“The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.” It is therefore simply immoral to act in such a way as to generate changes in the climate that affect others — especially those who because of poverty cannot adjust or adapt.
- “access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights” (p. 23)
- .. “The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm” (p. 79)
.. This situation has led to a constant schizophrenia, wherein a technocracy which sees no intrinsic value in lesser beings coexists with the other extreme, which sees no special value in human beings. But one cannot prescind from humanity. There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself.
.. Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties? “If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of the new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away”. (pp. 89-90, quoting Benedict XVI)
The End of California?
It takes 106 gallons of water to produce an ounce of beef — which is more than the average San Francisco Bay Area resident uses in a day.
.. San Francisco, praised for its penurious water ways, gets its life-supporting liquid from the Hetch Hetchy dam, in Yosemite. Many people, dating from the sainted John Muir, believe that flooding that mountain valley was one of the bigger crimes against nature in California history.
.. The urban “almond shaming” chorus is quick to note that the crop uses enough water to support 75 percent of the state’s population. In other words, there would be no water shortage in San Diego or Los Angeles if nut growers shut off the pumps.
Silicon Valley’s Water Conservation Conundrum
The Valley’s investors learned a hard lesson — that energy technologies often required larger investments and had longer development cycles than they would have liked. And when the market for solar panels was flooded by low-cost Chinese competitors, the “change the world” mantra of the venture capital community moved on to focus on social networking, software and other Internet investments.
The water crisis simply may be a poor match for the Valley’s skill set.
.. The solutions may have more to do with changing policy than technology breakthroughs at this stage.
“Water is not a rational market today,” said Brook Porter, a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers Green Growth Fund. The problems, he said, include inefficient or nonexistent pricing mechanisms, and regulatory bodies that may be resistant to change.
.. He argues that the Valley has excelled in creating new markets rather than satisfying crying needs in existing ones.
A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development
To mitigate climate change, spare nature and address global poverty requires nothing less, they argue, than “intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world.”
As Mr. Shellenberger put it, the world would have a better shot at saving nature “by decoupling from nature rather than coupling with it.”
.. Big Agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers and modern production techniques, could feed many more people using much less land and water.