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