Climate change: some reasons for our failures

[GliderGuider]

6. When you step back two paces and squint a bit...

If you do that, there isn't any real thermodynamic difference between a multinational CEO and a western environmentalist.

Step back two more paces, and the same can be said for a resident of a Brazilian favela or a Bangladeshi ship-breaker.

We are all "system insiders", people for whom existence is scarcely possible outside the cybernetic, technological exoskeleton of modern civilization that cocoons us. We are all direct and indirect beneficiaries of the entropification of the planet that makes "life" possible for 7 billion of us.

Without that civilization, there would be sustenance for maybe 50 million people on the planet. With civilization, we got 7 billion humans living on what is rapidly becoming a dehumanized, denatured slag tip.

I don't blame anyone any more for this, though. Blame and shame drain too much emotional currency that is better used on other things. Besides, I suspect there have been much deeper forces than simple immorality at work over the last five thousand, five million and five billion years - from thermodynamic principles to genetic imperatives, from evolutionary influences to the sunk costs of historical accident. The road to this particular hell has been paved with the noblest of intentions and an utter paucity of insight into what was actually happening, every step of the way from prokaryotes to the Exxon boardroom.