An amusing interview with a climate activist and alternative energy businessman who requested anonymity.

A Science Daily article on March 19, 2012 reported a new study published in the journal Geology that depressed everybody who was paying attention. Get ready for this: even if global warming is limited to 2 degrees C, future generations will have to deal with sea levels of a possible 70 foot rise.

But there's a silver lining! Our long-time climate activist and alternative energy businessman, a somewhat private corespondent of Culture Change, sees the source of our climate-change problems ultimately being washed away. Since the vast majority of the population of humans and their civilization is at no higher than 70 feet elevation, this means the machinery of destruction known as the industrial global economy will be wiped out. People will not have to be wiped out, but their high-energy, maximum waste economy will drown.

Where are we headed? This is the big question today. So if there is something good to come about as we muddle through the ecocidal sham of the political process, under the thumb of the 1% and the culture of consuming, let us celebrate. Our anonymous correspondent is identified below as AC.

AC: This is not some dumb-head notion of car-crashes reducing the population size, for example. This is serious. But you can almost sit back and not worry, because problems may solve themselves more than we dare to hope.

As insurance claim-related damage by 2050 will be greater globally from storm damage, caused by man-made climate change, than the world's entire GDP, it's clear that today's system is entirely unsustainable. This is "The Last Ride."

Culture Change: Do you mean like in the Highway to Hell, the AC-DC song, where you may as well get your jollies now, because it's the last time you can spewing that cheap energy out into our living atmosphere?

AC: Quite right. Let's get to the good news. When sea level rise does away with the cars and other machines, including factories and cities, people will literally rise to the occasion and go back to farming and gardening. It's doubtful that the upper elevation urban areas will be able to sustain anything like today's level of world trade and resource exploitation, causing the house-of-cards economy to collapse.

by Andy Singer, andysinger.com

Back to the good news: People like to do things like garden and farm, although some sharp city characters think they're tough stuff when they floor their petroleum death-mobiles on wheels, or when plastic chicks drive off to shop for new vanity items for their endless materialism.

CC: I thought we were going to stick to the good news. What's the matter with you?

AC: You can't have the good without the bad.

CC: And it's people like you who are the reason why.

AC: I don't know if I want to go on with this interview. I thought this was a serious energy publication, the one credited in the new documentary on PostCarbon.org, There's No Tomorrow.

CC: Well, having you here is worth blowing our credibility. As you say, it's the skills we will have to restore, and as I say, community's everything, so who needs fancy degrees to know which way the wind is blowing? Who needs a new energy infrastructure? We can use so little energy, and use natural materials and foods from our local ecosystems, we don't have to redo the grid or try to run today's system anymore.

AC: Hey, I'm supposed to be providing the vision here. Think about what will happen with property ownership as an elitist, oppressive system for cruel rule bites the dust. Imagine there's no people. Isn't that how the John Lennon song goes? Just kidding. Imagine equality and a truce between the sexes. Picture the worship of Mother Earth instead of some sky god who is supposed to punish but rather rewards the rich even though He's promised not to.

CC: Let's get one of our cartoonists to come up with something for this article. I see you're going off to bed, so look at this body of thought in the morning. Nice to have that used espresso machine, eh? Too bad the coffee arrives by bunker fuel pollution ship instead of sail boat.

AC: Wait, your readers might want to be left with a heartening idea. The surviving culture has to make due, and will need the shrunken, challenged population to proceed with rediscovered harmony and cooperation. They'll have to turn their backs on the failed system and get with the program: Mother Nature. Permaculture skills, handcrafts, folk medicine revived to replace the petrochemical pharmaceutical treatment of civilization's diseases...

CC: But we want our tropical luxuries, coffee, chocolate, cigars -- pagan sex rites and acorn feasts aren't everything, you know.

AC: Have no fear, sail transport will be here. New harbors with the higher coastline will be discovered. Surpluses from one place may be essential necessities or even staples elsewhere, traded in low volume. The revolution will not be televised or Facebooked. With the old malls underwater, barter fairs and mating dances will be the drudgery and savagery replacing today's glorious consumer culture.

CC: But will people remain free-range livestock for the elite, if they have to farm? There's a new attempt by the Feds to take over the food supply -- last week saw Obama's latest example of yes-we-can [National Defense Resources Preparedness]. Who is the we? It can't be the terrorists we're warned against here:

AC: Very funny. I admit food can be funny. But good ol' food-fights are a thing of the past, anybody notice? Too expensive to waste. Now cut the schidt; why not fight sea level rise now? You stopped publishing the Auto-Free Times, when you knew very well that going car free was and remains the fastest way to get to the 80% CO2 reductions called for in 1992 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change!

CC: What a cheap shot! The Auto-Free Times is not defunct, as claimed by a former employee editorializing at CarBusters magazine, but rather is under the new name of Culture Change! We gradually evolved from fighting cars and roads to addressing the underlying culture. We had to stop the print version because of 9-11's stock market effect that screwed our funding! We could have both titles in print if we had the money in the door regularly. Now THAT would be real sustainability. Well, thanks for the interview, even though you decided to not let us use your name. To quote one of our bike stickers of the 1990s, "Thank you for not driving"!

* * * * *

Referenced reading:

Global Sea Level Likely to Rise as Much as 70 Feet for Future Generations
Science Daily (Mar. 19, 2012) — Even if humankind manages to limit global warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends, future generations will have to deal with sea levels 12 to 22 meters (40 to 70 feet) higher than at present, according to research published in the journal Geology...
[also on the webpage are updates from Reuters with links, such as "Electric car revolution faces increasing headwinds" that quotes the probably suspect Lundberg Survey new study against flex-fuel cars's economics.] - Lundberg Survey's latest favor to Big Oil. The former "bible of the oil industry" became, after Jan Lundberg went over to the environmentalist camp, a much smaller survey that sold out entirely as a platform for climate-change denial, promotion of more petroleum consumption, and defender of Big Oil against "burdensome environmental regulations." What we worry?:

Earth Sends Climate Warning by Busting World Heat Records
"Accelerated climate change, driven by human activity, has led to soaring temperatures around the world and the decade between 2001 and 2010 was the warmest ever recorded in all continents of the globe, according to a new report released by the World Meteorological Organization."

Post Carbon Institute's and Incubate Pictures' new animated documentary There's No Tomorrow - the most concise set of facts on peak oil and why the era of economic growth is ending. Culture Change and its founder Jan Lundberg were credited, among other sources, in the video for "Advice" and "Thanks for invaluable work."

peak oil/end of growth documentary: There's No Tomorrow

Take the Take the Pledge for Climate Protection for a low-tech, faster-than-the-technofix lifestyle change approach that also prepares for petrocollapse!

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