Blog Action Day '09: Holding Questions on Climate Change

This posting is part of 'Blog Action Day' on Climate Change.

We always, I think, 'cheated' to grow/progress by adding stuff from 'outside' to our societies/economies that we otherwise treated as a closed system: serfdom, conquering, colonization, the new world, slavery, coal and oil, to name a few.
Now everything is connected, we're all in the same global complexopolis (I just made that word up), and there's no 'outside' the system anymore to cheat with. (Except for credit-based money creation, which went bust recently as well). So we're locked into a closed system. All of us, all 6.5 billion and counting.

Climate change is just one of the elements in that mix: the result of us cheating the system by digging up coal and oil and adding them to the carbon cycle again. It concerns a number of other greenhouse-causing gases, and it concerns all of our resources, phosphates, metals, carbons, you name it. CO2 is just the current poster child of choice.

And we're only half waking up to the fact that we've closed each and every loop in the system now. Back to where other species have spent their entire existence, inside their fixed niches in the ecosystem.

I have no clue how to 'fix' it, I assume there is no easy fix nor a quick one. It will need an overhaul of most of our ways of doing things. How I as an individual can contribute to that, I don't know. I'm more or less in the same spot Peter is in. Rationally I'm on board but the difference engine that is my brain is largely indifferent still, just worried in a diffused kind of way.

Of course there are things an individual can do, buy local, consume less, avoid flying, use public transport in stead of my car, donate boat paint, go favela chic. But does it really make a difference? Am I better at it than my dead great grandfather? Can you really get to e.g. the 80% CO2 reduction that is required of us Westerners if you stick to a 2 degree average rise in global temperature, while giving other nations a chance of reaching our levels of well being (which is the moral choice to make here)? Which brings us to 'cap and converge' (not to be confused with cap and trade), cap CO2, know that all resources are capped as well, and converge to a more or less equal 'budget' for all world citizens. Will that be achievable, without yielding to a type of hair shirt green eco-fascism, which my green primary school teacher already warned me about when I was 11 in 1981? I find I lack data, and our societies processes lack the transparency to make an informed judgment.

This is not a doom and gloom posting, far from it. It's just that for now I am merely holding questions, and wondering what 'working on things that matter' should mean for me right now. What questions are you holding?

(pics: random people going about their lifes, and enjoying themselves)

Tags: bad09, climatechange, co2, complexopolis, economy, resources, systems