One of the things I have noticed about the Global Warming Debate is that scientists have been giving warnings about the environment and pollution all of my life. Moreover, that these warnings have come up long before anything was done about the issues the scientists warned about and that in general, if most scientists start saying something is a bad idea, the consequences do come along in time. Sometimes even nastier than predicted.
When I was young Rachel Carson warned about DDT and other major pesticides destroying nature. Sure enough, there are a lot of places where overuse of dangerous pesticides not only destroyed nature locally but had lasting effects and caused human beings health problems, birth defects or even death. Right around the point DDT was being questioned, a man with morbid obesity (over 100 pounds overweight) lost a lot of weight quickly by serious dieting -- and died of DDT poisoning because DDT is stored in fatty tissues.
We are at the top of the food chain. Things that affect the food chain ultimately come home to us, concentrated at every step in the process.
I am not a scientist. I'm a science fiction writer. I read science articles and get good ideas for stories. I keep track of science at a layman's level.
I've seen legislation cut down on the problems widespread DDT spraying caused and seen some species rebound with help -- like the peregrine falcon. The things that scientists and naturalists suggest to help preserve species do work, sometimes spectacularly. Sometimes it's too little too late, sometimes it's not. Usually it takes public awareness of the problem, donations and support for the people providing the solution and strong legislation.
Looking at global warming itself, the first time I started seeing news articles from concerned scientists was twenty years ago. Now, I'm seeing some of the things they warned against showing up in the news. Things like the polar bear losing its habitat and the likelihood we may lose the ice caps on the planet.
Polar bears? They weren't high on the list of endangered animals when I was younger. Too far away from any pollution, too far away from any land any human being wanted for something other than wilderness. Yet now their habitat's being destroyed.
The maps showing just what cities would lose how much of their land if sea level rose one foot, three feet, ten feet and so on are based on reality -- on how far above sea level those areas in the cities are. There are solutions. The Netherlands had some very effective solutions to parts of cities way under sea level, having tackled the problem of running out of land by building dikes and draining seawater out of what wasn't land.
That's going to cost a lot of money around Manhattan though.
Polar bears losing their numbers, the weather shifts, the local droughts and problems in different places all start to add up when they match the things those articles predicted long before this point. From what I understand now, we are nearing a level of problems where it could become critical.
We aren't at that point of total collapse yet. We could begin to shift technology over to less carbon emissions. I've made a lot of lifestyle changes to reduce my impact on the environment.
To my delight, most of my environmental-motivated lifestyle changes have also reduced my cost of living, leaving much more spending money for things I genuinely want and use. The message of most environmental suggestions at the personal level is one that's not going to hurt your checkbook.
If you don't buy anything that you don't genuinely need and want, don't throw things away pointlessly for style reasons, reuse and recycle whatever you can and eliminate unnecessary packaging, you'll wind up spending less on junk. You'll then have more to spend on things that aren't junk. Books you really like and may reread frequently. Movies you'd like to see on their first run. Clothes that cost more initially because they're higher quality, that fit better and still look good a year or several years later.
If you prepare your food from good healthy raw ingredients and learn to cook to suit your own tastes, you will wind up spending less money for more nutrition. If you actually pay attention to nutrition and read up on it, your health may improve dramatically. Not by way of over the counter diet aids and health potions but by actually eating carrots with a little butter on them.
The butter's necessary to help your body absorb the fat-soluble carotene. It should be eaten at the same time you eat the carrots. That's one of the things that I tested in my own experience -- I had trouble with night vision for several years until my daughter started doing the cooking and carrots came up regularly along with other yellow vegetables. Gradually my night vision improved till now it's not a problem.
I do read up on science.
The atmosphere we breathe is created by living creatures. It's not the "Natural" atmosphere the planet started with. It came along because enough plants took in carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen -- and it poisoned all life in the world at one point early on, because life that evolved for that low-oxygen atmosphere could not live in the pollution caused by algae and land plants.
Back in the 1960s, I read a lot of articles projecting the growth of human population and the nightmares that would cause in environmental collapse. It has grown more slowly than predicted, some factors came in that affected human population growth that weren't anticipated. One of them is that women's education drops the birthrate.
The number of women who get advanced degrees and put off childbearing to have smaller families and provide more for the children they do have affects family size. It does this demographically without coercion, it's a matter of a lot of women making common sense decisions for the sake of the kids they have. The big exception comes in two well known situations -- either Subsistence Farming or welfare as it is favors large families.
This is because every new child is another laborer for the farm and economy of scale means they're all more likely to live if there are more kids in Subsistence Farming. In welfare the same economy of scale applies -- later kids can reuse the clothes and toys and things needed for the older ones and food can be bought cheaper in bulk, so all the kids are more likely to thrive if there are more kids.
So if you want to help reduce the welfare rolls, go donating money to women's scholarships or found one that'll help women already on welfare who already have kids get into and through college into higher paying jobs. The humane solution is also a practical one.
So let's look at the carbon foot print thing.
Pollution from cars got so bad in Los Angeles that just living there was a major health hazard. Over the years local changes in legislation have been reducing that problem. The solutions actually work -- when both the public and governments accept that there is a problem.
The problem is probably as old as life itself. Any successful animal or living creature is going to generate some trash, some effluvia, something that it can't live with or live in. There are always limits to growth.
Adapting to those limits in humane, non coercive ways before they become irreversible problems is effective. Not all wolves breed. Wolf behavior reduces wolf overpopulation. Humans limit population in different ways, rather than nonbreeders not having sex, humans invent birth control and use it.
The carbon footprint in some developed countries, especially large ones, is disproportionate to the number of people involved. In others it's a function of their already being heavily populated. The system of carbon credits and research to create technologies that will reduce emissions is a good way to stimulate it economically.
It's not coercive.
It's not like China tackling its population problem by limiting family size for everyone. It allows some of the underdeveloped countries in the world to catch up -- and invest in technologies that aren't going to create as much of a problem as older stuff that's still in circulation.
I welcome Copenhagen. I understand there need to be major changes in industry in order to meet the challenge of slowing down climate change. I think the problem can be met with creativity, with planning, with technology itself.
Natural systems are efficient. Some creature comes along that utilizes any resource -- and sometimes these creatures can cause us some big problems like algae choked lakes, when they're just responding to conditions where they thrive. What we can control most of all is ourselves.
We do have sentience. We can think ahead.
There's a philosophical difference between people who live frugally or green or whatever you call it, and people concerned only with economic short term profit. Short term economic profit often verges on fraud. It ignores any lasting consequence to your actions and justifies them by Get Rich Quick -- but life doesn't work that way.
That's the attitude that does the most human damage as well as the most environmental damage. It's what gets people losing their life savings in dot-com crashes. It's not just that it's selfishness -- it's short sightedness.
All of the environmental problems I've ever read about were first recognized by scientists studying real data, observations of reality. When most of them start to agree on something and only disagree on how to handle the problem, that's time to admit that yes, there's a problem.
The ice actually is shrinking. The area the ice is covering is less. Glaciers are receding on mountains. Consequences are actually happening.
So when a group of scientists and other interested parties form a conference to discover ways to deal with the problem and prevent it from becoming an even worse one, I cheer them on. I trust they will at least come up with some plans that'll help maintain the kind of environment human beings live best in.
Our household, my family's household, bought new Energy Star appliances and one consequence is that we're spending a lot less on our bills. Decisions like this on a personal level are cost effective. We could get some movies for the kids and for us to watch. We could afford some personal luxuries, most of which are things that will be enjoyable for years to come instead of just throwaway stuff.
Who's most threatened by admitting there's a problem? People who have a lot of money vested in older polluting technologies, who own the factories and want them running full tilt making things for which the real market may already be glutted.
If you want to actually invest money, start looking at green investments. The need for new technology and especially new power sources besides burning up finite oil reserves is real. If you back something that's real, you'll wind up being on the side that earns something.
So I'm not going to appeal to your conscience to save the world. More to self interest. Live frugally and you can afford the luxuries you don't need for bare survival that make life enjoyable -- things like my art supplies, or good movies, or books, or sports equipment. In quite a few things, the luxury product made to last is more cost effective in the long run -- weigh that by how much you actually will use it and enjoy it.
If you plan ahead and look at environmental impact of your purchases and life choices, then in the long run you'll also spend less money on things you don't want or need. Do you actually care how many layers of packaging are on some product you actually want? Or are you sitting there trying to find the right tools to drill through the super-thick theft-protection plastic packaging and heading to the garage to apply power tools to open a case to get at what you bought?
Waste is a core issue.
Waste not, want not. That doesn't mean "don't enjoy life or buy anything not strictly a necessity." It means that in luxury as well as necessity if you think ahead before buying anything and plan ahead for who you really are and what you really want in life, you'll have less of an environmental impact.
Most of all there's those ugly socially driven substitutions for real needs that hurt people's lives. People who gorge themselves on high calorie food treats to make up for feeling sad and lonely get fat and wind up lonelier and sadder. People who recognize their real need is friends and romance, eat candy less often and enjoy it more as a treat than an everyday thing, will wind up getting more active and social and solve the real problem.
Buying a lot of junk in order to make up for overworking at a stressful high pressure job leaves no time to actually enjoy the exercise equipment, sports equipment, fancy appliances and redundant electronics. I've seen that pattern of substitution often and I lived it during the 1980s when I had a job that I put in about 90 to 120 hours every week.
I can't even remember a tenth of the junk I bought during that time, but I ate out a lot and had trendy stuff replaced constantly by something perceived as more esthetic -- everything from kitchen stuff to furniture. A lot of it was shoddy and broke down fast too, I remember that.
Then in 1990 my life situation changed. I worked as a street artist and took home an annual income so low I wasn't paying taxes. Yet I wound up with less trouble paying my cable TV bill and I had cable. I had less trouble with a lot of things I considered luxuries that were real luxuries -- things I enjoyed and actually used or appreciated daily.
I didn't bother with the trendy stuff any more and I bought very solid furniture at thrift stores that had stood up to time. It continued to in my new apartment. I paid less for everything and stopped wasting so much, with the result that I also had a lot more time to enjoy things like having cable than I did in the 80s.
So the environmental conference isn't something to fear. It's more likely going to improve your life in some ways than to ruin it. What you can do is support it and in private life, reevaluate everything you do for whether it's cost effective.
Enjoying something is a factor. It is cost effective if you genuinely use it and enjoy it, so finding a less expensive way of doing it is the win there. One of the best things you can do for the environment is to get "The Tightwad Gazette" volumes from Amazon or a used bookstore, read through them and re-evaluate your physical culture.
Then sell all the junk on eBay to get it out of your house and off your mind. Throwing it away on eBay will put it into use somewhere it's needed. That cuts down on the amount of cleaning and storage you need to do later on -- once all the junk you don't need or want is out of your life there's actually more space to enjoy the things you found that you didn't know you had.
Find ways to reduce your commute time. This is a biggie for stress. The closer you live to where you work, the less time is wasted every day getting there and the less stressful the process. That's time you could be spending slobbing off with your favorite video game.
See, I'm not appealing to virtue in this. Your personal thrift is going to lead to your actual indulgence in real pleasures. It's not about being Good and Self Sacrificing. It's about being Sensible and getting the most out of what you have -- your time, your money and your energy.
The more people do this, the easier it'll be for the Copenhagen folks to come up with broad based solutions to the very large problems caused by the sheer number of people who all need and want to live well.
