Climate Change and Emission Trading Schemes

Climate Change and Emissions Trading Schemes

This is another attempt (actually it was my first) to defuse the “bomb” of a contentious issue in our society, by viewing it from a wider perspective. It is hard to write a simple outline of the matter as it touches on so many aspects of human society.

Many refuse to accept that human civilisation is capable of causing worldwide climate change. It is accepted that forces within and without the planet can make huge changes, but usually over a very long time scale. However, human activity on earth has changed much of the surface of the earth over the millennia, yet never so much and so rapidly as in the last 200 years, with the exponential growth of science and technology over the decades of this period, not to mention the vast growth of human population.

 Photo from Biopact

 As for the more topical and even more controversial Emission Trading Schemes, which many countries are considering, whether they turn out to be good constructs, or detrimental to our community, and our environment, is yet to be seen, but we are very likely to be feeling their effects soon.  Perhaps the usefulness of these schemes will be determined by whether people engage in them to genuinely enhance the environment, or in order to make undue profit. Any potentially useful construct can be undermined by false motivation, as was proved in the US where so many people’s savings were “made off” with recently.

"We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions."

                                                            (Shoghi Effendi)

Whether we believe the world needs to cut down on its carbon emissions or not, it can be seen that trading of ephemeral products for the sake of ever-increasing trade and consumption is not possible in a finite world. This trade, which has some positive aspects in uniting countries around the world, has brought us to the limits of our ability to exploit fossil fuel at this time, and also now of fresh water.

We may be awaiting our scientists to make new discoveries to rectify our problems. There is no doubt that there are unthought of resources within this earth, within creation itself. But every new scientific discovery brings its own problems, and every discovery can be used for good or for ill in the world. So once again we come to the prime importance of motivation, and the negative results of greed.

Most evident in the world is the effect of greed on distribution of the earth’s resources to the populations of the earth. Most of the resources, the energy, the world’s wealth, is in the hands of a few. By some ways of measuring, we of the western world could be considered to be that few, even if we do not consider ourselves wealthy, compared to the grinding poverty experienced by the majority of people on this earth. And yet, when we start to feel ourselves constrained, having to cut back slightly in our lifestyle, how much we protest!

And why should we care about all these people? If we understand that they are no different to us, except by accident of birth, and if for no other reason than:

“The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established”.

            (Baha'u'llah)