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Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Land Shark who wrote (15580)	3/5/2012 10:35:55 PM
From: average joe	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 37451

Climate Change: Facing-Off On The Future I was sitting two rows back behind Al Gore at the TED conference this week as the debate over Climate Change took center stage. I say debate – even though pretty much everyone who knows anything about science agrees there isn’t much to debate. As both a former Vice-President, and now the most powerful voice on the climate crisis, Gore deserves the credit for bringing the issue out of the labs and to center stage. His film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ brought the issue into stark focus and began the conversation in ernest. But it also created a problem. A problem that was evident on the TED stage this week. Paul Gilding, an author and activist, began the conversation with his profoundly disturbing talk “The Earth is full.” Gilding argued that our focus on growth at any cost has put the planet in peril. He said technology drives efficiency and economic growth – and powers breakneck consumption that the planet cannot endure. He made a case for how our lust for the latest gadgets is distracting people from acting to stop global disasters like climate change. “The world is full. It is full of us. It is full of our stuff, full of our waste, and full of our demands,” Gilding said. “We have created too much stuff. This is not a philosophical statement, this is just science. Our approach is simply unsustainable.” Mr. Gilding is the former director of Greenpeace International. “Thanks to those pesky laws of physics, it will stop. The system will break.” It was a sobering talk in a room full of techno-optomists. One that I could only imagine Gore strongly agreed with in the hall with 1,500 leading thinkers and doers. “The Earth doesn’t care what we need,” said Gilding. “Mother Nature doesn’t negotiate; she just sets rules and administers consequences.” Here’s the TED talk “Paul Gilding: The Earth is full” [iframe style="POSITION: relative" class=dimensions_initialized height=643 src="http://steverosenbaum.magnify.net/video/Paul-Gilding-The-Earth-is-full/player?layout=&read_more=1" frameBorder=0 width=620 scrolling=no data-orig-width="420" data-orig-height="436"][/iframe] Gilding’s talk was emotional – and powerful. “We’ve had 50 years of warnings and pretty much done nothing to change course,” as his eyes welled with tears. Many in the audience stood to applaud, Gore among them. Then, to provide a vision to counter Gilding’s doomsday vision – Peter Diamandis gave a TED talk with a decidedly techno-optomist point of view. “I’m not saying that we don’t have our share of problems – climate change, species extinction, resource shortage – but ultimately we have the ability to see problems way in advance and knock them down,” said Diamandis. Diamandis heads Singularity University, and is the head of the nonprofit X Prize Foundation. “Scarcity is contextual and technology is a liberating force,” he said. For Diamandis, the issue comes down to one word – abundance. His recently published the book, “Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think,” argues that we’ve got the brainpower to engineer ourselves out of world threatening issues like food shortages, water purity, and global warming. Here’s the TED talk “Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future.” [iframe style="POSITION: relative" class=dimensions_initialized height=643 src="http://steverosenbaum.magnify.net/video/Peter-Diamandis-Abundance-is-ou/player?layout=&read_more=1" frameBorder=0 width=620 scrolling=no data-orig-width="420" data-orig-height="436"][/iframe] After the two presentations, TED Curator Chris Anderson asked to audience to vote on which view was more compelling. Diamandis’ optimistic view won 55% of the vote, while Gilding got just 45% of the vote. Clearly the result must have been disappointing for Gore – who’s been working tirelessly to make Climate Change issue #1 among the worlds’ thinkers, and more broadly anyone concerned about the future of the planet. So, what’s happening here? Well, there’s a school of thought that says Gore’s leadership on the issue has been a mixed blessing. Given Gore’s liberal democratic pedigree, his leadership has, by its nature, been political. There may be some truth to this, but it probably doesn’t matter. It’s hard to get any constituency to take a long term view on any issue, given the short term needs and political expediency of those needs. Big systemic change in how we build cars, consume energy, or grow our food isn’t going to come without political leadership and a sustainable call for change. So even as the evidence grows, and mid-winter days become balmy and warm – Gore’s clarion call seems to fade into the background. Diane Sawyer, reporting on ABC World News, now proclaims the nightly weather disasters she reports as ‘wacky’ or ‘unusual’ or ‘bizarre’, as if the parade of hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, and avalanches are all unrelated instances of mother natures mercurial mood. This could be no farther from the truth. To wrap up the TED conversation, Chris Anderson brought both Diamandis and Gilding on stage. Diamandis express his confidence we’d sort things out. But Gilding ended with the ominous concern that it all comes down to timing - and we’d better hope all this innovation shows up in time. Indeed. forbes.com