If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of proactive planning in the transition to a sustainable future.
In this quote, Richard Heinberg points out that while the world will inevitably move towards a post-carbon future, failing to take action will result in a bleak outcome. He advocates for strategic planning and proactive measures to ensure a future where communities thrive and ecosystems flourish, highlighting the interconnectedness of human well-being and environmental health.
In practice
In a speech about environmental policy, one might quote this to emphasize the need for strategic planning.
The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.
Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems.
No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.
Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
I don't like to dwell on the past. I'm interested in Fischerandom now, I am working on a new clock, I'm trying to make chess a more exciting game today. I am not interested in sitting in my rocking chair thinking what I did 10, 20 or 30 years ago.
There is no development strategy more beneficial to society as a whole - women and men alike - than the one which involves women as central players.
I am only a child. Yet I know that if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this would be.
We can almost recycle everything now. If we lived within our means, by being prudent, the 7 billion people in the world could have everything they needed. Global politics should be moving in that direction. But we think as people and countries, not as a species.
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