OK. Now I know you all think Mr Mez and I are delusional hippies, and probably we are. But Mr Mez is also a very knowledgeable scientist who writes articles that are respected within scientific communities, and below is a transcript of his greenhouse discussion paper, as it appeared in print not long ago.
I am yet to be convinced that people are having a great deal of impact on global warming - we are, after all, still emerging from the last ice-age - but I don't think the destruction of rainforests, CO2 pollution and the creation of nuclear waste are helping things along much either. Bottom line is, if we don't stop what we're doing, we're all dead anyway, from pollution if nothing else.
The solution, as seen by the mega-rich, is to buy an icebreaker and convert it into a luxury yacht. Jamie Packer, hang your selfish fuckwit head in shame!
Anyway, without further ado, here is the article in its entirety for your consideration. And remember, I am the dope-smoking hippie in the family. Mr Mez does not do drugs and does not drink either. When we go out, I am the designated drinker. As far as I can tell, his genius brain is still intact, unlike mine.
I have to put this into several posts, as it exceeds the maximum length of 1000 characters.
"Greenhouse!
Well has the fight against climate change been called a war. Most of us living now haven’t been through a major war - one which threatened our entire way of life, as did the two World Wars last century.
We don’t know what it means to live with the fear that accompanies such times.
Many of us don’t even remember the Cold War, when the whole world stood poised on the brink of Armageddon, thousands of millions of human lives at peril, depending on generals whose ideas of war were based on their experiences during World War Two - in particular the delusion that there is such a thing as a winnable nuclear war - no less outdated than those of their murderous predecessors in the First World War who sat fat and complacent in their Chateaux, drinking port and smoking cigars, ordering charge after doomed infantry charge into hails of machine-gun bullets.
Somehow we got through the Cold War. But this new threat - the collapse of our biosphere - is no less deadly, and our present politicians are no less unimaginative and cowardly than the generals of the past.
Human society today is incredibly fragile. Our population is three times what it was fifty years ago. The very first thing that will happen, long before we make the planet uninhabitable, will be the collapse of our basic global infrastructure. We are now so dependent on automation and technology that even a partial breakdown would cause famines and food riots, and lead to bitter resource wars costing hundreds of millions of lives.
Crops are failing. Over 170 million people live on land less than one metre above sea level. Infrastructure is collapsing. Without machines, the carrying capacity of the Earth is only a few hundred million. The rest - the other 95% - will die.
It’s happening already. Refugees and “internally displaced” people now number in the tens of millions. Forty years ago we said to ourselves, “No society can survive with billions of people starving. By the time we get to the year 2000 we will just have to adjust our economics and politics to do something about it.”
But now that we’re here, we realise we don’t have to do anything about it. Even developed nations are filled with burgeoning third-world underclasses, from the squalor of urban slums to the shanty-towns surrounding cities such as Johannesburg and Mexico City.
So overpopulated is our planet that the scenario of a “Fortress First World” already exists, but the affluent middle-class continue living in a dream-world of media lies and deliberate self-censorship, surrounded by desperation, poverty and violence.
Can we imagine how our grandparents felt when newspaper headlines shouted Hitler's invasion of Poland? Or when the Call Up letter arrived in 1942, asking them to go and fight in New Guinea against the evil of Japanese imperialism?
Probably not. We’ve forgotten many things about war.
One of them, though, is that you don't ask how much hardship there will be, or the cost involved, before you decide to fight.
This is a new way of thinking for most of us. In war, the given is that you fight. Working out the cost comes afterward.
In fighting climate change, cutting greenhouse emissions is the given. You don't begin by working out what the economy will stand, and then set your emission targets.
That way, we’re all dead.
The newspapers are full of idiotic things like: “Committee declines to set emissions targets due to possible economic impact.”
How about living in a world whose agriculture has collapsed? Would that count as an economic impact?
We can talk about "manageable economic restructuring" later, as we go along. There’s no place for it in the basic decision.
One day it will be the year 2500. Whatever happens to us, the day will come and the sun will rise on January the first 2500.
What sort of world will it rise upon? Seriously.
Carbon sequestration and other mitigating technologies might make some difference. But consideration of these belongs after we’ve decided what has to be done. It has no business as a driver of policy.
Economists are the kind of people who, as you fall off a cliff, tell you not to worry because someone will open up a parachute shop halfway down in response to the demand. They've always been dangerous; now they’re a deadly liability. This is not an economic question. And even if it was, it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got when you’re dead. You still can’t spend it.
