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.

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.

Keynes was right about most things, but wrong about this

The idea of the Four-Hour Work Day is nothing new.

John Maynard Keynes - he imagined a
 steadily rising income would see us
 working 15-hours a week.

Something like that, but even more adventurous, was predicted in 1930 by iconic economist, John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes then believed that, within a century, per-capita income steadily rise, people’s basic needs would be met and no one would have to work more than fifteen hours a week.

Clearly Keynes was wrong: as he predicted per-capita income has steadily risen, easily accommodating basic needs in the developed world, but he misunderstood human psyche in that our wants vastly exceed what we actually need resulting in a society in a society that sates that addiction by working longer and longer hours.

Subsequently we have become financially rich, time destitute and striding seemingly unawares toward the abyss of a rapidly changing climate being brought upon us by the heedless consumption of energy using finite carbon dioxide producing fossil fuels, and the equally wasteful accumulation that depend on that same finite resource.

Both dynamics are driven by the fact that we are simply too rich and so should we be serious about climate change adaptation we will all happily work fewer hours, earn less money and so consume less and so use far less energy.

Queensland urban design expert, Juris Greste, once said we don’t live in an economy we live in a society.Show More

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