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.