Climate change
Recently we have seen some terrible effects of global warming and its effect on the world's climate. Even in the UK, where half the country has had no rain for months, people have lost their homes in sudden fires.
Last night on the TV news, people in California lost everything they had when raging forest fires engulfed their homes.
Other countries have had destructive floods, following excessive rainfall.
World leaders know that the only way to halt global warming is by reducing the carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. But they continue to burn them, as they find it expedient, choosing to ignore the inevitable results. In Brazil, they make the situation worse, by clearing away the trees that absorb CO2.
The USA and China still mine millions of tons of coal every year, while Russia holds Europe to ransom with natural gas and oil.
The UK has ordered a new nuclear power station to be built by EDF, a French company. It won't be ready for some time yet.
I have no answers, just sympathy for those worst affected.
Hey it's a real drag, man. I can't help but think the best response is to all go back to living a simple life, close to nature. Obviously that's no straight forward matter and it would happen over many generations. But the more we can embody that in our individual choices and be the example of living simply and humbly, hopefully that will promote that idea to others. Meanwhile: brace ourselves for a rough ride and do our best to be good to each other.
I'm on an island, not so small, someplace warm. And that, by itself, is no solution. 85-90 percent of our food is shipped in, via barge or air. People insistently build houses unsuited to the climate, and then air-condition them. Getting here takes a plane ride; even between the Hawaiian islands you have to fly; except within Maui county, there are no ferries. Passenger ferries don't pay; people want giant, fast, boats that will take them AND their cars. On the continent, most car miles are racked up on short trips, despite the romantic advertised images of the long getaway trip. So even though there's no place to drive to here, people drive just as much as in California, and Honolulu has traffic jams; even Kailua on our island suffered so badly from traffic that they've had to four-lane the main road through town.
It was probably more energy-efficient to live in San Francisco - genuinely walkable, with good public transit, to the point where many sensible people don't own cars, moderate climate.
A very big driver of our consumption is small household sizes. It used to be usual that four, six, eight people would share a car, a furnace, a bathroom. Now it averages three people per household, with two or three cars.
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