What does inaction on Climate Change look like?

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Costs of inaction towards climate change are large, unpredictable, and will be inevitably catastrophic. Last week my focused was on sustainable development; a discussion on what I thought sustainable development really meant. Essentially I concluded that sustainable development was development with environmental conscience. Producing a product, large or small scale, that had the positive intention of reducing its footprint on the environment through creation. The creation of a product of this sort would be considered to be negative feedback loop. Now, don’t get too caught on the word negative. In this case, negative is a good thing. A negative positive feedback loop mimics systems in our natural world. Change in one part of the system effects change in another, however creating a cyclical effect. Energy is recycled within the system. An example of this is the predatory food chain, all energy is recycled through the food chain, with no energy being lost or gained, just cycled around again. The reciprocal of this is the system of a positive feedback loop. A positive feedback loop mimics much of the systems in our industrial world.  The industrial world creates products we can’t buy fast enough. My favourite example of this is computers, and cell phones. These are products the population can’t get enough of, and companies capitalize on this by offering new models on a bi yearly basis. The consumer has barely taken the plastic off their new computer before they are out buying the latest model. As consumer we don’t buy things to last anymore, companies realize this and, in return, don’t produce things that last. What would be the point? The point is computer parts don’t biodegrade. We can’t ship them off to a landfill and wait for five years for them to turn into nutritious top soil. What do we do? We ship them off t a far way land where we don’t ever have to look at them again. But at what cost is this? Who deals with our computer carcasses? China.

This is the price China has to pay for our positive feedback loops. This is Guiya, China. North America exports its e-waste (term coined for technological waste), sometimes illegally, to China as an easy, cost effect method of disposing of its own dirty habit. Although China is capitalizing on the import of e-waste by paying workers a low income to pick through the waste for high priced components, it is a serious issue for individuals living here. It is estimated that 72% of e-waste ends up here. That’s approximately 5 billion metric tons of metal and plastic waste. (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSPEK14823020070611?pageNumber=1). Although thousands of native individuals are employed by e-waste recovering companies, individuals receive no rights and a small wage. Their health, which is in jeopardy due to the mixture of toxic chemicals present, is of no concern to their employer. This is not a sustainable business for China, nor is it sustainable practice for North America. This is a positive feedback loop, and this is just the beginning of what inaction on climate change through sustainable development looks like.

However this is just a small piece of the puzzle. This example of inaction is only a small contributing factor to the much larger picture. What does inaction on the part of climate change look like? In the long run, in my mind, it looks something much like a scene from the movie “The Book of Eli”. It looks much like a drought stricken deserted shell of what civilization once looked like.

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You could argue that is image is pushing it a bit far? You could also argue that it is not. Inaction of climate change will slowly start to creep up on us. This scene doesn’t represent what will happen in the next 20 or even 50 years, but, if we do absolutely nothing, I feel, this is what our world will end up. Inaction will begin slowly, and increasingly escalate if we don’t fight back.

Let’s jump back, far behind this scene of this desolate world. What does inaction on climate change look like tomorrow? It looks like a large scale storm that blows the roof off of our shed. It looks like 20 cm of snow in Victoria. It looks like islands in far away countries that we’ve never heard of, or will ever visit, slowly slip beneath the rising sea. It looks like severe drought in Europe on the front page our daily newspaper. It looks like flooding in northern Australia. Inaction on climate change looks like today, tomorrow, and next week if we don’t start fighting back.