Nontraditional Environmental Challenge
Traditional environmental challenges generally involve behavior by a small group of industries who create products or services for a limited set of consumers in a manner that causes some form of damage to the environment which is clear. As an example, a gold mine might release a dangerous chemical byproduct into a waterway that kills the fish in the waterway: a clear environmental damage. By contrast, carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring colorless odorless trace gas that is essential to the biosphere. Carbon dioxide is produced by all animals and utilized by plants and algae to build their body structures. Plant structures buried for tens of millions of years sequester carbon to form coal, oil and gas which modern industrial societies find essential to economic vitality. Over 80% of the worlds energy is derived from carbon dioxide emitting fossil fuels and over 91% of the world's energy is derived from non carbon-neutral energy sources. Scientists attribute the increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to industrial emissions and scientists have linked carbon dioxide to global warming. However, the scientific consensus is difficult for the average individual layperson to readily see and grasp. This essential nature to the world's economies combined with the complexity of the science and the interests of countless interested parties make climate change a non-traditional environmental challenge.
Read more about this topic: Politics Of Global Warming
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“If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)