While traveling this past week, I spent the interminable spaces that comprise the process of modern air travel, catching up on reading news. I find it difficult to have enough information about what is actually going on in the world to really make up my mind about much of anything. Socrates dictum "all that I know is that I know nothing" is more than just a cute thing to say for me.
The Economist and BBC News provide some of the best global news coverage on a variety of topics and issues. My anglophilic news propensities are fueled by the fact that these two stalwarts of a former Empire provide a broad array of information with depth and wit. I don't read these because they cater to my political proclivities, but because they are informative. Separate the wheat from the chaff and there is alot with which to make bread with.
Walking outside my apartment this morning, I caught the unmistakable scent of that grandfather of chemical pesticides 2-4-D. Pesticides have a definite place, but bathing our cities and farms in ubiqutious persistent applications shouldn't be one of them. The over application of chemicals aside, this ignited my mind with thoughts gleaned from my forays into the news of the past week.
It is hard to believe that it has been twenty years since the first climate summit in Rio de Janerio. That estimate could be raised to 40 years if the Stockholm Conference is counted. At the time, there was great optimism about turning the world in a new direction by collective action. Twenty years later, there are are sobering assessments of what is actually happening. This BBC article is sure to be one of many that looks at the information available. Reading this and other stories, fortified me with a degree of pessimism about the past and prospects for the future. Information is only useful if you believe that it is good information. Am I to believe the dire assessments or more sober optimism of other sources? Belief shouldn't play a role in whether or not anthropogenic climate change is taken as fact. Unfortunately, it does because there are so many versions of facts. Like trying to find a door in a house of mirrors, gleaning real knowledge from available facts can be intimidating.
The article above, and others like it coalesced in my mind with an Economist article that I read celebrating the "golden age of gas" that was heralded by the International Energy Agency a short time ago. The Economist, hardly alarmist about climate, takes a measured and pragmatic tone that emphasizes attainable goals. Living a a state where one of the primary drivers of the economy is the development of oil and gas, it is easy to believe in the more measured approach than a more alarmist one. Lemming like, I speculate how much money could be made in the oilfields if I was twenty years younger. Biological drives and economic ones sprout from the same sturdy root of existence.
To sum up what we know (or think we know) about climate change, we have to examine our own beliefs based on information and ask ourselves if they comprise knowledge. To paraphrase one of the paragons of wisdom: "whomever is without sin should cast the first stone". Do we believe our actions constitute a metaphorical "sin" or part of a solution to a better future? If we believe the former, we must cast the first stone at ourselves. The latter, at those who believe in the "sin" itself. How we answer this question could be the answer to either our sustainable future or ignominious downfall.
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