In Part 11 of his series, Shanti calculated costs and savings when switching to an efficient and renewables energy system using our present defense budgets
Imagine! Imagine we spend all the money not to make war with each other, but to switch nearly the entire world to an efficient and renewable energy system: this would cost nearly $62 trillion, according to the analysis by researchers at Stanford University.
But all that new, fancy infrastructure would also save trillions in energy costs every year afterwards – meaning the whole transition could pay for itself in less than six years!
The research team looked at the costs of switching to renewables in 145 countries that, combined, emit 99.7 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels. That included building new power plants with technologies like solar, wind and hydroelectric energy.
They also included adding new electricity storage, like batteries, and new technologies like electric vehicles for transportation and heat pumps for climate control in buildings. They published their results in June 2022 in the Journal Energy & Environmental Science, Issue 8.
Building all that new stuff is what would cost $62 trillion. But then they looked at the potential savings.
Private energy costs alone would drop by 62.7 per cent, or about $11 trillion each year. In less than six years, those savings would outweigh all the initial building costs.
Even more savings could be factored in by incorporating all the societal costs from fossil fuels. When the researchers calculated all the money, saved by avoiding things like air pollution from power plants and climate damage, they found that the world could recoup its entire investment in renewable infrastructure in less than one year!
So, when we cooperate with instead of fighting against each other, this same energy can save us not only from the cruelty of wars and becoming a greenhouse planet, but also make the entire Earth an ‘Neve Shalom Wahat Al Salam’ and fill it with greenery and prosperity. Nationalism is a great sin. It is due to this nationalism that so many problems exist in the world. These wars will continue as long as there are borders. We can choose to stop being a nationalist and break all those boundaries. These borders must go in order to survive.
Consider all human beings are cosmopolitans, citizens of the cosmos. They all belong to this single community called humankind.
Listen to good old Diogenes of Sinope of whom is said: Asked where he came from, he answered: “I am a citizen of the world.” This was a ground-breaking concept, because the broadest basis of social identity in Greece at that time was either the individual city-state or the Greeks as a group.
Immanuel Kant reminded us already, in his 1795 essay Perpetual Peace, that “the Earth’s surface belongs to the human race in common.”
This Earth is the common heritage of humanity.
Kant’s good advice can finally bring the human race closer to a cosmopolitan constitution. More recently, both Emmanuel Levinas and Jack Derrida have explained how hospitality can be the guiding principle for the relationships between people in a cosmopolitan world. For Jack Derrida the foundation of ethics is hospitality, the readiness to welcome the other, and not merely compatriots or fellow-citizens, into one’s home.
Of course, we may choose the standpoint that humanity will never consider its borders as ‘relics of the past’, and that humans will always be a ‘homo homini lupus’, a wolf for other people.
So, if that is the case, be prepared for a worldwide armageddon.
As far as we know, our world is not threatened by a meteorite impact, our world is threatened by our choices.
I have heard…
A dumbo is crossing the Sahara desert on a camel. After two months alone with the camel, and dreaming of beautiful women, he starts to find the camel attractive and decides to make love to her. But as soon as he is ready, the camel stands up, walks a few feet away and stops.
The dunce tries again, but again the camel stands up, walks a few feet away and stops. The fool tries again and again with no luck.
One day he finds the remains of a plane which has crashed in the desert, and just nearby a young woman, unconscious, but still alive. For days he takes care of her and she recovers totally.
One morning she comes to him, looking her prettiest, hugs him and tells him how thankful she is to him for saving her life.
“You have been so sweet to me,” she says, “and I like you so much that I’ll do anything for you.”
Looking at her beautiful face, the man says, “Would you really?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Oh, I really appreciate that,” replies the dunce.
“Would you mind holding that camel for me, please?”
For the first time in human history, humanity has entered a dead end street. Now we can choose to keep following the ‘camel’, repeat what we as humanity have become accustomed to and continue on the path we are on. This is the dead end street of ‘Me, Me, Me first!’, of mutual intolerance and enmity and of making our common nest unliveable and destroying it.
There are good reasons to take the position that man is a dunce, a dumbo, or even a ‘homo homini lupus’, that, after all, taking what he can get is the true nature of human beings.
Yes, especially today we humans know how we can turn our beautiful world into a dangerous place: analysts from the International Institute for Strategic Studies counted 183 violent conflicts worldwide in the year 2023, the highest number in thirty years.
At the same time, there is good reason for hope. For the first time in our history as humanity, we are confronted with a clear limit to this way of life. ‘The limits of growth’, the message of the ‘Club of Rome’, published in 1972, still holds today and even more so. They examined the five basic factors that determine and, in their interactions, ultimately limit growth on this planet: population increase, agricultural production, non-renewable resource depletion, industrial output and pollution generation.
The book contains a message of hope as well: Humans can create a society in which they can live indefinitely on earth if they impose limits on themselves and on their production of material goods, in order to achieve a state of global equilibrium with population and production in a carefully selected balance.
Global awareness of these limits can be a game changer: the shock of insight into what is happening already today and what awaits us if we don’t change our direction can move us to abandon our position. This position can become a point where we once stood, but no longer stand. Seeing states threatening each other and watching the planet becoming more or less unlivable for humans can also become our salvation, especially when we open our eyes to an attractive and accessible alternative for both these possible apocalypses.
Against all odds, I trust human beings, their creativity, loving care, intelligence, awareness, understanding and courage, their ability to learn, their youth. Do you remember our ‘encyclopedia’, mentioned in part 1, where each volume describes 550 million years, each page 1 million years, each line 25.000 years and each letter 350 years?
This means that our recent 50.000 years as humans are the two last lines on the last page of the last volume!
So, seen against the background of the evolution of life on Earth, humanity is still young, just here for a few seconds. Such a ‘New Arrival’ on this planet!
To me, the Antropocene is an invitation, a possibility to start living and flowering as human beings, to live individual love affairs with existence, knowing in our innermost core that we are all part of one life. I trust humans. Humankind is still young and often still unaware of the many fragrances of its own potential flowering.
That’s why you will find, in the next eight parts of this series, a waterfall of loving reminders of this ‘imprisoned splendour’ in all of us from some of our grown-up friends living different ways of life.
To be continued…
Related articles on Osho News
- All articles in this series, Humans Are Still Young
- All articles in the series, At Home in the Universe
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