Saturday, December 10, 2016

An Uncertain Future

This week, it was announced that Donald J. Trump will nominate Scott Pruitt as the head of the EPA. Mr. Pruitt, who gained notoriety as the Attorney General of Oklahoma, has a long track record of denying climate change and, as the New York Times states “… has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies…” He has said (on the record) that he will repeal the Paris Climate Change Agreements, accused President Obama of “waging a war on coal” and is an advocate of incorporating climate change denial into public school education.

With technology increasing and the rate of innovation ever-speeding up, we have seen a trend towards increasingly wasteful behavior – providing support for both Jevon’s Paradox and the IPAT theory (Environmental Impact has increased due to increasing population size, affluence per-capita, and increasing environmental damage from technology). Moreover, the fact that controlling any of the IPAT variables is extremely politically unpopular combined with having a populist president such as Trump makes the outlook for changing our current trends very unlikely. That said, by living mindfully and using the Reasonable Person Model, there are some extra-governmental steps that can be taken in order to decrease our consumption and give our planet a brighter future. Additionally, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that we have likely reached peak demand for Oil and other commodities – meaning that the inevitability of resource descent will aid in forcing people to change their behaviors.

In order to make the requisite changes (lowering our expectations for standards-of-living, accepting that fact that we must consume less, and developing sustainable habits) can all be made easier by shaping our behavior based on the future rather than the past. This prospection will help us see the importance of becoming a more sustainable society and implementing policies that will allow us to do so. This prospection can be made more attractive by (1) increasing people’s ability to engage in delayed gratification and increase mental vitality and (2) incentivize people to engage in this behavior by emphasizing the benefits of prospection.

Moreover, by providing people with a procedure and instructions of specific steps they can take to change their behavior, allowing people to change at their own pace, and recognizing that this change will take a long time, will all aid with pre-familiarization and allow us to make lasting, long-term changes in American Society. Importantly, we must make people feel as though their actions really do make a difference on an individual level.

While many people are skeptical as to whether or not we can create such a massive change in American society, I am hopeful. For decades, the mainstream view was that Americans would never abolish slavery, that they would never pay income tax, that women would never achieve the same rights as men, that minorities would be allowed to go to the same schools at white children, and that marriage would always be between a man and a woman. Each of these changes required people to adjust and to give up more of their individual wealth or ideology for the greater good.


Bill Clinton once said “the only way to unite this increasingly divided world would be through an alien invasion…” while Martians are not landing on Earth, the threat of Resource Descent is one that is universal to human kind – and the RPM and pre-familiarization will help us solve this threat more effectively and more peacefully as one.

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