Today’s post by regular contributor, Richard Jurin, is a follow up to a recent post. Before his retirement, Richard led the Environmental Studies programme at the University of Northern Colorado, where he launched a degree in Sustainability Studies. His academic interests are environmental worldviews and understanding barriers to sustainability. As ever, with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by NAEE.
Richard writes:
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong” Thomas Sowell.
The big question before humanity at this time, is not the debate about climate change – climate is changing, as it has been doing throughout its long 4.5 billion-year history. Whether anthropogenic causes are primary or just a minor contribution is a discussion apparently not allowed. The big question ought to be, how we adapt to changing climate and do so in a way that builds resiliency and helps people everywhere thrive. Power structures on this planet would have us make drastic and even destructive changes where the only beneficiaries would be the few economically privileged. Is humanity being rushed into making a Faustian bargain in order to save a failed global economic system? A system that pretends to resolve the very problems created by it in the first place.
The human power structures on this planet merely tell us what to expect and how they want us to react. They use a catastrophe narrative and fear as an incentive to get acquiesce to their draconian policies. They sell a dream of ‘net zero.’ There is a Gadarene rush to ban the internal combustion engine and have everyone drive electric cars, and make everything electric, without real discussions about sourcing all this electricity and minerals used to build this technology. Can we even reach net zero with our current technology? The great misnomer and belief of this catastrophe narrative is ‘Clean Energy.’
Current renewable technologies are only net zero in their electrical generation phase. During manufacture and construction, they are as polluting and destructive as fossil fuels (perhaps more so with limited metals and minerals used), and disposal waste after their lifespan is also a major problem. Uranium nuclear powered electrical generation is similar. There are innovations and better options already available, such as Thorium Salt reactors and hydrogen technologies, but these do not fit the profit driven economic paradigms driving our society. Like the city sewer systems, piped water, and the horse poop problem of the latter 1800s, we need to consider options that are not financial constrained by a profit only mindset.
In our current economic system, any electrical power source must be ‘Clean’ (non-polluting), ‘Reliable’ (available without interruption, 24/7/365), ‘inexpensive’ (financially sustainable) and be large grid-friendly. Current renewables proposed to resolve our so-called-climate-crisis are none of these. Real options to resolve our global energy needs will not come through the international organizations, which have bamboozled, cajoled, and alarmed us into believing their vision for the future. The UN’s ‘sustainable development’ policies, the SDGs, do not promote ‘sustainability’ as most of us conceive of it. Their policies, aligned with groups like the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Bank, and other elite groups, merely seek to impose even more debt imperialism to drive a global financial governance system that Klaus Schwab calls ‘The Great Reset.’
If our lives and world is to reset, we should be the ones to do it, speaking out from the grass roots to each other around the world. While the internet has the power to trap us when constrained by the powers that be, it also has the power to liberate us, allowing open and transparent discussions and forums; something never before realized in human history where the people can all talk. We must have these discussions and invite all to join in the discussion of what we think the future might be in a sustainable world with the people in control and not corrupt elites!
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Richard can be contacted at richard.jurin@risebroadband.net