Our Desires Fuel the Climate Crisis
Questioner: Hello Sir, Good Evening. As we are seeing unexpected heat in the early 2023, like it’s just February, March, and it’s already this hot. Also, the scientists expect that this year would be the hottest year in the last century. And the world population is also increasing rapidly. So, what do you think of this word ‘Climate Crisis’ ? Is there any way out of it?
Acharya Prashant: Where is the crisis coming from? The answer is so obvious & so simple that we don’t want to look at it. We want dramatic solutions to complex problems. Here the solution is obvious, and the problem is not complex. Who’s causing all the heat? Where are all the emissions coming from? The dinosaurs did that? The rats, and the wolves, and the birds, and the fish, and the tress, they are doing all this? The fields, the butterflies, snakes maybe, they are the vile creatures, all the baddies. Snakes must be causing climate change.
Who’s causing climate change? We are causing climate change. That’s what, full stop. And it’s, even a class four student can see the obvious. The number of people multiplied by per capita consumption, right? That’s proportional to your greenhouse emissions. Is that not simple? And once you do it, it’s done. Carbon dioxide, or methane, or water vapor, released into the atmosphere stays there for very, very long. Long, not in terms of weeks, not in terms of months, in terms of hundreds of years. Once done very difficult to undo it.
Also, there are negative feedback cycles. You must have read of it as informed young students. What are these feedback cycles? What are these feedback cycles, please tell me? That simply means that climate change will do something that will further aggravate climate change. For example, you have ice. Let’s say there is ice on this surface. What is the color of the surface? Dark color, let’s say brown or black. And there’s ice on the surface and what’s the color of ice? White You very well know which color, which color traps radiation and which color reflects radiation back. If there is ice on it and lights falls, what does ice do the light? Sends it back, right? Because of its color, ice cannot absorb too much light and if ice cannot absorb light, ice cannot also absorb heat, correct?
But what will climate change do? There was ice on the rock & climate change will melt away the ice, so the dark colored rock will be exposed. And if the rock is exposed, the rock will absorb even more heat. And if the rock absorbs even more heat, that will melt even more. That’s a negative cycle, a negative feedback loop. Unfortunately for us, several of these negative loops have already been triggered. And once triggered, they cannot be stopped. It’s like a stone rushing down a slope. Once it gets even a little bit of velocity, it cannot be stopped now. So, that’s what has happened and that’s what we have done.
It’s futile and very dishonest to look for objective reasons to the climate crisis. Squarely human beings, their tendency to proliferate and their tendency to blindly consume is the only and only reason. What does the common man want, I am asking you? Okay, let’s look at what your parents want. You must be eighteen, twenty, twenty-five something, right? Right. Now next five or ten years, what is the picture that your parents envisage for you? Settled. What does that mean, settled? If I ask your parents, “Paint me a picture of your kid ten years from today, what will that picture consist of?” Show me the elements in the picture please, quickly and you will understand the climate crisis.
Audience: Good job, a house.
Acharya Prashant: Which means consumption. And what will that picture consist of? Come on. Yes, and, and?
Audience: Marriage and Kids.
Acharya Prashant: So, that’s what is wanted from your life; that you produce more bodies to consume. And those bodies should consume per capita more than what your currently do.
Please understand what that means. One should become three. So, on one hand, one is becoming three; on the other hand, today this one is consuming, let’s say ten units of something, let’s say, ten units of electricity or coal. Emissions are proportional to our consumption; do you understand that? Irrespective of the technology involved. I understand that greener technologies can reduce per capita consumption, but still. We still do not have technologies that reduce emissions by a factor of four, or five, or six, that doesn’t happen. The reduction happens in percentage terms—five percentage, ten percent, that kind of reduction.
So, there is this one person who consumes ten units today, what’s his dream? Tell me of your dream. If you consume ten units of something today, your dream is to consume at least hundred units tomorrow. Now even if you involve green technology in between, what will the poor technology do? The technology can mean that the reduction comes by ten, twenty, thirty percent, forty percent; but you want to increase your consumption ten times, that is one thousand percent. Now in front of this one thousand percent, what can a technology driven thirty-forty percent reduction do?
So, first of all, you want to raise your consumption level from ten to thousand, because that’s what means progress and happiness to you, right? How do you determine that a person is successful? He is consuming more. That’s the definition of success, right? Do you see that definition of success is what has become the climate crisis? As long as our happiness means consumption, you will have climate crisis, and this climate crisis is the end of the world.
Not only this one person is targeting to increase his consumption from ten to hundred units, or thousand units, he is also aiming to produce three kids. And all three of them, each of them will consume hundred units, right? So, what is the total consumption after ten years? Four hundred units. What is the consumption today? Ten. So, from ten, your dream is to raise consumption to four hundred units, and the emission, the carbon emission will proportionately increase, correct? So, it’s our dreams that have become the curse of this planet.
Unfortunately, we live for our dreams. Unfortunately, we are produced to fulfill dreams. If you do not live by these dreams, even your society and your family will not spare you. You tell them that if I do all these things, then I am really, literally, destroying the Earth. Still, they would not listen. They will say, “No, no. But you should, you should. Please, please do that.” And anyway, what can you do by fighting as a lone wolf, a solitary warrior? Even if you do not consume, even if you do not proliferate, still everybody else is doing the same thing.
See your cousin Dhanno, she just gave birth to her fourth one. You can at least have three. That’s what is killing the planet. And any numbers of summits, or conferences, or declarations, or agreements are not going to help. All that is simply eyewash, we are fooling ourselves.
If you do not challenge the very philosophy—it’s a very pedestrian philosophy, it’s a very foolish philosophy, it’s not a philosophy worth the name philosophy, yet it is a philosophy the entire population of the world lives by. That philosophy is, eat more, eat more, have more and you are successful. The purpose of life is consumption. Be happy, consume more. Be happy.
Just as our friend was asking, “What’s the problem if I consume and be happy? What’s the problem if I have been given fake dreams but that makes me happy?” This is the problem. You are solidly into the sixth mass extinction phase. We are getting killed and nobody is talking about it. The entire planet is getting killed for good. For millions of years to come, there will be nothing but the barrenness and nobody wants to talk about it.
Because if you talk about this, then your dreams will go unfulfilled. And our dreams, our intoxications, they are so dear to us that we are prepared to destroy this planet. For the next millions of years there would be nobody and we don’t bother.
Do you know that the rate of extinction of species, per day rate today is one thousand times more than what it used to be just forty or fifty years back? Do you understand the enormity of that? The massive tragedy, do you see that? There is a natural rate of extinction of species, all kinds of species from little bacteria to the biggest whale. There’s a natural rate at which the species get extinct. Today they are getting extinct at thousand times the natural rate.
And that is all man-made, we have done that, because we have dreams. And the ones who have dreams don’t even feel guilty. In fact, they will want to impose their dreams on you. Dreams, hopes, desires, ambitions, whatever name you want to give.
