Eyes Wide Open: List 3

Geoengineering ideas to combat global warming, from launching space mirrors to piping deep ocean waters to the surface, have a mad-scientist ring that leads even proponents to worry about future problems.

We’re staunch believers in science when it improves our lives.

Our dependence on fossil fuels didn’t arise from an evil plot but through our curiosity and ingenuity.

It explains another reaction to our predicament: refusing to accept a decline.

The windfall of cheap fossil fuels that’s fueled the West for two centuries got us used to ever-rising living standards.

Adaptability is one of humankind’s hallmarks.

This leaves the Big Three dependent on private cars, which use far more energy per person. For such reasons, these countries are always near the top of the list for per capita energy use and carbon footprint, with figures much higher than these of other countries with similar living standards.

Invulnerability. The oceans around the Big Three countries have helped protect them from invasion.

But even ingrained attitudes can change.

“If the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does not suspend the catalytic converter rule, it will cause Ford to shut down and would result in: (1) reduction in gross national product by $17 billion; (2) increased unemployment of 800,000; and (3) decreased tax receipts of $5 billion at all levels of government so that some local governments would become insolvent.”

Individuals, businesses, and nations share the same objection: governments restrict us, stifling our narrow interests so as to protect broader ones.

It’s interesting to watch what happens when weather and financial disasters strike: everyone wants government help, from flooded-out farmers to bankers who’ve spent a lifetime bashing Washington. How to explain such inconsistency?

Cognitive dissonance is the mental tension created by holding two conflicting opinions.

This is often solved through rationalization: coming up with justifications for our acts or beliefs.

We expect beliefs and actions to be consistent; hypocrisy is the charge leveled at violators.

It’s no accident that the world’s most politically volatile countries—Somalia, Iraq, Haiti, Pakistan—feature overpopulation and overstressed environments.

These are the climate refugees, pushed by spreading deserts and lengthening drought in Africa, Brazil, China, India, Iran, Central America, and other regions. This exodus is already in progress. Some move to other parts of their countries; others try to get to the wealthier West.

They mean more mouths to feed, more health-care needs, and emergency housing issues, often in countries struggling to take care of their own—a category even affluent nations feel they fall into.

If environmental stress can lead to competition and discord, the opposite is also true.

Building up soil, protecting forests and fish stocks, and avoiding overpopulation and climate change all work to prevent conflict before it starts. Good stewardship might not seem to be doing anything.

India is struggling to lower its growth rate, hampered by varying policies in its twenty-eight states and past scandals over sterilizations and vasectomies.

Mix this influx of workers with the imported Western industrial system, add in the demand that these new consumers create, factor in major government spending on infrastructure, and you have exploding economies that are quickly lifting standards of living.

The materials to build them, the gasoline to run them, the highways and gas stations and parking lots to support them, the sprawl they foster, and the emissions they release all combine to transform a country’s environmental profile when they take hold.

Name a need and some organization is probably working on it. Possible challenges: personality conflicts, impatience with lack of progress, the agony of defeat. Probable benefits: camaraderie, learning curves, performing on the big stage.

Recycling reduces mining and energy use, but its difficulties and energy needs make it a modest help rather than a cure-all.

Carpool lanes seem a good thing, but making driving easier perpetuates car use.

Carbon offsets—also called carbon credits—are donations to programs that work to reduce greenhouse gases (through reforestation, mass transit, and other means) so as to shrink the footprint of high-CO₂ activities. If the greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere are balanced by offsets, the activity is carbon neutral—a status many schools, businesses, and cities are working toward.

Over and over, pessimistic predictions that fossil fuels were running out have been made obsolete by new finds and new methods.

Many climate predictions, by contrast, have been too optimistic: worrisome figures have usually outstripped projections.

You’ll hear others moan it out of apathy, exempting themselves from the need to do anything, the seductive bliss offered by regression.

Environmental groups have found a new lever in the drive to lower greenhouse gases: pressuring universities to divest their endowment funds of all fossil-fuel stocks.

The gist of normalcy bias is that we’re reluctant to prepare for disasters we’ve never experienced.

Many have preferred steering the same course even if it leads to disaster, from the nobility overthrown by the Russian revolution to the Detroit CEOs whose loyalty to shoddy gas-guzzlers led their companies to disaster.

Political upheavals sometimes remove them from power.

That’s what they do, and there’s so much oil and gas to be had and so many customers that there’s no incentive to alter course.