| |
|
Would you like to see India and China with the levels of consumption of the US?
This seems to be a bit pointy. Illmatic talks about immigration elsewhere. How do you stop immigration? You stop people wanting to move themselves long distances in poor conditions in the hope of a better life. One way to do that might be to make it clear that they will not *have* a better life. Another way is to help to make a better life where they already are. However, if you assume that "a better life" means not just peace and not the fear of imminent violence or torture (and one way to equalise that, of course, is to ensure that asylum seekers, of any stripe of bogosity, are subject to persecution by the government and random acts of violence in the countries where they might seek asylum) but also the right to drive cars, consume beef and so on, then you've got an enormous problem.
Imagine every family in India and China driving a car, or owning a computer, or eating meat every day. The sheer amount of resources and space and deforestation you'd need is unimaginable. Especially of course since at the moment these countries are trying to deal with some of the needs of a society in the industrial age, but without the spare capacity for filtration and purification the west can employ. It's a nightmarish idea. Christ, imagine the population of China all deciding that they needed antibacterial handwash, and getting their wish - how much of Indonesia would remain undevoted to palm oil production?
So... that's a fundamental problem. Unless you can work out some way to create endless energy (cold fusion) and or infinite construction capacity (nanobots? Space mining?), the Earth is a zero sum equation. It can produce a certain amount, and withstand a certain amount, and can be induced to do production and endurance more or less easily. So, IMHO it is simply not possible to give everybody in the world the standard of living that is identified as "society" earlier in this thread with the technology at our disposal. Therefore, society must not only be protected from war, destruction, zombies etc, it also has to be protected from other people getting it.
So it becomes a series of sacrifices. If you want to keep using fossil fuels, you have to adapt to more pensioners dying in the Summer (or, if the Gulf Stream shuts off, the winter - one of the problems is that it's very hard to determine exactly which x leads to which y) If you want lots of wind energy, you have to accept that you will lose a lot of coastal land and moorland, and a lot of picturesque views, along with a lot of wildlife. If you want to produce a certain number of greenhouse gases int he pursuit of a civilised lifestyle, you have to invest further energy in protecting certain areas from flooding, or give up on them and retreat to higher ground, and you also have to accept that malaria might appear in Europe, say. Malaria and an absolute shitload of people trying to get out of places where climate change is having a greater impact and the structures, and the money, are not there to deal with it.
So, in a sense most actions taken to preserve civilisation (in the sense of continuing to have constant hot water, or having electric lights burning in empty skyscrapers, or having a vast industry devoted to buying, shredding, drying, machine-rolling, packing and shipping out Marlboro lights) are actually also actions likely to make the conditions in which it thrives harder to maintain and harder for others to achieve, even as it makes it more apparently desirable both to seek and to maintain....after all, something that destructive must be pretty damn cool to be sought so assiduously... |
|
|
