Month 11, Day 29: Vaporware

The Irish Times discusses the unlikeliness of anything happening at Cancun. While the notion of economic and climatic catastrophe as two sides of the same coin is not new (either to me or to this letter-writing project), it’s still very tricky to shoehorn them both in to a single short piece.

It is a measure of humans’ limitations as a species that the terrifying implications of climate change are barely registering on our societal alarm systems. While Frank MacDonald notes that people are preoccupied “more pressing issues” — presumably the unemployment and economic turmoil to be seen everywhere in the world, it is incorrect to assume our planetary economic woes are unrelated to climate problems. The economics of nation-states and global commerce rest on two demonstrably false assumptions: never-ending supplies of cheap energy, and the feasibility and desirability of continuous growth. Even were it actually unlimited, fossil fuel’s hardly cheap once we include ancillary expenses (cleanup, environmental destruction, geopolitical brinkmanship), and an ever-expanding economy is definitionally impossible on a finite planet. The price we can expect to pay for having a civilization built upon illusions will be disastrous economic upheavals in the short run and catastrophic climate change in the long.

Warren Senders