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If the Roman Republic understood the conditions at the origin of climate change, it could easily have put an end to it. That's because all you have to do to stop climate change is to stop using fossil fuels and plant a lot of trees. Together, these measures would reduce the overabundance of artificial carbon dioxide, which can harm the atmosphere and wreak havoc on our planet.
This idea – that an ancient civilization without electricity or a technological and industrial complex similar to Silicon Valley could solve climate change – might seem sacrosanct to sophist entrepreneurs and their journalistic lackeys who invest in this kind of thing. Indeed, for at least a decade, the media landscape is littered with casuistic puffs with titles such as:
"This machine has just begun to suck CO2 in the air to protect us from climate change" (Fast Company, May 2017)
"Start-ups hoping to fight climate change while other tech companies save money" (New York Times, May 2019)
"Swiss power plant sucks carbon from the air, wins new funds for climate repair" (Reuters, August 2018)
"These companies are leading the fight against climate change" (CNN Business, October 2018)
"Why and how businesses must tackle climate change now" (Forbes, October 2018)
The message hidden behind these stories? Climate change is the type of monetizable "problem" that companies can "solve" – as it looked like a smoothing over a hiccup in the supply chain or a public relations crisis.
But this is not the case. Climate change is a political problem with a political solution. The Roman Republic had at its peak a well-organized and representative government, capable of major works, such as the Roman aqueducts or the vast Roman road network that extended to North and South Africa. If the political will existed among the citizens, the republic could certainly organize itself to solve the climate crisis.
With a reorganization of society and industry, we could easily do like the Romans. Yet our industry has collectively hypnotized our civilization into believing that anything can be solved by using more gadgets and more money for the technology sector.
Due to the mesmerizing nature of Silicon Valley gadget manufacturers, we often can not see it when it happens in front of us. But just look at other industries in which Silicon Valley has "innovated" to see the results.
Take Juicero, for example: a $ 400 juicer that presses proprietary packages that could easily be wrung out by hand, and does not bring any noticeable improvement over the millennial juicer's "technology". make users dependent on absurd and useless subscriptions. Google has invested hundreds of millions in Juicero before it went bankrupt. "Innovation", indeed.
You can also consider another "innovation" of Silicon Valley, such as social media, an elaborate digital social system whose primary function seems to make us addicted to using it. This has obviously made humans more narcissistic and less happy. Now, social media companies are collectively trying to develop strategies to fix the damage.
This is how Silicon Valley corrects things, or rather claims to do the same: by first inventing the problems and then publishing their own "solution". This is not a model I would apply to the thorny question of the survival of all life on Earth.
But the most urgent concern here is that technology simply can not solve the problems that he created. Never forget that 100 companies are responsible for 71% of all global emissions. or that technology giants are among the worst offenders when it comes to producing disposable goods or being complicit in an endless cycle of planned obsolescence.
Recently, the consumer-driven technology sector has become a rentier model. In this model, you do not necessarily have gadgets, software, or media. you simply rent them to a company forever. Companies prefer this model, because rather than buying something once, you have to pay to rent it for life – which means a lot more money for them in the long run.
I do not doubt that, if we let techno-capitalists tackle climate change, we will find ourselves in a similar situation: global governments will outsource carbon capture to a group of technology giants we will pay forever to rent their gear and keep the gear. a stable state. If they solve the problem and eliminate all excess carbon from the atmosphere, their services will become useless – and their shareholders and investors would certainly not like that. It is best to leave the problem intact for as long as possible to dry up the public sector for all eternity – ironically, solve the problems that technology, for the most part, has created. This is the perfect claw.
Unfortunately, the magic ideas of Silicon Valley have so poisoned us that few people are able to consider the notion of a technological solution to climate change as a joke. Capitalism views the environment as an externality and insatiably creates waste and pollution. It is a doctrine incompatible with the survival of life on Earth.
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