This analogy does not fit climate change and geoengineering completely (Ex. It does not fully consider the intergenerational dilemma by having only one human body), but I am interested in its implications. Political inertia is similar to the resistance one has to changing their diet because both are a result of conflicting values. While the body desires fats, salts, and sugars in large quantities, the mind can also realize the negative effects of such high consumption. Similarly, “we” can see the theoretical implications of our consumption of fossil fuels and the resultant emissions, but that comes into conflict with our “high-consumption” way-of-life. We can rely on medicine or geoengineering to bail us out of the “bad diet” but is that sustainable? However we could take the rout e of geoengineering being a bridge between our bad life-style and our “good” life-style afterwards. After a quick search on Google, I found this quote from someone who has worked with people on changing their diets, “In 20 years of working with patients, I've found that people will commit to change only when their motivation outweighs the challenges,” (oprah.com). It seems that there is a consensus that mitigation is the best solution but a lack of sufficient reasons to make it a reality.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Geoengineering = Open-Heart Surgery?
I would like to investigate the similarity between the solutions to climate change, and heart disease. Consider our general environment as a human heart, and humanity as the mind. The heart’s health is slowly deteriorating because of high fat, salt, and sugar consumption similar to the effect of our consumption of fossil fuels. The mind knows that high-consumptions of such foods are detrimental to the heart’s health, but the combined craving of the body and mind makes the change difficult partly because the negative effects are in the future. Most likely, without a strong enough scare, the mind will continue the unhealthy diet until a catastrophe occurs, in this case a heart-attack. Presumably, the human being will have some kind of medical procedure in order to survive. After that, the mind may be sufficiently influenced to change the diet or possibly depend completely on medical intervention.
This analogy does not fit climate change and geoengineering completely (Ex. It does not fully consider the intergenerational dilemma by having only one human body), but I am interested in its implications. Political inertia is similar to the resistance one has to changing their diet because both are a result of conflicting values. While the body desires fats, salts, and sugars in large quantities, the mind can also realize the negative effects of such high consumption. Similarly, “we” can see the theoretical implications of our consumption of fossil fuels and the resultant emissions, but that comes into conflict with our “high-consumption” way-of-life. We can rely on medicine or geoengineering to bail us out of the “bad diet” but is that sustainable? However we could take the rout e of geoengineering being a bridge between our bad life-style and our “good” life-style afterwards. After a quick search on Google, I found this quote from someone who has worked with people on changing their diets, “In 20 years of working with patients, I've found that people will commit to change only when their motivation outweighs the challenges,” (oprah.com). It seems that there is a consensus that mitigation is the best solution but a lack of sufficient reasons to make it a reality.
This analogy does not fit climate change and geoengineering completely (Ex. It does not fully consider the intergenerational dilemma by having only one human body), but I am interested in its implications. Political inertia is similar to the resistance one has to changing their diet because both are a result of conflicting values. While the body desires fats, salts, and sugars in large quantities, the mind can also realize the negative effects of such high consumption. Similarly, “we” can see the theoretical implications of our consumption of fossil fuels and the resultant emissions, but that comes into conflict with our “high-consumption” way-of-life. We can rely on medicine or geoengineering to bail us out of the “bad diet” but is that sustainable? However we could take the rout e of geoengineering being a bridge between our bad life-style and our “good” life-style afterwards. After a quick search on Google, I found this quote from someone who has worked with people on changing their diets, “In 20 years of working with patients, I've found that people will commit to change only when their motivation outweighs the challenges,” (oprah.com). It seems that there is a consensus that mitigation is the best solution but a lack of sufficient reasons to make it a reality.
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