Gardenworld The Most Promising Path
Author: Douglass Carmichael Issue: 2023-11-15
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Gardenworld: The Most Promising Path
by Douglass Carmichael
We have had many wide ranging climate action discussions, but what they add up to is fear that there is no proposal that deals with the logistics of actual co2 emissions reduction. This emission level is larger than in the months after Paris but right down to today co2 emissions are still rising. The conclusion has to be that we are in dire circumstances.
We have had to deal with fake plans such as switching to “clean energy” “or net-zero” sources such as natural gas, methane, and biomass (of course burning these also creates co2). The avoidance of simple logic and conclusions by so many worldwide has been discouraging. A transition in basic economics is replaced by “climate justice”. This hides the reality that the financial sector should, the official dialog should, be incentivized to raise investment by raising the incomes of the poor rather than cutting the incomes of the rich.
The background is that humanity lived on the surface of the earth sustainably until the discovery of fossil remains led to new opportunities for growth, giving us the hockey-stick result of allowing perhaps five times as many people living on the planet as is sustainable. Given the breakdown of that system we may have to return to the one-fifth of current population and economic activity.
Most discussions are still about what is wrong, and to the extent discussions move beyond that, they are about how to engage financing for change projects. While there is widespread awareness that the “system”is broken, there is no discussion at scale and depth past “we must”. The hope is to replace the current (energy) system with a new energy system that allows all the energy customers to remain connected and avoid any change.
The current reality is more storms, more drought, more crop reductions. Melting ice, rising prices across the spectrum, larger migrations, failing health systems. It is obvious that commodity prices will rise, energy prices driving these, and materials prices will make the manufacturing of alternative technologies more expensive. We are already seeing business that survived on 1 or 2% money closing down major projects (offshore wind projects on the US East Coast for example).
In short, we have lived with cheap energy and built recklessly. That period is over. We need to give up assuming the task is to avoid change with fingers in the dike.
The most promising path is Gardenworld, blending the growth of food and the growth of humans in the same project; blending food and shelter in projects on land that remains viable.
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- Douglass Carmichael (author)
- 2023 (year)
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