SCAN! stands for Seniors for Climate Action Now!. Effective action taken now requires both clear goals and planning for the future. The world is telling us that we must change how we live. We should talk about what kind of approaches would be sustainable.
One of our members has an interesting model. We thought a post he wrote would stimulate thought and discussions about sustainability and what it really means.
Sustainable Capitalism
All “climateers” know that something is seriously wrong here. Bolstered by ideas of greatness and inevitability, we of the self-appointed master species have muscled our way into the world and taken advantage of nature’s bounty with little regard for the consequences. We treat the atmosphere like a cesspool and the cliff and creek outback like a garbage dump. We flood, cut, mine, and cover enormous areas with concrete, asphalt, and toxic tailings. Much of the rest of the land we cultivate with ecosystem-destroying monocultures, or fill with tasty, four-legged methane factories. In service to high technology, we chase rare earths as if the name did not itself contain a warning.
When was the last time you saw a product labelled with the phrase “12% added for clean-up and recycling”? When was the last time you heard of the creators of a toxin-leaking pond come out of retirement to take responsibility? When was the last time the fishing fleet voluntarily stopped harvesting before the stock disappeared? And how many methane-leaking abandoned well heads are there in Western Canada again? No, we take, and we run, believing that the world is an infinite resource. These are the hallmarks of a species out of control, one whose presumptive actions are impelling it – and all our co-habitants on this lonely spaceship – toward disaster.
The earth’s rocks contain a morality tale about all of this. The story is about the epitome of success and excess. It comes in a layer a few billion years old, one found all around the world, including all over the Canadian Shield. Below the layer (meaning before in time), it was a world in which the only life forms (meaning bacteria) were anaerobic (meaning they harvested compounds other than oxygen). It was a world of dull coloured rocks, greys and blacks.
However, above the layer there is a distinct and sudden change in colour to royal purples and rust reds, with occasional bursts of brilliant oranges, yellows, greens, and azure blues that, to a prospector, are often the welcome signs of rich mineral deposits.
How so? What happened?
Anaerobic bacteria consume compounds like methane (in our dumps, for example) and excrete oxygen. Oxygen is their waste product, and, not to put too fine a point on it, they reproduced so prolifically they poisoned their environment with their excrement. They drowned in their own filth.
We would never complain about this event, of course, as the arrival of this new oxygenated world is the single most significant development in life on this planet. It gave rise to a vast array of forms of which we are just one. Your blood cells are red because of it. You are because of it. Every Vermeer and Picasso exists because of it. We love this world of oxides.
The irony! By poisoning its world, a mindless bacterium cleared the way for humans, the most intelligent of beings on this planet so far, who are now mindlessly following suit.
Why are we doing it? And what can we do about it? Those are the questions that plague climateers.
The why is not a great mystery. We are creatures tuned to the immediate. All animals are. To survive, one does not have to run fast, one has to be quicker to process and react. Those that weren’t are no longer and have left no offspring. Darwin and Descartes should have gotten together to say, “I react, therefore I am.”
Immediacy is the most dominant and controlling feature of our minds. Who is not amazed at how fast their hand moves to save their favourite coffee mug? Whose day is not organised into degrees of immediacy? Whose life, as well? It is how we got here to this pinnacle, and why we will persist in some form or other no matter what happens.
So, the problem with climate change is not its complexity, or its sweep, and it not even that it will be highly disruptive and destructive. The problem is that climate change does not feel immediate in the daily lives of the insulated well off and powerful. Indeed, it may not even affect you noticeably. At least not in the next few years.
What is immediate is one’s family’s comfort and security. Paycheques, bonuses, promotions, and profit are immediate. Planting a tree or remembering to turn off the coloured holiday lights in January to cut emissions likely will not even make the bottom of the list.
In other words, the problem is that objective measure of our comfort and security, namely money. The problem is money! (Surprise, surprise.) Money drives the polluters; money impedes the climateers.
What do we, the vast Without-Much class, do about it?
History informs us that some form of capitalism is the only workable system in the long run. Authoritarianism, fascism, and communism have not been sustainable. But capitalism in its current form has resulted in wildly disproportionate concentrations of money. The very rich and their sycophants live in gilded mansions while the rest of us must support their pet projects and clean up. At its worst, that leads to revolutions. Ask the French.
We could get around the problem with rampant philanthropism, but that is a matter of whim, and, for many, only comes after expensive cars and the 30-meter yacht in Monaco, if at all.
I propose to do something different: I think of it as one form of sustainable capitalism. This is an arrangement whereby, within companies benefitting from harvesting the earth’s bounty, the needs of the company and its staff are well met, but the rest, meaning the profits, get funnelled back to support the source of the company’s wealth, namely the earth, its environments, and the health of all of its other beings from bees to blue whales.
I am the inventor of a highly promising solar technology which looks to have the potential to become the main source of grid power in sunny areas, no matter what time of day or year it is, owing to its green, cheap, and efficient storage. While I develop the business, my wife and I plan to create a foundation exclusively focussed on studying and mitigating ecosystem damage. It will receive most of the company’s profits through me, the majority owner, and, on my death, it will receive almost all my shares.
With good fortune and good planning, the result will be a foundation governed by a board which must balance the needs of an ecologically troubled world with the stability and growth of its own renewable business, the steady source of most of its funds. What comes from the earth gets returned to it. Sustainability and balance.
Our company and our technology are both early in their development. I am planning for success. Someone must try recycling renewable profits, and I am in a unique position to do it. If we succeed, it is my deep wish that others will be inspired to follow suit. There is hope in that.
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Robert M. de Chazal, inventor and CEO of SunDraco Power Inc. (Sundraco.com), is a member of SCAN!.