Thursday, November 02, 2006

Another Inconvenient Truth

Picked up from Warren Ellis' blog: "Only 50 years left for sea fish: There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century..."

It seems there's just about no limit to the ways in which we're all engaged in making this planet unliveable for ourselves. It's not enough to poison the drinking water, and make the air unbreathable, and melt the glaciers to flood huge chunks of the current landmass so that we won't be able to grow enough food to subsist on. Nope, that's not enough because apparently, thanks to modern fishing techniques and stupidity, we're within a couple generations of wiping out another source of sustenance that we've relied on for millennia.

If you haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth (starring Al Gore), or read The Sheep Look Up (by John Brunner), you really ought to. They both make a great case for parking your car and climbing onto a bicycle.

4 comments:

Tammy said...

AIT is mandatory viewing in HBA2 this year! I get to watch it again on Monday.

Tammy said...

completely random note: just realized if i had posted my prediction about eko pre-show on my blog, it could have potentially spoiled at least the fact that someone was gonna die!

Anonymous said...

Much as I liked AIT...I had read somewhere before seeing it the opposite opinions that we aren't impacting the climate enough to make a difference and that what we are seeing is just cyclical.

Another thought is that if we use up all the fossil fuel in cars and make the planet warmer....then we may delay the next ice age. Or we may provide more livable land (Siberia and the Yukon) for example.

However, poisioning the fish and burning all the fossil fuel is just stupid when we could do things in moderation. Much safer.

Kimota94 aka Matt aka AgileMan said...

Two the central questions to ask wherever environmental debates spring up, I think, are:

1) Who benefits, and how, from selling you on their views? So if big business, or gas refiners, or politicians with wealthy businessmen backing them, tell you that Global Warming's a myth, or it's actually going to benefit us in the long run, what do they get out of convincing you? Similarly, if an environmental agency puts forth the angle that we're going to kill the planet unless we change our ways, how does getting us to do that help them? I'm more likely, on balance, to believe the person who has nothing personally to gain, than the person who's trying to keep me buying his product, everything else being equal (in other words, if both can make compelling and logical, but opposing, arguments).

2) What's the worst that could happen if we chose to believe the wrong argument? Let's assume the tree-huggers are wrong, and none of the most dire effects will actually happen, no matter how much gasoline we burn. But we still go ahead and reduce our consumption, use more public transit, utilize pollution-free or pollution-reduced options like bicycles and electric cars. What're the downsides to us? Well, we may spend more money than we needed (almost always the case where conservation is concerned) and we'll likely have a healthier environment (cleaner air, people more healthy on average if they getting more exercise). And some gas companies might go out of business. Doesn't seem all that bad to me. On the other hand, if we buy the "there is no threat to the planet" argument, and that turns out to be wrong, at worst we all die, and at best our lives are changed so dramatically (millions of deaths, tens or hundreds of millions of refugees created, large scale epidemics, food shortages, law and order breakdowns) that we probably would consider what we have right now to have been Heaven on Earth. So it seems like the worst case scenario in one case is mildly inconvenient, whereas in the other case it's Armageddon. A cautious soul like me finds that an easy choice to make.