Our climate is hot. The issue of climate change is the new toy for those seeking to restrict producers of prosperity. This month a UN conference, which deals with the extension of climate policy beyond Kyoto 2012, will start. There, a majority will argue in favour of tougher and concrete restrictions on the emission of CO2. I agree with those who push for protection of the earth. I despise them for their double standards.

All the products we buy are somehow taken from the earth. They are carved out of raw materials and transformed from one state to another (i.e. using chemical processes). In the beginning we took stones from caves and sand from the earth. In order to construct a house labourers fuelled themselves by eating the food the earth provided. As our world developed, and production flourished as a result of specialisation, the diversity and amount of products increased. My computer is one of those products.

When I look at it (as I do now) I wonder what will happen to it when its last user decides it is not longer doing its job. The machine has been created by engineers (who get their energy from eating wheat, vegetables, etc), it has been produced in a hall (with electric robots, light and air conditioning), it has been shipped by a transporter (consuming fuel for trucks and planes) and it can only be operated while fed by electricity. These are the by-products.

The product itself has been made of plastics, metals and lots of electronic parts I cannot imagine what they are made of. All these materials were at some point taken from nature. A comparison comes to my mind: I cut one tree to make 100 pieces of paper and then (after a while) I put these used pieces of paper back at the place where I cut the tree. As you can imagine… it won’t grow another tree.

The same holds true for my computer. The resources being used (either directly or indirectly) could be put back at the place where they came from, but they will be different from the ones we took to create the product. On the contrary to… let’s say food, many man made products cannot be given back to nature without taking nature a long time to disintegrate and reintegrate it. Even worse, some transformed (chemical / nuclear) products do change the equilibrium in nature beyond the point where we can control its effects.

I think we are wasting too many of our resources. It is a consequence of having too much available too easy (e.g. at low prices). When it comes to energy we are spoilt. ‘Natural energy’ is a substitute for physical energy: think of washing machines, cars, phones. With Christmas advancing I ask myself if we really need all these extra lights. Do we really need a modem and a separate router to connect to the Internet?

The complexity of and interdependency in our world are the costs of the specialisation that brought us unprecedented wealth. There is a direct trade off between prosperity and its externalities. We, people of the 21st century, have to decide not only on limiting CO2 emissions. We cannot change the world without weighing all the factors making it work. Flying to Bali, convening in a well-equipped congress centre in order to protest one part of the big machine is simply not enough. Well, it is only simple and it might have the same effect on our existence as pollution has.