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CO2 On Trial: Michael Tobis If Things Had Worked Out Better
CO2 On Trial: Michael Tobis If Things Had Worked Out Better
ADULTHOOD AS A PRODUCT
The fact is that we are entering an age of new and unprecedented limits. We can still have a happy future, human achievement and human dignity can continue its broad historical progress, and we can still have a lot of fun. But we have to recognize new limitations. The emergence of limits is unfortunate. It's costly. It's ill-timed. But preserving a stable environment is an ethical responsibility like none that has preceded it. We need people to understand not only that CO2 is a global problem, but that it's just the first in a series, as we make the transition from an open frontier world to spaceship earth. As a brand of soap, this is a hard sell. We have to sell the idea of a widespread set of changes in behavior, a new set of ethical constraints, and a substantial increase in the complexity and scale of governance. There are serious risks and costs involved, but avoiding this responsibility will yield something much worse. This is not a happy fact. Wind turbines may or may not be pretty given the eye of the beholder, but our situation is not pretty at all. We need to come to grips with it. And our frantic lives with their narrowing margins of sanity and declining capacities for contemplation make it very difficult to do so. What we need to be selling is not, in the first instance, an act of congress or a treaty. Its not even the culpability of CO2. Our humble product is the idea of limits. We are selling the idea of the end of the global adolescent growth spurt, the idea of restraint.
We are in the predicament of promoting collective maturity to a society that sometimes appears to be losing track even of individual maturity. In a low-attention-span battle we lose because the visceral hooks of the advertiser appeal to the adolescent within us. Adolescence is more fun than adulthood. The adolescent worldview sees no advantages to maturity. It's easier to sell fun than to sell responsibility. On the other hand, usually in the long run the suitably responsible strategy is more fun. We cant stop our mad lemming like trajectory with proxy arguments. Its time to slow down, take a deep breath, and start paying attention. Its time to try to understand what reality is trying to tell us. The fate of the only living planet we know about, the only world that matters to us, deserves more attention than does our choice of laundry soap.
==== The author, Michael Tobis, is cofounder and editor-in-chief of Planet3.0, an online sustainability community.
https://medium.com/earth-today/41d6534e8ff6