Climate change
Opinion: Convincing evidence of climate change aside there is nothing that we can do directly to change the course set over the last hundred years or hundred centuries. At best discussion of global warming is a lever to get people of their arses. It is not our most pressing problem. If we do not take immediate action to radically reduce our dependence upon oil the world could rapidly descend into an abyss from which few will survive to experience the detrimental effects of climate change. It's all about the oil at this point. Unless we engage 110% of our efforts to reduce oil dependence immediately our decline from Peak Oil will not be a "controlled" slide it will be a plummet to anarchy. Read The Long Emergency for an optimist's view of our future. Everyday an action to save, reduce, eliminate the use of oil. Two people the next day. Two actions the day after. Repeat or perish.
they are closely related problems given that
1. reducing oil usage can help reduce climate destabilization (a more accurate term than climate 'change')
2. if we do as you say and ignore climate change and focus only on oil, then what happens when we use less oil and the politicians decide to ramp up coal? Bad news. Very bad news. Potentiallky suicidal news...
3.When he spoke at the university at which I teach, Julian Darley said (this is pretty close to a literal quote) that peak may be the bigger shorter-term problem while he believed that for the century global warming may be our biggest challenge.
4. While you are correct that the die is set as far as past emissions and the fact they will keep having an effect for some time, it's a bit like someone who has smoked for years: yes, the effects on his/her lungs from this past smoking will indeed continue and be a detriment to their health; however it certainly isn't true that it's not relevant whether they continue smoking or not. Similarly the die is set on past emissions and that means that our "best base scenario" is already far from rosy as far as the climate chaos we're cause will be, however it does matter very much how much (or how little) we do about it from now on, since that's like whether we make the lung disease slowly improve or whether we take the fast-lane to lung cancer and death; in this case, whether or not we throw outselves off a cliff of non-linear sudden drastic climate disruption once a critical tipping point is reached when the feedback loops are so strongly in place that we are essentially doomed to a far, far worse scenario..
5. Finally as someone said more eloquently than I have, you can live without oil on this planet (even though the short term adjustment might be painful or even lead to many deaths depending on how stupidly society does or does not react) but you can live on this planet eithout oil..you can't really live however (at least not in any meaningful sense) without a stable liveable climate.
And as Cal-tech physicist and author of "Out Of Gas" David Goodstein put it,
"The planet Venus is a little closer to the sun than Earth is, but the physics should permit Venus to be very earthlike in temperature. But it's not.Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect and a surface temperature hotter than molten lead. As we have seen, distance from the sun is only one of several variables that determine habitability on Earth. At 93 million miles from the sun, our planet could be a
frozen wasteland, or it could be a Venusian inferno. The fact is that it is neither. Instead it has this delicately balanced partial greenhouse effect that is ideal for creatures like us. We mess with that greenhouse effect at our peril." -Physicist and Caltech Vice-Provost David Goodstein (Author, "Out of Gas")
http://EconomicDemocracy.org/
Hmm, paragraph breaks did not work for me when ?I used text-only mode, now that I've tried using the rich-text mode they are still not there, it's just one large paragraph...could moderators of postcarbon.org look into this..?
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