[MCN] Kate Marvel, climate scientist. "Someday I must tell my son what I have done."

[Lance Olsen]

Excerpt : Someday I must tell my son what I have done. My comfortable, safe life is in large part a product of the internal combustion engine <https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page5.php>. Fossil fuels power the trains that take us to the beach, the factories that make his plastic bucket and spade, the lights I switch off when I kiss him good night. We can make small adjustments: recycling, buying reusable bottles for our water and ice coffee, foregoing the occasional plastic bag. But these small things, even multiplied by a large population, are still small in the end.

I cannot deny my son or myself the ease of modern life, and I have no wish to isolate him from friends and family by insisting on radical changes. A carbon-free life seems a solitary one: no travel to see grandparents, awkward refusals of invitations, precious time with friends replaced by gardening, canning, mending, building, working. 

I search for political solutions, an advocacy muted by the cowardice of my personal choices. In the end, I am responsible for the gases that are changing the climate and, in raising my son in comfort and convenience, am passing on that responsibility and guilt to him.

Greenhouse gases are indisputably warming the whole planet. We are moving toward a future where the natural variations of El Niño are swamped by rising ocean temperatures. There will be no weather that we have not somehow touched. And our legacy travels deeper than we think: We have left to our children a time bomb of warming. Even if we somehow managed to halt the increase in greenhouse gases, freezing them at today’s levels, the planet’s temperature would continue to rise <https://www.princeton.edu/news/2013/11/24/even-if-emissions-stop-carbon-dioxide-could-warm-earth-centuries> as the heat trickles into the deep, slowly creating a new equilibrium. The ocean will eventually know what we have done to the atmosphere. The process is slow, but inexorable. We have committed ourselves to this warming, a legacy to future generations.

To be a climate scientist is to be an active participant in a slow-motion horror story.

<<https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-should-never-have-called-it-earth/ <https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-should-never-have-called-it-earth/>>>

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From Energy Transition to Energy Reduction
By Chris Smaje
My request to those working in the renewable energy industry is to ask themselves before undertaking any new project: “Will this help people to live a lower energy lifestyle than they previously did?” – which, regrettably, is not something we can say of the low carbon energy installed globally to date. If they can’t answer yes to the question, I’d request they dump the project and seek another one. It’s urgent.

<<https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-05-20/from-energy-transition-to-energy-reduction/>>

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Spending the planet for energy intensive lifestyles

<<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM>>>




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