Welcome To The Green(er) Revolution
For some, the global warming debate is well and truly over :
The record Atlantic hurricane season last year can be attributed to global warming, several top experts, including a leading U.S. government storm researcher, said on Monday.Wired has a story on 'The Next Green Revolution'. Less guilt-tripping, less nutiness, more workable reality and positive change :"The hurricanes we are seeing are indeed a direct result of climate change and it's no longer something we'll see in the future, it's happening now..."
But there are a few left in the weather business who do not agree, at all, that global warming is to blame :Some, like William Gray, a veteran hurricane researcher at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, attributed the warming to natural cycles.
Gray said he believes salinity buildups and movements with ocean currents cause warming and cooling cycles. He predicted the Caribbean water will continue to warm for another five to 10 years, then start cooling.
For decades, environmentalists have warned of a coming climate crisis. Their alarms went unheeded, and last year we reaped an early harvest: a singularly ferocious hurricane season, record snowfall in New England, the worst-ever wildfires in Alaska, arctic glaciers at their lowest ebb in millennia, catastrophic drought in Brazil, devastating floods in India - portents of global warming's destructive potential.
With climate change hard upon us, a new green movement is taking shape, one that embraces environmentalism's concerns but rejects its worn-out answers.
Technology can be a font of endlessly creative solutions. Business can be a vehicle for change. Prosperity can help us build the kind of world we want. Scientific exploration, innovative design, and cultural evolution are the most powerful tools we have. Entrepreneurial zeal and market forces, guided by sustainable policies, can propel the world into a bright green future.
The new vision is less of the old "We Need To Get Back To Nature" hippy-tripping, and more geared towards maximising innovation and turning a green buck off the new techs at the same, while saving money from wasting less, of everything :
You don't change the world by hiding in the woods, wearing a hair shirt, or buying indulgences in the form of save the earth bumper stickers. You do it by articulating a vision for the future and pursuing it with all the ingenuity humanity can muster. Indeed, being green at the start of the 21st century requires a wholehearted commitment to upgrading civilization.
'Upgrading civilisation' is a new and interesting term, certainly better than 'Let's Get Back To Nature'. Nature is damp, muddy, dangerous and smelly. Winding back civilisation by spending twelve hours churning your own butter and living in a moist cave was never, and will never be, the answer and the people who are heralding the New Change know it.
Apparently, city living is good for the environment because it means less urban sprawl and more maximisation of energy, infrastructure and facilities.The non-fossil fuel energy sources - wind farms, solar, geothermal and hydrogen production - are working and now have to be produced in industrial quantities.
Efficiency of everything is the key to winding back the damage to the environment and reducing the effects of more in the decades to come, so it's better insulation, houses that don't have cathedral ceilings, cars that don't choke kids in asthma clouds, and less waste in everything from fuel consumption to light bulbs plus more money for innovation and research.
Redesigning civilization along these lines would bring a quality of life few of us can imagine. That's because a fully functioning ecology is tantamount to tangible wealth.Wealth? That's going to be an easier sell than the old 70s and 80s trip of living in poverty and deprivation to save the planet.
Rich and environmentally conscious? That's the Next Green Revolution.
To the (recycled plastic) barricades! Tear down the (single-brick, non-insulated) walls!
