The Four-Hour Work Day is an inticate part of adaptation and mitigation

Adaptation and mitigation are rarely considered together when people discuss a response to climate change.

This book to be launched next
 month at the University of
Melbourne helps us
 understand the different,
unfolding world humans
will have to live with.

However, they are in fact complementary, one and the same thing for if you apply mitigation processes correctly adaptation will follow.

Human-induced climate change has arisen, primarily, because humanity discovered fossil fuels and worked out a way to employ them for humanity’s benefit, but failed to recognize that in the burning they would be dumping inordinate amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Initially all was well for there were relatively few people on the earth (about one billion in 1800) and aided by the fossil fuels that brought the agricultural and industrial revolutions, along with marked increases in public health, we began to live longer and healthier lives.

Being better fed and educated, along with becoming much smarter, we learned how to exploit those fossil fuels and in making life far more comfortable, our numbers began to expand and in the past 40 years our population has more than tripled to an alarming seven billion plus.

However, those who study such things argue population growth is slowing and although there are more people living on the earth now than in the whole of human history, we will see fewer than 10 billion people on earth by the end of this century.

Of course, the numbers are in a sense irrelevant to how we adapt to a mitigate climate change.

The die, it is important to note, is already cast.

The amount of carbon dioxide dumped into out atmosphere as an unaccounted for externality is such that what is now a nearly one degree increase in the earth’s surface temperatures above pre-industrial times will soon become two degrees.

Writing in the 2013 book, “Four Degrees of Global Warming: Australia in a Hot World”, there was consensus among the many authors, the Australians would need to learn to adapt to living all the shortcomings and difficulties associated with a four degree increase in temperature.

The two degree increase is unavoidable and roaring down the pipe toward us is a four degree increase and so we need not just adaptation, but mitigation if we are to have any serious likelihood of surviving these quite different circumstances.

People need to educate themselves, read the literature and learn about what is ahead.

What we are facing is so different from what has existed that it escapes the comprehension of most and the outcome is of such complexity, that to attempt an explanation here would do a disservice to all, short to say that the world of tomorrow will be different, damnably difficult and effectively a step into the unknown.

Let’s talk about adaptation and mitigation – first we must throw off the human created economic shackles and create a new life that is people focussed rather than one the emphasises that human-created construct of money.

 The world's population has grown
 exponentially since we found and
understood fossil fuels.
 

Work, a process that enslaves many and benefits just a few, needs to be relegated to a position of lesser importance and so rather than be “working for the man”, we need to be in a position of working for the greater wellbeing of all.

Subsequently a four-hour work day would still see us produce more than enough to ensure our comfortable survival and yet allow each of us sufficient time in which to work with and for our respective communities.

An inherent part of such an approach would see us all poorer, in brutal economic terms, and so less able to consume “stuff” and so society’s use of and consumption of fossil fuel-powered energy would drop dramatically.

Freed from the “need” to work most of our waking hours, each of us would be in a position to use that time, energy and skill to help make our neighbourhoods, communities, towns and cities better places in which to live.

Places that because of the work/life balance would be less energy intensive, more resilient in a changing world and a way of life that would be more adaptive to the emerging difficulties associated with climate change and actually mitigate the cause of our declining atmospheric conditions.

Complex equations made startlingly simple

Equations leading to climate change are complex and yet, in fact startlingly simple.

 Daly's book,
explains 'Steady
State Economics'.

The capitalist system to which the developed world adheres is energy intensive with most of its dynamism being derived from the combustion of fossil fuels.

To avoid the complexities and confusion of climate change, or at least begin to mitigate the contributing dynamics, we need to reduce, constrain and seriously limit our use of fossil fuels and that means slowing trade at all levels within the capitalist system.

An interim step to enable the world community to embrace a new lifestyle, one changing the emphasis from one of profit to a focus on people, would be the introduction of a four-hour trading day.

Complex and impossible many would argue, but no more so, however, than the development of the profit motivated capitalist system that has arisen over about three centuries.

There is one strikingly important difference for what exists took many generations to assemble and in doing so consumed most of the world’s finite resources, upon which the modern world desperately depends, and left many people emotionally and physically disabled, and resulted frequently in divided and disrupted communities.

Critically, we don’t have three centuries to resolve this dilemma for by 2050 life on earth will become rather rickety when we will be hard pressed to trade for even four hours a day, let alone eight or even longer, as is the desire of many.

How this will evolve is beyond my comprehension, but until we can we can understand how to live fulfilling lives without living in the shadow of a monetary mantra, then a rather grimy conclusion is likely.

The four-hour work day is simply an interim step, but it takes us closer to what Herman Daly discusses in his 1977 book “Steady State Economics”, that discusses simply having what we need, and not what we want.

“Sustainability is a slippery word with meanings as different as those who use the term and for some it is about sustaining profit, whatever the cost, while for others it is about moderating the cost, ignoring our wants and ensuring our needs are sustained.

Sustainability, at least for the moment, seems to be about deconstructing the present greed and profit driven creed of an unbalanced capitalist system and replacing it with a more people-centric process that sensitively combines the best of what has lifted humanity from the morass of the distant past and the strengths of what is a softer, gentler and a more socialist-like way of governance for our society.

Work should be about answering needs and not the accumulation of wants – a dynamic that is much less energy dependent.

Clip adds to our understanding of the Four-Hour Work Day

Four-Hour work day enthusiast, Eric Fortune, alerted us to this YouTube clip explaining the dynamic.

In arguing that such an eventuality with the life of all, the attached promotional material says:

To end with this demented state of things once and for all, we must reduce working shifts in proportion to increases of productivity, establishing, to start, a worldwide work shift of four hours. This will end the world economic crisis, and give us full employment, a stable economy and a better quality of life for all human beings.

 

The YouTube clip is simply entitled: “The four-hour workday”.

Writing about population, but solving another issue

Professor Danny Dorling doesn’t specifically endorse the Four-Hour Work Day, but the implications of his 2013 book, “Population 10 Billion” suggest he would support the idea.

Danny Dorling's
 book - "Population
10 Billion".

The Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield sees the future welfare of the world as intimately implicated in humanity’s broad consumption habits and discussing how we could live in a vastly fairer and essentially better world he wrote: “But first we need to control growth, not population growth – that is being controlled – but economic growth, which is still uncontrolled.”

The near uncontrolled hours allowed for work (work in its traditional and understood sense) is the driver of economic growth and that, along with insistent advertising ensuring we always remain materialistically aspirational in an our ambitions.

That near daily grind with its unrelenting hours of work brings a range of individual and communal difficulties from personal dissatisfaction to neighbourhood dystopia.

Chief, however, among the ailments arising from seemingly unlimited work hours and the unbridled consumption that arises from our personal wealth is the dissonance humans have brought upon the world’s climate.

There appears to be a simple equation: if we worked fewer hours; we would have fewer funds at our disposal; we would consume less; our subsequent carbon footprint would be smaller; we would have vastly more time to invest in the welfare of our neighbourhoods; our social lives would become richer through cooperation and working together, rather than spending most of our time, and our thinking, living in the combative and frequently de-humanizing world or business; we would also be in a position to expand and enrich the natural human social capacity that allows for collaboration that until now has been poached for profit by the world of work that is largely insensitive to the environmental needs of the planet – those needs being considered “externalities”, which are never represented in business balance sheets.

Climatologists who understand how we (humans) are disrupting the world’s climate system and grasp the seriousness of our behaviours, along with our insistence on burning fossil fuels, can only see successful mitigation through the immediate cessation of our embedded consumptive ways of life.

The Four-Hour Work Day is an immensely simple concept, but its implication is both intricate and complex in that it is seen confusingly through an ideological prism and its successful implementation demands an honest reappraisal of what it is the humans deem as “success”.

The idea of success for many is inextricably linked to the traditional mechanistic world of work, where a world in which work is simply realigned with answering needs is fundamentally kinder to earth, or at least the environment that allows humans to flourish.

Traditional work with which most of us are familiar, is, unequivocally, climate-disrupting and the energy consuming targets of the commercial world that are about massaging the toxic demands of our wants.

It is a risk of extreme proportions to abandon work without first understanding what we do to replace it for work as we experience it today answers out natural human need for the sociability that injects steadfastness into our lives.

Revolution is fine, but what happens after such a social upheaval is equally, if not more important.

A change to our lifestyle that bring changes that more than doubles our free time, demands that we reimagine how we live and within that create a paradigm that ensures that we are actually busy living fulfilled lives that bring many bring many positive psychological traits and allow us to flourish, both as individuals and as a group.

Work has become probably the most important tribal experience in our lives and we need to re-think that to make our neighbourhoods the source of the richness we draw from those tribal encounters.

Followed faithfully and through adherence to its principals, the Four-Hour Work Day will play a critical role in refreshing equality throughout civilization.

A degree is inequality has societal value in that it drives innovation and ambition, but too much of what today is a class-driven imbalance is massively de-motivating, which will ultimately lead to the very confrontations that those in charge fear the most.

A few guidelines for the Four-Hour Work Day:

People are only to work four-hours a day, no double shifts, no overtime;

Public services, such as hospitals, transport, postage, law enforcement and various essential facilities are not restricted; and

Any business that is privately owned and operated that employs four or fewer people does not face the four-hour limitations.

Four-Hour Work Day not only critical, but inevitable

Evolving circumstance humans have never experienced make our embrace of the Four-Hour Work Day not only critical, but inevitable.

Nicholas Stern.

Former chief economist with the World Bank, Nicholas Stern, said, only a few days ago, that a global temperature of five degrees above pre-industrial levels was increasingly likely.

Stern, who wrote a 2006 study on climate change, said on Tuesday, April 2, that the world could be headed toward warming even more catastrophic than expected but he voiced hope for political action.

He said that without changes to emission trends, the planet had roughly a 50 percent chance that temperatures would soar to five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial averages this century.

"We haven't been above five degrees Centigrade on this planet for about 30 million years. So you can see that this is radical change way outside human experience," Stern said in an address at the International Monetary Fund.

The economist was quoted in an international news story headed: “Economist warns of 'radical' climate change, millions at risk”.

Mitigation of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions can only be slowed through humans living a far less energy-intensive life style.

Any move to that demands a wholesale change to a way of living – we need to live close to where we work; we need to re-orient our wants and needs (our “wants” need to be supplanted almost totally by our “needs”); we need to spend more time in our community, in our street, with our neighbours; and by working just Four-Hours a Day, we would all be fundamentally poorer and so the fripperies of life would be less affordable.

In concert with that change, of course, would be the essential redistribution of wealth, ensuring that all people, regardless of whom and what they might be, would have access to a reasonable quality of life – something that doesn’t exist at the moment.