Dear Sir/Madam,

Kenneth Chang's article, "As Earth Warms, the Hottest Issue Is Energy" in last Tuesday's NYT made both encouraging and depressing reading. Encouraging, because it acknowledged the scale and urgency of a major problem we (which for once really does mean ALL of us) are facing, i.e. our "fatal" dependency on fossil fuels; depressing, because it only gave serious consideration to technological solutions.

An essential part of the solution will, of course, be technological, but an equally, if not more, important part will be "moral", i.e. relating to the rules governing acceptable human behaviour.

At the moment, few recognise, or are prepared to face up to, the moral implications of achieving sustainability, in respect to which our dependency on fossil fuels and global warming are major, but by no means the only, concerns.

Human behaviour is responsible for our present problems relating to sustainability. Why? Because it is non-sustainable. This may sound simplistic, but is an extremely important fact, which most of us are finding very difficult to face up to, mainly for the following reasons:

1) It is behaviour we were born into and have grown up with, thus making it seem perfectly "normal" and correct to us.

2) It is behaviour which affects our income (earned or otherwise), status in society and way of life. Questioning it means questioning our way of life and doing business, along with many of the values, attitudes and aspirations which underlie them.

3) Subjectively (and who isn't?), our jobs, status in society and way of life are ALL important to us. Objectively, however sustainability is even more important, because without it we are extinct! 

4) What we do individually, or even in quite large numbers, has no significant effect on a global scale. It is not MY car that is a problem, nor the thousands of others I see on the road. Even all the 10's of millions of cars in the USA are not a big global problem in themselves. It is the 100's of millions (soon billions) of other cars that are a serious, probably insurmountable, obstacle to achieving sustainability.

All this has led to us getting our priorities round the wrong way. Which is why we are so obsessed with finding a technological fix to the problem of sustainability (e.g. reducing our dependency on fossil fuels), instead of going to the root of the problem, questioning our own behaviour (and what underlies it), and contemplating the radical changes necessary to it if we, i.e. our children and coming generations, are to survive and prosper.