southern light

I don't think it's the heat so much as the light. By 5.30 in the morning it's already bright and the sky, the rooms, the tree tops..the world itself is full of a dazzling light that takes up and fills every square inch.

Of course, this subjective displeasure is of no import. The thing to focus on is how climate change is disrupting old processes of settlement and narrowing our time horizons so that we only think about living in the present. In Vietnam, Cambodia and (possibly?) Thailand there is a severe water shortage. India, too, it seems. 

As people's thoughts narrow down to the simple question of making it through the day one can imagine the pressure that is going to put on political structures. And what of our attitudes to other people, the strangers who come to our door with empty hands and parched lips? (As in a survivor film you somehow believe that you will be spared, singled out by the gods or by sheer brute luck for survival).

The director General of the WTO was here this week. Usual bullshit: more trade, more growth. Asked him whether he thought that the emphasis on trade/globalisation from the 1990s onward had scuppered any chances of reaching a sustainable level of emissions. Sly to the core, he claimed "that the economists tell him" that long-distance trade is actually more efficient (emissions per unit of distance traveled) compared to, say, the local transport of a substitute good within a country.

Of course, what he forgets to add is that the volume of trade and the absolute emissions produced by trade (and not the per unit figure) is what we're interested in. Over the last thirty years there has been a 95% increase in global extraction of materials. To reduce this figure to per capita terms is interesting but misses the point. The overall increase in population, the shift to urban centres, the growth of a middle class, the development of infrastructure and the eating up of forests and agricultural land (actually, the mechanization of agriculture as well), the favourable change in attitudes to consumption/commodification (partly brought on by debt) and increased trade..all of that suggests a serious increase in emissions.

In fact, we may be locked in to developments and infrastructure, patterns of living that make future reductions in emissions increasingly unlikely. One stark figure from Naomi Klein: for a reasonable chance of meeting the 2C limit it is estimated that only 1/5th of all the carbon on the books can be extracted, the rest has to be kept in the ground. In practical terms developed countries would have to reduce their emissions by 8% p.a. for a number of years. Without a severe recession that seems unlikely. But even if Co2 emissions do come down they can't simply be replaced by methane. 

These lines by Russell always strike me as being supremely relevant. In an additional point: where are the great thinkers today? Thinkers who could address the problem in a clear way? Instead, you hazard the guess that they've been replaced by technicians, "experts" and those with tremendously narrow specializations.  

'Whatever we may think, we are creatures of Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth is slow: autumn and winter are essential to it as summer and spring, rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more than to the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted throughout the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embedded something of it in the festival of Easter..'