Running Out of Time

There's a stark contrast in this year's election and my vote, in part, is somewhat defensive. As always, Collapse of Industrial Civilization remains focused on the threat of climate change.

The biosphere is collapsing under the weight of 7.5 billion people living off the combustion of a one time endowment of ancient carbon energy, from the factory-farmed produce they eat to the petroleum-based medical supplies that keep them alive.

We’ve been fooling ourselves for a very long time about what is truly sustainable and will continue to do so as the system falls apart, geoengineering fixes are applied, interstellar space colonization fantasies are dreamed up, and wars are fought for what remains. Humans have constructed a reality incompatible with the well-being of the natural world and the stability of the biosphere, but we won’t be able to escape the rules of physics, chemistry, and biology. We’ve spent generations making the bed we’re going to be lying in, never realizing it’s also our death bed. Time is not on our side.

According to United Nations Environment Programme chief scientist Jacqueline McGlade, the Paris Agreement is

just too little, and it’s not happening quickly enough. If we don’t see emissions peaking by 2020, then the chances of getting to 1.5 degrees is vanishingly small.

Update (April 27, 2018):  Referring to John Ehrenfeld, Aleszu Bajak highlights the problem with purely technological fixes for climate change.

Tackling a problem as deeply ingrained as global warming ... will require humanity to face an existential question that geoengineering alone cannot address: Are we willing to sacrifice growth to ensure the survival of our species?