Michele Guieu (California, US)
“When the sky is blue again,
Let’s not forget about this.
2020 is screaming at us
to rethink “business as usual”.
The photo was taken September 9, 2020, in Sunnyvale, Bay Area, where I live,
as fires were raging through California, Oregon, and Washington.
The human predicament is a situation with no solution (but changes to the situation can be made) where environmental, economic, energetic, and equity issues are tightly intertwined and could lead to a systemic collapse of our civilization. We are in a trajectory of collapse because we are exploding the planetary limits. We need to change our economic system so that our carbon footprint does not exceed one planet (in the US, we use resources as if we had 4.7 planets).
How do we go from “we explode the planetary limits” to “we respect the planetary limits”?
Burning Fossil fuel creates greenhouse gases that change the climate, increasing the intensity of fires, drought, floods, hurricanes, and acidifying the ocean. We need to stop using them. But how are we going to do that? 80% of ALL our activities use fossil fuel (oil, gas, coal).
Let’s say we can replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, and we would not emit any greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Could we continue to destroy wild spaces, wildlife, on land, and in the ocean? Could we continue to destroy the Amazon forest to make room to grow the crops to feed the cattle? Could we continue to extract nonrenewable resources to make all the things we need and face an inevitable depletion for some metals? Could we continue to consume things endlessly?
We live in a finite world, and we cannot grow indefinitely. We need to put a brake on the exploitation of the living world.
Renewable energy is not as powerful as fossil fuels and cannot replace them. We can transition to a world free of fossil fuels, but it will not resemble today’s world. It could be a world respectful to the environment, equitable, economically sustainable, and using energy wisely. We need new imaginaries to build that world!