For those who don't know my position very well, and in light of the fact that sarcasm and irony are often missed or misinterpreted on the interwebz, perhaps some clarification is in order.
This post is an ironic way of saying that the only thing that will slow our carbon release significantly is a global economic collapse triggered by excessive social complexity and climate change. Nothing else will do it. Unfortunately, that collapse appears to be under way.
The human experiment is caught in what I call a carbon trap. Our continued existence depends on the very thing that is killing us: the combustion of the planet's ancient carbon stocks.
We are in a cell whose bars are made of carbon. The door swung closed when the atmosphere reached 300 ppm of CO2, and the lock snapped shut 50 ppm later. There is no key that will re-open it.
The trap was constructed well outside of our conscious view or understanding.
It was designed by our evolved desires for status, material comfort and security.
It was built with the best of intentions by well-meaning scientists and engineers whose knowledge of the consequences was both incomplete and obfuscated by their own evolved desires.
The strength of the bars comes from the thermodynamics of carbon combustion - an energetic process with a very steep gradient. Once we descend that gradient we would have to harness over twice the energy to climb back up again. We need the energy to keep things running (which is the reason we burned the carbon in the first place), the same amount of energy to break the chemical bonds and turn the CO2 back into harmless carbon and oxygen, and a little more to pay the Pied Piper of Entropy.
Most of us distract ourselves by creating and admiring elaborate appointments for our carbon-clad prison.
Most of those who are aware of the bars spend their time dreaming of ways to slip through them into the world they can see outside. They face one insurmountable problem. While the light of awareness can slip between the carbon bars, our bodies cannot.
Those who are fully aware of the trap understand that we now need it to survive. We are collective victims of what complex systems scientists call "path dependence": where we came from and how we got here limits what is now possible for us to do.
One of the things we can't to is simply to open the door and leave. Even the fact that our carbon-barred prison is now on fire can't change the cold equations. We need to wait until the very walls burn down, when a few soot-blackened survivors may stumble out into the blasted and barren landscape left behind by the construction project.
Have a nice weekend.
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