Merry!?-go-Round (three) Penguins Watching TV
The Economist cover image from ‘No Safe Place’ July 24 2021.
Penguins watching the end of the world.
June 29, 2022
Merry!?-go-Round (three)……..Penguins Watching TV
“In 1745, as the River Liffey, having broken its banks, clawed at the foundations of his house in which he sat, the young Edmund Burke experienced a strange, perverse thrill. The man who would go on to found modern conservatism drew inspiration from this experience in a later essay on the sublime, writing of the unmatched delight that terrible destruction could stir - provided that it is watched from a certain distance.
The most terrible thing about the spectacular scenes of destruction that have played out around the world over the past weeks is that there is no safe place from which to observe them. The ground under the German town of Erftstadt is torn apart like tissue paper by flood waters; Lytton in British Columbia is burned from the map just a day after setting a freakishly high temperature record; cars float like dead fish through the streets-turned-canals in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou. All the world feels at risk, and most of it is.”
……….”But research over the past 15 years has suggested that solar geoengineering might significantly reduce some of the harms from greenhouse warming.
What nobody yet knows is how such schemes could be developed so as to reflect not just the interests of their instigators, but also those of all the countries that they will affect. Different countries might seek different amounts of cooling; some ways of putting solar geoengineering into effect would help some regions while harming others. Nor is there yet a compelling rejoinder to the risk that the very idea of such things tomorrow reduces the incentive to be ambitious in cutting emissions today.
To think about solar geoengineering requires facing those problems - and the risk that powers with little interest in them may try out such schemes regardless. It also means facing squarely what kind of being humankind has become. Watching the rising waters of the Liffey, Burke
“Considered how little man is, yet in his mind how great….
Master of all things yet scarce can command anything.”
Manipulating the climate that humanity has destabilised - unwittingly, at first - spurs similar thoughts of simultaneous power and impotence. It is not nature that humans cannot command, but themselves, in all their insignificance and world-altering might.”
The first two and last two paragraphs of the leader article in the Economist magazine titled No Safe Place. July 24 2021.
The Industrial Revolution of the 20th century was deemed the solution to raising living standards, material living standards, the environmental cost of which is becoming all too apparent today.
One problem apparently solved in the past, the consequences of which have tied a knot that requires undoing in the present.
An idea in the present, outlined above, that may apparently solve a problem created in the past, but which will tie another knot for the future.
Of course there is the argument that raising living standards reduces menial tasks in life and frees time for higher pursuits.
But what do we, humanity do with this ‘free’ time, other than look in the same direction, outside of ourselves, and tie more knots.
Round and round and round.