Individual adaptation warrants applause, but top-down change is needed

Individual adaptation to climate change abatement is to be admired and so warrants applause.

However, it should be noted that although such changes may be remarkably extensive on an individual basis they will have no noticeable amelioration on the catastrophic conditions emerging from climate change.



Being subsequently poorer because of a
four-hour work day, we would naturally
consume less and so waste less.



Nor will those changes have any impact if everyone on your street follows you lead, and nor will it make much difference if those mutations are echoed throughout your whole community.

Demands for a rigorous response to climate change adaptation are so demanding, are considered by many to be unnecessary, unneeded and unimportant, that any bottom-up movement is likely to falter and so a workable adaption and mitigation program hinges on courageous top-down legislated changes.

It is abundantly clear that the combination of earth’s population, along with their consumptive habits, particularly those of the developed world, is the prime cause of our worsening climate.

A host of climate change abatement ideas have emerged in recent times, but most appear to revolve around the central paradigm in which life as we know and understand it is maintained.

There, however, lies the folly – life as it is simply consumes far too much of earth’s finite fossil resources, first as an energy source and, second, as the prime ingredient in most of those goods that we consume with seemingly absolute disregard for how those who follow will survive.

Most everything that happens in the developed world consumes energy and goods made possible by our gouging of our finite resources, which some describe as ‘ancient sunlight’, that is made easily accessible by our burgeoning wealth.

To trim that wealth and so ease the developed world’s impact on a worsening climate, we urgently need to take steps to make all those in that world substantially poorer and so the equation needed to make everyone poorer, and so less able to consume and therefore live a more limited life is to switch to a Four-Hour Work Day.

Such an approach, with the restrictions of no overtime and no double shifts, has the implication that each of us will need to live much closer to where it is that we work.

The “five minute life” will become increasingly important, that is most everything important on a day-to-day basis is within a five minute walking or cycling radius.