Book Review
This book is a comprehensive survey of the options facing us in our attempts to avoid the worst scenario for the future, threatened by climate change if we do nothing to change the way we view and use nature, from exploitation to conservation – from treating it as disposable to ensuring that it is renewable.
Its ten chapters cover the full range of new technologies and options for reducing fossil fuel use, sharing resources fairly, developing renewable energy, sequestering carbon, sharing knowledge and developing local, resilient economies. They cite a wide range of examples, with quotes from many sources.
They make it clear that the physical means to make the changes needed are available, and are being fast developed. To make the changes fast enough, though, needs change of attitudes, at all levels of society. The biggest obstacle is the corporate domination of government and public media.
The authors are aware of the obstacles presented by current business practices and the pressures of shareholders and competitors working against adoption of ‘green business practices’, and are keen to point out that the changes needed will ‘create many green jobs’. As they write, ‘In the end, all jobs have to be green jobs’.
They argue that humans need to feel useful, and opportunity to participate in work to meet social need is to be welcomed. But their extension from this to view ‘job creation’ as something good in itself – an all-too common error – fails to appreciate the complementary need for leisure. I understand that hunter-gatherers typically spend about two-three hours a day in meeting their physical needs.
In looking at the debates over alternatives, the authors note the dishonest arguments promoted by apologists, for example, for the nuclear industry, and its influence on ‘friends in high places’. This is a problem in many other issues, too. The vested interests of the rich and powerful are one of the most serious obstacles preventing the changes so clearly needed.
The authors are well aware of this, describing our ‘thin democracy – something done for us or to us as solely representative democracy – …’. They see a ‘richer democracy’ emerging, largely due to the spread of the internet. This gives hope of enough enlightened popular pressure on politicians to overcome the dire influence of the corporate lobbyists.
Their most important observations are contained in their final chapter, ‘Going Deeper, Looking Further’, in which they discuss the requirements for ‘happiness and wellbeing’, and note that ‘billionaires … were not happier than Maasai herdsmen …’. They note that ‘most of us during the fossil fuel era have not been partying at all but have struggled in some form of bondage – the deprivation experienced by billions, and the bondage of competitive struggle for millions more’, and that the growth of GDP is in large part growth of waste and destruction.
Their quote from Jakob von Uexküll, the founder of the World Future Council, gets close to the fundamental problem inhibiting change, when he notes that ‘The transition … will require a massive redirection of money flows. Global climate negotiations are stalling because of the ostensible lack of money. Governments must now use their right to authorize the creation of new interest- and debt-free money to fund the available solutions …’, and ‘Does it really make sense that our sovereign governments should have to borrow the funds needed to protect our common future from private moneylenders, who create this money themselves through fractional-reserve banking, and whom we as citizens and taxpayers have just rescued from bankruptcy?’
All that is missing is the final step in the argument: the need to end the banks’ privilege of money-creation, and return it to the State, which can create it without plunging society into ever-growing debt. Spent it into circulation to replace the banks’ ‘debt-money’ as it is repaid and cancelled, it would end society’s ‘debt-bondage’ for good, and allow ‘what is physically possible and socially and environmentally desirable to become financially possible’ – something tragically prevented for too long by apologists for the status-quo.
The quote from Jakob von Uexküll continues with his approval of the recent G20 agreement to support a general allocation of IMF-created Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which however he rightly points out ‘need to be reformed, making them interest-free (as they originally were) and allowing them to be rolled over indefinitely, as they already are in practice. SDRs are convertible into national currencies of the holder’s choice. Alternatively, the SDR itself could be made legal tender – as a new global currency. ….’.
So – despite my reservations, a book to be highly recommended for its comprehensive and thought-provoking coverage of the many facets of its important subject.