Easing climate change with a four-hour day

Ideas for easing climate change are as varied as they are many.

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.