Can You Imagine?

Toppling the Fossil Fuel Empire

by MURRAY DOBBIN

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
– Albert Einstein

As the world struggles with how to deal with the slow motion apocalypse of global climate change it becomes more and more apparent that we are trapped in “the kind of thinking” that got us here. While I don’t want to wear out Einstein’s quotability, his other little piece of wisdom that we need to keep top of mind is this: ”Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Our failure of imagination regarding the ever-increasing production and use of fossil fuels will, over time, kill billions of us and irreversibly change all life on the planet. It is a failure of imagination, not at a policy level but at the level of civilization. It’s not a lack of knowledge — we have a staggering amount of information and analysis, a frightening compendium of what we are doing to ourselves and every other species on the planet. We keep piling it on, study after study, dire warning after dire warning, irrefutable science, actual evidence of melting ice-caps, the virtually unprecedented level of agreement on the part of scientists about where we are headed. Additional information is already hitting up against the principle of diminishing returns.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/01/toppling-the-fossil-fuel-empire/?utm_source=feedly&utm_reader=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=toppling-the-fossil-fuel-empire