دانلود کتاب عدالت انرژی / کاهش و سازگاری با تغییرات آب و هوا

I write this on the Ides of March (March 15), 2020, as the novel coronavirus is sweeping the world. Many thousands have already died, in some countries hundreds in one day, and while the virus seems to have peaked and receded in Wuhan, China, and the rest of that nation, it is making swift inroads across its new epicenter, Europe, and in North America as well. It is only a matter of time before the entire globe is caught in this conflagration of disease. There has been nothing like it since the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, more than a century ago. Why start this way in a book about energy justice, climate, and sustainability? The reaction of people and their governments is deeply instructive. Where decisive action has been taken early on, where testing for the disease is readily available and practiced, where social distancing is the norm, and where people follow all precautions, then the spread of the virus is slowed, its curve “flattened,” and the number of deaths reduced. Where governments have hesitated at the beginning of the crisis—and almost every government has done so—where preparedness for an epidemic, despite warnings, has been delayed for decades, where citizens carelessly or stubbornly do not heed directives to stay home or to minimize gathering in groups, and where younger people fail to recognize how they themselves, mildly affected, can carry a mortal contagion to older citizens and to those with underlying medical conditions, there the ravages of Covid-19 are greatest, the health care system and hospitals overwhelmed. Doctors and nurses themselves succumb to the illness, many dying near their patients. In this crisis, barely a few months old, it has been hard enough to get many people, including those in authority, to think with informed imagination into the future eVen a month or two, let alone a year or more. Something in the human psyche resists changing habits, thinking of a rainy day, or eVen recognizing one when it comes. It is a grim reminder of what the failure to accelerate a great energy transition, as well as climate mitigation and adaptation, will eVentually cause. The harmful effects of unsustainable practices, of the continued burning of fossil fuels, of poor habits of denial and waste, will come more slowly, and on the whole these effects will appear far less dramatically noticeable than the raVages of a pandemic. HoweVer, holding on to non-renewable energy and continuing to pursue unsustainable farming, logging, and consuming, will result in a future that, unlike that of eVen a global pandemic, cannot be eventually reversed. Climate disruption will reach irreversible tipping points. A rainforest or great boreal forest, once decimated, cannot recover. Thawing permafrost cannot be refrozen. An epidemic rarely spares the rich, but in an unsustainable world the poor will always remain most vulnerable. Humanity and the life on which humanity depends, the glorious biodiversity of this rare planet, will see an erosion that will impoverish us in an insidious and, for a time, an imperceptible way. Because of the shifting baseline syndrome—in which we constantly alter our view of what is normal to accommodate whatever the current, prevailing conditions are—we shall find ourselves not on a slippery slope but already falling down it without a handhold. The major question then is, will governments, businesses, and citizens themselves recognize the need for renewable energy and sustainable practices in time to prevent the pernicious and cascading effects of the way that almost all of us—especially those in the developed world—have been living? The Papal Encyclical of 2015 asks this question. Whether one is religious or not is not the point. (The laws of the natural world are no respecters of religion, or of financial deals; nature doesn’t do derivatives.) The same question is asked by Robert Jay Lifton, who helped to found International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. He has written that issues of sustainability, and especially the foundational one of climate disruption, ask us to change the way that we live, not just in our consumption of energy, food, land, trees, and water, but in the very selfconsciousness of ourselves as the species that has, for at least a generation, dominated every ecosystem on Earth, and will continue to do so. This entails nothing less than a re-establishment of basic values. The planet is now our garden, and gardeners must not only learn how to tend the soil and plants under their care, they must watch their own habits, adjust their own work, and regard with responsibility, and even self-sacrifice, the others who rely on the garden, not only the living, but those who will come after. If our descendants inherit a chaotic, impoverished, and unjust world, future generations will ask, Why? And then they will remark, it did not need to be this way.