We Need Change Now

Yes, we need change, fast. Yet carbon taxing will be too hard to initiate, too slow and inadequate to the real rate of warming and global ice-melt, to prevent increasingly catastrophic years.

Carbon tax will help. Yet almost everything we generate, produce, consume, use, eat and grow now involves about 85 percent waste (energy and/or water, etc.). So accelerating transition to a waste-free national culture will be faster. France’s interior ministry found that increasing cover-crops on bare fields by 0.4 percent per year will absorb increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. Will that save coastal infrastructure, nuke plants, cities, etc.?

Annual rates of ice-melt and warming now accelerate exponentially. Science shows all the “forcing” factors increasing, at much greater rates. So to stop or reverse ice-melt and average sea-level increase, sane policy would increase cover-crops, reforestation, de-desertification and habitat restoration at an accelerating rate.

Yes, enjoying simplicity is a great idea. Yet addictions to energy/water-wasting habits, buildings, vehicles, appliances, toys, consumer goods, amusements and, increasingly, crypto-currencies are worse than heroin.

If we want a sustainable civilization, we need mass-rehab and a change of heart enabling changing minds — about reality, real possibilities, the future and appropriate response.

Michael Monterey

Eugene