THE ENVIROMENT AND THE ECONOMY

The Environment and the Economy

The Environment and the Economy

Is the world currently facing an environmental crisis and if so, how did we get to the place we are. If we are not facing a crisis, critique the points that Coleman and Kerbo make that suggest that we are in a crisis. How would you employ the scientific method to investigate this issue?

The climate crisis and the end of the era of fossil fuels are the most tangible challenge to the principles of our civilization. While according to its president Anote Tong, the Republic of Kiribati is expected to disappear soon under the water the diagnosis of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in English: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC) does not call. The temperature of a homogeneous world in the current scenario of economic growth would increase by 6.4 ° C by 2100 catastrophic. Nicholas Stern, in The Stern Review also described a decrease of global GDP by up to 20% in ten years if urgent investments are not made (Coleman & Kerbo, 2009).

But the climate crisis is often a phrase or commercial media away from its conceptual framework. What is a crisis? From its Greek origin, the word “crisis” means both "the end of the road" and the "need to decide", so it is at once "choice, control, decision." There is in the precise term crisis the finding of the end of an era and the need to survive. The crisis, therefore, requires both its own diagnosis and therapy. If, as Marx says, “Humanity is only necessary tasks it can do”, "The material conditions for its solution already exist in the learning process”. But scientists and environmental problems are much deeper than the malfunctioning political, social or economic Marx was talking about. It is not clear that humanity accomplishes this new task and survives itself.

Thomas Homer-Dixon calls us to the pursuit of another idea. The challenge of the imagination (2003), he tries to show that the company should not rely on technology to address global environmental crises. The imagination required to make scientific progress is in limited supply and may not match the current needs and local. Without this awareness (that of the consequence of our actions that escape us more), we understand less the amount and imagination that we will produce to meet the challenges we face in the future (Miller & ...