Few things have truly worried me these days besides work and retirement pensions. To be honest, I am often quite laid-back in regard to most duties I have, flexible enough to overlook tasks, postpone or replace them with more interesting ones. However, something unexpected has happened: I have become the most obsessed human being when it comes to discarding materials. Is the bottle clean? Is the lid off? Is it in the right container? Can it be reused? To add up, it pains me to dump decompostable waste into plastic bags. Aren’t there any compost bins around? Why aren’t the nutrients in food scraps returning to soil? How much more garbage can we throw away? Will we ever run out of space?
As if space wasn’t the only pollution problem, there’s also the air pollution matter at stake. When food goes to landfills, it rots and produces methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming far more than carbon dioxide.
Food waste, despite being quite a relevant concern, is only the tip of the iceberg. Our societies are governed by the imperatives of productivity and consumerism, as opposed to local sufficiency. When we buy a collection of different handbags, for instance, we are definitely not paying back nature for the smoke released into the atmosphere throughout its production and transportation processes. What I am saying is, we pay too cheap a price for the products we purchase, a price which does not include eco-friendly practices, restoration or fair labour employment terms.
Sometimes I wonder if we can really put a price on global environmental damage. Even if we found ways to effectively repair nature, it would be impossible to have our resources regenerated at the scale we are losing them. In essence, we can’t put a price tag on nature. However, land as well as living beings have long ago become commodities, appropriated and exploited for free and it doesn’t sound right to me (and hopefully neither does it to you) that enslaving animals and using up our natural resources for the sake of ever-increasing growth should be acceptable. Our relationship with nature should be that one of reciprocity: we give as much as we take, and we take only the necessary to meet human needs.
Environmental problems have been under discussion since 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, urging industrialized countries to limit their emissions of greenhouse gases in accordance with individual targets. Since then, our attention has turned to the emergency of global warming, since the goals set in later-on agreements have failed to be accomplished and since we have realised we are heading, this century and in the best-case scenario, to a 1.5° Celsius increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels. And what does that mean?
- A 1.5-2.0° Celsius increase in temperature is enough to make insect populations collapse everywhere. A decline in the number of insects will cause a dramatic disruption in natural ecosystems. Insects are responsible for pollination and plant reproduction and are a food source for several other species. Add to this the serious degradation our soils have been exposed to due to aggressive industrial agriculture.
- Polar ice caps (that function like an enormous reflector) will melt, and solar energy will be absorbed. As the temperature rises, vast areas of marine habitat will become lifeless. Add to this the acidification process through which our oceans are going due to industrial emissions. According to Jason Hickel (author of the book Less is More), an ocean’s ph drop by 0.25 is enough to wipe out 75% of all marine species.
- Global warming will make heatwaves and extreme natural disasters more frequent, killing an incalculable number of people. Forest fires and the death of millions of wild animals can be expected to happen on and off.
- Sea levels could rise as much as 100cm. Catastrophic storm surges will make the hurricane events we have seen so far seem mild if compared. At a more extreme level, coastal cities could disappear, becoming permanently flooded.
- The more forests die off, the more droughts we will see. According to Hickel, “The Amazon, for instance, exhales some 20 billion tons of water vapour into the atmosphere every day, like an enourmous river flowing invisibly into the sky. Much of it ends up raining back down onto the forest, but it also produces rain much further afield – across South America and even as far north as Canada”. Desertification and droughts will heavily impact water and food supply on a global scale. Those things together will bring about famine, migration flows and political instability. Chaos.
In short, global warming isn’t about having to spend money on air-cons or feeling discomfort outdoors every now and then. It’s about setting a death sentence to nature. Unlike the story in the movie Don’t Look Up, our extinction doesn’t seem likely to be caused in the future by a comet, but to a cascade of events we won’t be able to stop.
Ecology is our ideology
History has shown that stabilising global population does not reduce ecological damage. Even if there was a decline in the number of people, capital would work on making the existing ones consume more. That’s called capitalism.
History has also shown that every time we found more efficient ways of using energy and resources, expecting consumption to drop, the opposite happened: it became higher, because technology has been used to facilitate continuous and unlimited growth. Therefore, finding green solutions to energy demand won’t fix the problem alone. Although there has been an increase in renewables, they can’t keep pace with our rising demand. And let’s not forget that renewables depend primarily on the weather.
Anthony Yuen, head of energy strategy at Citi Research told CNBC: “You might build a lot of wind farms, you might have hydro reservoirs and and hydro generation facilities, and you might have a lot of solar panels. The problem is: What if you don’t have enough water, wind, or solar versus your initial planning assumption?” (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/04/gap-between-renewable-energy-and-power-demand-oil-gas-coal.html).
I’m not an economist or environmentalist, so the aspects covered in this blog post are probably just a glimpse of the real problem. What I do know for sure is that any feasible solution to fight global warming necessarily involves reducing consumption. Less consumption means less demand for energy, less extraction, pollution and land depletion. It is a fact that our planet can’t sustain another 100 years of economic growth without destroying life as we know it today.
All things considered, we must take the three Rs more seriously: REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE.
- How about purchasing services instead of products? Do you want to give someone a present? Take them to the theatre, to a nice restaurant, book them a day at a spa, buy them tickets to a special musical event or an online cooking course on baking cakes!
- Try to consume less pre-packaged food. When buying it, choose paper over plastic. Glass over tin. Can you afford (and prefer to buy) selected food? Choose the organic ones. Give preference to food from local farmers. If you fancy designer products, choose eco-friendly brands.
- Can you repair the screen of your phone? Or the soles of your boots? You can use rainwater to water your plants, ecobags to do the shopping, menstrual cups for those lady days of the month and e-books to develop reading habits.
- Separate your waste materials into different bins and take them to proper collectors. RECYCLE.
- Eat less meat: this is the least drastic way for us, individuals, to make the most positive environmental impact on climate change. You can start by making it your side dish. Take baby steps.
If I die at the age of 75 (2060) and we don’t get to reverse course, I will probably see most of what is written here. Fundamentally, taking a stand is political. Supporting politicians who fail to acknowledge climate justice is absolutely irresponsible at this stage, especially after having so much information on hand. Let’s make sure our countries’ pledges on fossil fuel extraction, emissions and deforestation are achieved. It’s crucial to side with people who genuinely want to take action and make the world a better place to live.
Tell me about you. What do you do to fight global warming? Share your ideas with us 🙂
See you!
1 comment
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