Great to appear in a lineup of Letters to the Editor, in The Guardian with Rupert Read, Durwood Zaelke & Maxime Beaugrand (ours is the third one down).
"Readers reflect on the failures of the Dubai climate summit and suggest what needs to be done to avert a climate catastrophe."
Here is the text of our Letter:
"Oliver Milman stresses the dangers of relying on “magical” technologies (‘Magical’ tech innovations a distraction from real solutions, climate experts warn, 10 December). But since humankind’s access to cheap, abundant energy has allowed us to threaten many planetary boundaries, simply substituting one form of energy for another won’t fix our predicament.
The root cause of climate change lies in ecological overshoot and the behaviours and systems that enable it. We must fix these. We now burn more fossil fuels than ever. And many interventions are resource-intensive, slow and founded in a flawed business-as-usual mindset.
The marketing, media and entertainment industries have manipulated human behaviours towards the wasteful hyperconsumption of natural resources. But as time is so tight, we propose the same methods be employed to reverse our acquisitiveness, to operate within the Earth’s limits and avoid ecological collapse.
Economic and political power structures and vested interests form the interlocking layers of our crises. One of our grand challenges is to recast such forces to reverse the damage done. We call for a concerted effort to identify ways to best attain a rapid global embrace of new norms for consumption, reproduction and waste."
Prof Christopher J Rhodes
Fresh-lands Environmental Actions, Reading, Berkshire
Prof Phoebe Barnard
Mount Vernon, Washington, US
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