One of my readers, Bryce Beattie of Real Self-Reliance, has written a thoughtful response to my criticism of legislators opposing the Waxman-Markey bill. This bill is known as the carbon cap and trade bill; it narrowly passed the House last week by getting some bipartisan support, and will be facing much opposition in the Senate.
Bryce believes that while we do need to live more sustainably (the central premise of the diamond-cut life), Waxman-Markey is not really about climate change, but is about government control, and therefore is wrong.
I went to visit his blog on self-reliance, which is a good one, chock-full of practical advice on wide-ranging topics like spending less than you earn, emergency preparedness, dealing with swine flu, and even the dangers of an entertainment-centered lifestyle. I’m in full agreement with Bryce’s ethic of self-help, personal discipline and taking 100% responsibility for one’s life.
Here is where I challenge the self-reliant, anti-government perspective, though: how exactly does the world reduce its carbon footprint enough to avert catastrophe without government involvement and ‘control’?
Pulitzer prize-winner Jared Diamond describes in his book Collapse how many societies have extinguished themselves in the past by overusing their resources and degrading their environment. The Mayans and the Anasazi, Norse Greenland and Easter Island are a few examples among many. In contrast, a few societies disciplined their resource-use and thrived instead of collapsing. But how? The discipline that allowed survival instead of catastrophe happened from the bottom up (the general will and organization of the common people) in the small societies of highland New Guinea and Tikopia. In Japan of the Tokugawa era, it happened from the top down (government control).
I see no sign of a nationwide or worldwide groundswell from citizens to voluntarily reduce carbon emissions. (In this respect, Diamond-Cut Life is ahead of its time 
, though its emphasis on finding happiness is not). Rather, our emissions keep growing. We have a crying need for government control of the carbon emissions that cause climate change, similar to the way that we need police departments in cities to deter people from stealing and assaulting at will. The good of the whole is crucial, and individuals have always throughout history had to submit some (not all) of their desires to it.
Self-reliance of individuals, while important, can only take us so far. It can’t address the larger overarching issues that bind us into societies and civilizations. And our civilization will degrade and eventually collapse if we don’t sharply reduce carbon emissions and control climate change. I challenge those who fear the government controlling carbon emissions more than they fear the wholesale societal collapse that the Maya, Anasazi and Easter Island societies experienced.
I imagine that the people of those cultures objected, also, to the idea of consuming resources more slowly than they were doing. If they’d known where their lifestyles were leading them (chaos, starvation, bloodshed and cannabalism) they might have accepted some restraints on their consumption. We do know where our lifestyles are leading us, and we need to accept restraints on our consumption, i.e. production of carbon emissions.
Related Posts:
- House Votes on Carbon Cap & Trade Bill This Friday
- The Climate Doesn’t Play Politics
- Our Carbon Reduction Group
I do think people make real change, not governments. That said, government has the power to enable bad change or good change — or it can do nothing and completely stifle change altogether. Democracies work best — and why American citizens are so LUCKY — we can elect leaders that will ‘fight’ for our best interests — interests we think are important. Take countries where poor leadership keeps people in poverty, and the people have little say. How would things change if all those governments changed for the better? The poor only need a break to reverse the cycle of poverty. Similarly, Earth needs a break from all this unnecessary pollution. I’d say government is 10 percent of the change, and the people 90 percent.