Ideas for easing climate change are as varied as they are
many.
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| Our modern world has exploited in just 200 years a resource that took billions of years of sunlight to create. |
The equation seems, however, on the face of it, pretty
simple and easily understood.
Modern lifestyles of the developed world, in particular,
have exceeded or exhausted the natural world’s ability to cope – we have
created a global dystopia, the disruption earth’s inherent ecological balance.
A few of us, in relative world population terms, live as if
humans are detached from the rhythms of nature, ignoring the reality that we
are in fact integral to it.
Just a couple of centuries ago we discovered how to access
the magical power of fossil fuels (ancient sunlight) and now after such a short
time we have nearly exhausted a resource that took nature billions of years to
create.
We have been wasteful in the extreme and now the bill for
that frivolity is coming due and should we choose to ignore the debt collector,
civilization will be decimated.
Complete restitution is beyond us, but we can make inroads
on the interest with a systemic behavioural change and within that a
seismic-like revolution to the economic foundations of our communities.
Each of us should be limited, by law, to working four hours
a day, no overtime and no double shifts with the outcome being five days at
four hours being just 20 hours a week.
Consequently people would be inherently financially poorer
and so vastly less able to consume and use products that are only available
because of an economically driven society whose richness hinges on the prolific
use of fossil fuels that are unquestionably the root of the complications that
are changing the world’s climate.
Conversely, and importantly, people would suddenly be, by
comparison to today, “time-rich” and so able to use those free hours to grow
food, make things, enrich their neighbourhoods through simply being there longer,
set up and implement sharing schemes reducing the need for every household have
one of everything and begin the long societal haul to the creation of the
“five-minute life”.
Such a life would mean that most everything important on a
day-to-day basis was within five minutes easy walking or cycling distance.
Should a business want to operate longer hours, then it
would need to hire another team of people for a further four hours changing
completely the employment/unemployment nexus.
Most contemporary economic gurus will declare such a change
as unworkable, alluding to consequences that would bring society to its knees.
However, what is truly unworkable is the business as usual
paradigm and its 40-hour week; bequeathing a rich middle class that, in 200
years, has nearly exhausted the world’s fossil fuels, depleted obvious energy
resources and left a benign environment and atmosphere in tatters.
