Copenhagen

A few last thoughts on Copenhagen. No agreement, no surprise. How could we realistically think we could organize every state on earth including every government and corporation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and police it and track it for the next say 200 years? I know that civilized humans are insane but we are pretty crazy and arrogant to think we could achieve such a monumental task. So I don't view Copenhagen as a failure, as I once did. This isn't like the easy job of banning ozone depleting substances. This is about how we live on earth.

And it's really about complexity. I've written about this before. We have this crazy idea, we being civilized humans, that in response to change we just need to have more departments, more staff, more agreements, more laws, more police. MORE. But this increases complexity and that's pretty dangerous. Imagine your are building a tower and just keep adding on to the top; picture jenga. One day the structure isn't going to to work and it's going to fall over. Conversely, consider a number of small structures, like a village. If one collapses, which is infinitely possible, all the others are still going to be there. There's a great permaculture principle which states: Use small and slow solutions.

Happily I came across this fascinating article after Copenhagen. Essentially it challenges the assumption that our leaders and scientists make and we assimiliate everyday, that nothing is going to change. Consumption rates will continue to rise and that's just the way it is. When of course this is not how the earth works. This is a finite planet. So you won't have enough oil for everyone year after year and that's going to affect how much greenhouse gas emissions we produce.

And if we keep building that tower, when it falls our emissions are going to go with it. So get busy building dear bureaucrats and CEOs and dear leaders. All your complexity is going to amount to nothing in the end.