Smithology

The recent announcement by Kevin Rudd that Australia’s greenhouse gas reduction target will only be 5% made me a little bit angry but not very angry. I wasn’t surprised, nor do I think that a higher reduction rate would make a difference. To me, the climate change battle is pretty much lost until it starts to actually affect the economy directly, e.g. perpetual drought or flooding of major business centres and even then, the gradual nature of the change will probably mean that we can keep doing the same old stuff until our planet resembles a burned out cigarette butt and we are all living in plastic bio-domes (but still writing in our blogs). This is called the “frog in the kettle” affect which is the idea that a frog will jump out of hot water if you drop it in there but if you put it in a pot of cold water and then heat up the pot, the frog will stay in the pot until it is cooked.

I think I might be in one of the first generations to be educated from primary school about climate change (or the greenhouse effect as it was called back in the day). In the twenty years since I started caring about environmental issues, very little has changed. Sure there’s been a lot of awareness and talk but we continue to run trucks and cars along big roads all day, power generation is still mostly coal based and I continue to hear day after day about another study coming out to show that human industrial activity correlates with increases in global average temperatures.

As far as I’m concerned the damage is done. Maybe the damage was done a hundred years ago. We are all on a very large ship called the global economy and it doesn’t steer very fast even though it continues to accelerate towards the iceberg.

I used to get really angry and I used to care. I was part of a local environmental group here for a number of years and I know that plenty of people care about the environment but also every one of us is completely dependant on greenhouse gas polluting services. I know people who have decided to “unplug” as much as possible from this system but they are very few and it is naive to think that society in general will suddenly start generating their own electricity, growing their own food and riding a (wooden?) bicycle to work every day.

I like to think that I am a hopeful person and I do remain hopeful that things will change, but I can no longer bring myself to make any effort whatsoever to change the way I do anything in order to help the environment. Until I can see that our leaders take the problem seriously and that our economy and industry is somehow changing, then why should I bother? (But I will still buy those compact fluorescent bulbs and continue to fill my recycle bin for what it’s worth)

[tags]environment, fatalism[/tags]

environment