IT IS TIME TO ACT

article from O2q paper Nov 2007, with help from The Nation magazine...
CAN we buy our way out of our growing climate crisis? Sure we can. Just ask the corporations and the politicians they own. All we have to do is buy into, or buy up, all the wonderful technological quick fixes they promise to provide and all our climate crisis problems will be solved. Well, not quite.
Quick fixes such as "clean coal," and biofuels are not so quick and just as likely to land us in a whole new set of fixes.
"Clean coal" depends on technologies that optimists say are two decades away, if ever. In the meantime, coal mining ravages the earth. In Appalachia, more than 500 mountaintops have been blown off to uncover the coal inside, with the toxic waste dumped into local rivers.
Proposed government subsidies to support biofuel production in the USA are nearly equal to those funding the Iraq war. Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, Cargill and other mega agri-corporations are converting US farms to corn for ethanol, not food. Their new agrofuel plantations in poor and indigenous areas of South America, Asia and Africa are displacing thousands of farmers.
It takes 450 pounds of corn to make enough ethanol to fill one SUV tank with gas. To try to use corn ethanol to replace even 10 percent of the fossil fuels used globally would require finding new or converting agricultural lands equal to about half the area of the United States.
Feed cars, not people-is destined to be the first rallying cries of the corporate solution to our climate crisis.
Other corporations are getting on the consumerism bandwagon. The idea is, you buy jeans or dozens of other things, and some of your money goes to Environmental Defense and other do-gooders, who plant enough trees to offset the greenhouse gases created in making the products. It's carbon trading through shopping.
Eco-conscious families are turning up with two, three, many Priuses, so every member of the family can help save the planet.
Sorry, but shopping even "smart" shopping, is not our way out of the crisis. Al that stuff is made of something scarce that came from the Earth, and it took scarce energy to put it together.
Overconsumption, corporatism, advertising, the drive for growth and profit-those are the roots of this crisis. Real solutions begin with the recognition that the Earth has limits that are now in plain sight. Ultimately all solutions will involve "powering down," using less energy, fewer materials-less consumerism.
"Less and local" should be the standard, as well as deeply rethinking whether we can afford a system based on growth and wealth accumulation rather than sustainability, sufficiency and equity.