by Edwin Rydberg

Created on: March 03, 2010   Last Updated: March 10, 2010

Human-moderated climate change is true, but what's the way forward?

It's hard to imagine that anyone doubts human-moderated climate change is a reality.  Despite attacks by 'skeptics' (in quotations because a skeptic is usually considered to be someone who looks at the data objectively, but in the case of climate change that doesn't seem to be true) and use / abuse of recent media stories, the data is sound: since the beginning of the industrial age, we have been steadily warming the planet.  A documentary I recently saw even suggested our ancestors were responsible for preventing an ice age 7000 years ago through the rise in agriculture (which put greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and raised the temperature just enough to make the world comfortable for us). 

It seems, to me, that the real question is not whether we caused it, but what, if anything, should we do about it.

There is no question in my mind that the strategy of making people eco-conscious, and aspiring to 'environmentally friendly' behaviour, is failing and will continue to fail. It's an idea that is inherently flawed. Not only will the majority of the West not change (still drive your car to work? 'oh, but I have to...'), but it's hardly reasonable to thrust such a burden on developing countries or to expect that suddenly the East will cease their developmental surge and slow their progress just to fix a problem created by the West (even if it affects everyone). Not only is it just not human nature, but it's hypocritical in the extreme.

If you still believe behavioural change can solve this, keep your eyes wide open and look carefully for excessive waste. You'll find it absolutely everywhere: stores leaving their doors open, the heat blasting in the middle of the coldest winter in several decades; lights left on in buildings all night, an increase in car travel, even during local 'no car' days, even the local gym that uses electronic machines for circuit training while running four televisions each tuned to a different station in the same room (incidentally, why can't they harness some human energy to power some of the facility?).

In short, there is absolutely no realistic way that humanity will significantly reduce it's energy consumption through behavioural modification, let alone in time to make any difference to a climate change that's already well in progress. Had we started making changes from the time of the Rio conference in '92 we might have had a chance to affect the

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