(opinion) While economic growth continues we'll never kick our fossil fuels habit

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/26/economic-growth-fossil-fuels-habit-oil-industry

While economic growth continues we'll never kick our fossil fuels habit

George Monbiot

Wed 26 Sep 2018 06.00 BST Last modified on Wed 26 Sep 2018 10.30 BST

We’re getting there, aren’t we? We’re making the transition towards an all-electric future. We can now leave fossil fuels in the ground and thwart climate breakdown. Or so you might imagine, if you follow the technology news.

So how come oil production, for the first time in history, is about to hit 100m barrels a day? How come the oil industry expects demand to climb until the 2030s? How is it that in Germany, whose energy transition (Energiewende) was supposed to be a model for the world, protesters are being beaten up by police as they try to defend the 12,000-year-old Hambacher forest from an opencast mine extracting lignite – the dirtiest form of coal? Why have investments in Canadian tar sands – the dirtiest source of oil – doubled in a year?

The answer is, growth. There may be more electric vehicles on the world’s roads, but there are also more internal combustion engines. There be more bicycles, but there are also more planes. It doesn’t matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things. Given that economic growth, in nations that are already rich enough to meet the needs of all, requires an increase in pointless consumption, it is hard to see how it can ever be decoupled from the assault on the living planet.

When a low-carbon industry expands within a growing economy, the money it generates stimulates high-carbon industry. Anyone who works in this field knows environmental entrepreneurs, eco-consultants and green business managers who use their earnings to pay for holidays in distant parts of the world and the flights required to get there. Electric vehicles have driven a new resource rush, particularly for lithium, that is already polluting rivers and trashing precious wild places. Clean growth is as much of an oxymoron as clean coal. But making this obvious statement in public life is treated as political suicide.
(snip)

I recognise that challenging our least contested ideologies – growth and consumerism – is a tough call. But in New Zealand, it is beginning to happen. Jacinda Ardern, the Labour prime minister, says: “It will no longer be good enough to say a policy is successful because it increases GDP if it also degrades the physical environment.” How this translates into policy, and whether her party will resolve its own contradictions, remains to be determined.

No politician can act without support. If we want political parties to address these issues, we too must start addressing them. We cannot rely on the media to do it for us. A report by the research group Media Matters found that total coverage of climate change across five US news networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and PBS) amounted to 260 minutes in 2017 – a little over four hours. Almost all of it was a facet of the Trump psychodrama (Will he pull out of the Paris accord? What’s he gone and done this time?) rather than the treatment of climate chaos in its own right. There was scarcely a mention of the link between climate breakdown and the multiple unnatural disasters the US suffered that year; of new findings in climate science; or of the impacts of new pipelines or coalmines. I cannot find a comparable recent study in the UK. I suspect it is a little better, but not a lot.
(snip)

[Kilgore]

1. Not giving a damn also helps

I know absolutely no one at work, and very few socially, who seem to care. And the few who seem to care dont act like it jusging by lifestyle.

We are scroomed! (Screwed & Doomed)