The need of ideas grows exponentially more urgent

 We need ideas now more
urgently than ever.

Ideas that will generate some sort of abatement of climate change implications are needed now more urgently than ever.

Reports from disparate points around the world illustrate that the realities of climate change predicted by climatologists were too conservative and the much discussed “tipping points” are in some places already upon us.

Prolific suggestions about response might have been appropriate if this was still 1980, but being 2012, some 32 years later and with the situation inevitably much worse, the time for talk and grandiose solutions is gone.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to discuss possible means to avoid earth’s unfolding dilemma without sounding pessimistic and overly dramatic, but the situation humanity faces brings on a certain pessimism and can only be resolved through decidedly dramatic action.

What has worked for the past 200 years has enriched humanity, but came at a misunderstood cost to the health of the planet; an account which is now due and which humanity, if it persists with its “business as usual” ways, will not be able to settle.

Had we acted in 1980, we would now have been cruising toward a workable solution, but it is not 30 years ago, it is 2012, well the eve of 2013, and the world is close to having 400ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and with the world’s permafrost beginning to melt, who know where that carbon dioxide content will stop.

The world is presently at less than one degree Celsius in global temperatures, historic emission of Co2 make an increase to a two degree increase certain and now some respected groups and scientists are predicting three and four degree increases and should that eventuate, five and six degrees seems inevitable.

Many, including Australian Professor Ross Garnaut who has considered the costs of climate change, are reluctant to say how well humanity would endure post Industrial Revolution increases in global temperatures of five or six degrees.

Few in our society how pull the strings of power and who could show the way in helping the world abate climate change and find a way to work through it seem unwilling to make tough decisions; decisions that will be decidedly unpopular and yet, are probably the most obvious way to address the present dilemma.

An example of why it would it work already exists.

The much considered World Financial Crisis of 2008 slowed growth, slowed consumption and slowed our use of the world finite resources and during that period humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions fell away dramatically.

The lesson, it appeared, should have been obvious – if we learned to live a more restrained life, understood how to find contentment with less, equally understood that we should not envy or covet our neighbour’s goods or way of life and lived in concert with nature rather in competition with it, then it would be possible to slow our global carbon dioxide emissions.

It is an inadequate idea, but in working just four-hours a day the traditional business world would, in some essence, be sustained, we would have less to spend on the present frivolities of life and it would be a wonderful introduction how we must live in a world governed by quite different from those of the past two centuries.

The legitimacy of The Four-Hour Work Day can be argued endlessly, but our changing climate and the ever depleting finite natural resources will eventually, within a decade or so, make to adoption of such inevitable.

 

The Four-Hour Work Day is loaded with inadequacies

The idea of the Four-Hour Work Day simply won’t work.

The beginning of
recorded history.

The concept is loaded with inadequacies; inadequacies that will see it do little to see society adapt to the demands of climate change.

Authoritative voices from around the world, climatologists who are conservative by nature, lean on undeniable evidence to illustrate that to mitigate human impact on the earth’s climate, we must reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by at least 80 per cent overnight.

Human activities of the past two centuries have bequeathed to the world and iron-clad guarantee that global temperatures will increase by a minimum of two degrees compared to pre-industrial times.

The present increase is less than one degree and already the world is being ravaged by weather events unique in recorded history.

We cannot change what is happening and some people, those with faultless climate related qualifications, are suggested that with positive feedback loops (the melting of the tundra permafrost that release billions of tonnes of methane gas, which is even worse than carbon dioxide) we could have a future in which global temperatures increase by as much as six degrees.

A six degree increase could end civilization as we know it.

The Four-Hour Work Day is nothing more than an essential first step in preparing society to prepare life in circumstances absolutely foreign to modern man – we have to learn to live where we live, valuing community and understanding that survival is not about controlling or competing with nature, rather living in concert with it.

The Four-Hour Work Day is about de-throning the economy and rather than prostrating ourselves before it, use that time to connect with neighbours, friends and others in the community to build the resilience that will be a prime requisite when our climate becomes fierce and the world’s finite resources, upon which our present lifestyle depends almost entirely, become almost impossible to excavate or extract from the earth.

The modern conception of work is exhausted, the idea is over and the sooner we recognise and understand that, the sooner we can, as a society, begin redirecting our efforts, our human energies, toward building resilient ways of living that don’t compete with nature, as has been the case in the “machine age” of recent centuries, and work with it.

The Four-Hour Work Day is inadequate in reaching the goal of true and genuine sustainability, but if nothing else it creates the correct mindset and redirects us form what is logistically, factually and most certainly a dead end path.