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Wayne Teel's avatar

Sadly, your last line is correct. I would love to get rid of cars. Bikes are so much more pleasant, and so is walking, especially if there are no cars. Yet we are locked in to a system that is car dependent, fully dedicated to the ideal of continuous growth, which is an economic and environmental disaster already happening. The evidence is clear. We are a ship, heading straight for a rock, while the captain and crew are looking backwards extolling the power of the propeller. Most of the passengers are staring back as well, while a few are looking ahead and screaming in a sound proof room. Ford, Trump, Orban, Putin, Netanyahu, Modi and a whole troop of other world leaders are not leading from wisdom, the are simply doubling down on the mistakes of the 1920's that lead into WWII. This time the crash will be far worse. Can we throw things into reverse? Not without a massive shift of the rudder toward reduction and alternative energy, with the emphasis on the former. China is doing the latter without reduction. 160 gigawatts of new solar in the last quarter is very impressive, but ignores the fact that the streets are crowded, albeit with an increase in the percentage of electric cars. I don't have hope that the politics will change without a collapse. That collapse is coming is clear to anyone brave enough to look ahead. Where is the politician brave enough to tell us that we need to consume less?

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Art's avatar

I could not agree more with your point about the responsibility for electing politicians who favour cars over the climate. We are almost all quick to abdicate our personal responsibility for the crises the world and we each are facing. Until and unless we change that getting onto a better path is a pipe dream. Politicians are people, governments are run by people, corporations are run by people. We forget that and treat them like some all powerful entities that act independently of all the rest of us on their own agenda over which we have no control. Very convenient when you want a scapegoat for all your problems so you can rationalize doing nothing, but complete and utter nonsense at the core. If you eat up and vote for the deluded pipe dream peddled by self serving politicians/corporate shills that there is a world with widely available good education, good social programs, good health care, good housing, good infrastructure, good (insert here all the things that make a society a decent one to live in) without everyone contributing a significant part of their working effort (directly or through taxation) to the common good you, not they, are the problem. If you keep buying/consuming whatever trashy widget and useless service corporations pump out and expect there to be no consequences to the planet/climate you, not they, are the problem. The solution is theoretically simple but it will hurt those that have the most most and they will fight tooth and nail to maintain or improve their social ranking so change won’t come without a fight (“hurt” here is mostly describing a psychological pain associated with having to accept less material wealth as sufficient and involves no actual hardship that should trouble any decent human morally). Humans rate their satisfaction with life largely against the material wealth of their neighbour (usually focusing on the injustice that allows the ones above them to have more while accepting as part of the good and natural order that they have more than their neighbour with less) regardless of how much they have themselves. This was a problem when the “world” for most people was their physical neighbour. It is a problem an order of magnitude, at least, worse in a world where the wealth of the tiny subset of the population that has the most is pressed into our faces 24/7 and they become the “neighbour” with more that we measure against. The problem is further compounded by the reality that those with the most will work incessantly to sucker those with less into jumping onto their self serving bandwagon by selling the nonsense dream that we can all have it all like them if we just work a little harder and continue to feed the machine. It is compounded again by the reality that the BS works every time at every level to make people act in ways that are not in their individual or collective interest. A politician/government can buy the vote of a significant percentage of the population (even that part that has much) by promising to improve their immediate individual lot by a few dollars (cancel vehicle license renewal fees, send out a hundred dollar tax rebate cheque, lower taxes, …) or by putting up a third party scapegoat as the source of all their ills and promising to reign in the imagined/exaggerated evil (immigrants, China, the Middle East, Muslims, Democrats, Republicans, LGBTQ..). This works again and again despite the reality that they are at the same time strangling funding for better education, social services, health care, etc. and dumping piss pots full of money down holes that lead directly into the accounts of those who already have the most. They can do it only because we keep taking the bait over and over and over again. You out number them a ten to one and without you they have nothing. You get the government/leadership you deserve. There are no excuses for doing nothing at the individual level (keep in mind that picking the Liberals over the Conservatives in Canada or DEM over GOP in the US is for all practical purposes doing nothing).

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