A good friend of mine, made a good case for the cause of climate change to be capitalism and consumerism. His point being that business is in a symbiotic relationship with the consumer of their products and they desire more profit, therefore more consumers, and therefore more production and pollution of the climate and an overconsumption of raw material resources. There is a lot of truth to that, for it is how it works, to a degree.
Business in capitalism is trying to make money. To make money, it needs to sell what it makes/provides for more than it costs to produce it. Basic stuff of economics. They advertise and sell in many ways to convince people they need what they make. The overall culture of the advanced(?) world perpetrates this illusion that to show we have “made it” in this world, is to consume more and more. To show off our success. All that extreme adds to the pollution of using energy in so many ways that contribute to the climate crisis.
We in the industrialized west, account for a great deal of the climate crisis. We consume more, use more, waste more, and otherwise contribute to this warming world. That is a fact. And the rest of the world struggles to get a decent life for their population. To feed them, to house them, to provide basics to lift them out of the devasting poverty they live in. Yes, they contribute much less than we do to the climate issue.
All that said, the one thing absent in all this is how many people we have on this limited planet. We are approaching 7 billion, (with a B) people here and growing. How do we find a way to give all of those a good “quality of life”? Right now billions of people live on very little and the way they contribute to climate change is lack of sewage management, coal burning for heat, and other inefficient ways of surviving. What do we do for these people? But the one thing they do, is reproduce, and for a good reason. If I am very poor, the only way my old age is cared for, is to have children. That is very logical. And it can be a death knell for the planet.
How many people can the Earth support? We are wiping out many non-human species every year as we encroach on forests and wetlands, to turn them into farm land. In the meantime, business finds opportunities in all this to make money. It is what they do.
It is a bad game for everyone in the long term. But to blame business, (or any religion that promotes having children), or any social, ideological stance that does not deal with the fact we cannot just keep populating this finite space, as if only feeding them was enough, is to a denial of what is in our living. China tried the “one child” thing, as an enforced doctrine, and it did work somewhat but had unintended consequences of aborting female fetuses.
How do we humans reconcile our connection to each other, to this planet we inhabit, and our desire to procreate? As long as we see our being as a separate entity, we may never find the answer to that. We may have to kill the environment as we know it. The Earth will adjust without us. We are not the superior beings here. Tlane 4/26/21
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