 Sunday, May 11, 2008
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On this holiday to celebrate Mothers, it seems especially appropriate that today's author calls on us to
preserve the greatest mother of all, Mother Nature. Of course Mother
Nature is much more than simply the mother of all life on the planet,
she is the very basis for continuing life on our planet. ... Reposted from Tomdispatch.com.
Dusk on Planet Earth
Bill McKibben
Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always
be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if
necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New
Start -- even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.
It's not just the economy. We've gone through swoons before. It's that
gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the
cheap stuff
that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn
into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and
starts food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so
inextricably tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim
Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem… how best to put it,
right.
All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.
There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most
powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As
in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to
Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a
scientific paper
-- "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which
civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted,
paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will
need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Hansen
cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and
huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we
don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last
summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.
So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that
your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right
away, you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear
off the cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone
before the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the
red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before
you hear that clunk up front.
In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking
the pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard. Instead of slowing
down, we're pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came
the news
that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last
year -- two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.
And suddenly, the news arrives that the amount of methane, another
potent greenhouse gas, accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly
begun to soar as well. Apparently, we've managed to warm the far north
enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost and massive
quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.
And don't forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the
$2,500 car, and Americans are converting to
TVs the size of windshields which suck juice ever faster.
Here's the thing. Hansen didn't just say that, if we didn't act, there
was trouble coming; or, if we didn't yet know what was best for us,
we'd certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere. His phrase was: "…if we wish to preserve a planet similar
to that on which civilization developed." A planet with billions of
people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever
more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures,
has already
managed
to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the
northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon
heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada's efforts to
comply with the Kyoto Protocol, already in doubt because of its
decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta's tar sands.)
We're the ones who kicked the warming off; now, the planet is starting
to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and
suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar
radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of
the sun's heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the
sense that
Francis Fukuyama had in mind.
And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them -- to reverse course.
Here's
the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the
Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration,
at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): "If there's
no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to
three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."
In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the
Kyoto Accord.
When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to
converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty -- a treaty that would go into
effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial
of limits on atmospheric CO2.
If we did everything right, says Hansen, we could see carbon emissions
start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that
CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out we might even be
on track back to 350. We might
stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.
More likely, though, we're the Coyote -- because "doing everything
right" means that political systems around the world would have to take
enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired
power plants
anywhere,
and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired
power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global
warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means
making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way
we made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II.
It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.
It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time
and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest
of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and
technology freely with the poorest ones, so that they can develop
dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.
That's
possible -- we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we
could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But in a month when
the President has, once more, urged us to drill in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring
phrase "gas tax holiday" has danced into our vocabulary, it's hard to
see (though it was encouraging to see that Clinton's gambit didn't sway
many voters). And if it's hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine
China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as we do.
Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try. In
fact, it's about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.
A few of us have just launched a new campaign,
350.org.
Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18
months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that
it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.
After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one light bulb at a time. And if this
350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well, sometimes those passes get caught.
We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at
least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort.
If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this
number, for making people understand that "350" stands for a kind of
safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.
Hansen's words were well-chosen: "a planet similar to that on which
civilization developed." People will doubtless survive on a non-350
planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the
endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that
civilization may not.
Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security
provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin
won't exist, at least not for long, this side of 350. That's the limit
we face.
Copyright 2008 Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the
author, most recently, of The Bill McKibben Reader, is the co-founder
of Project 350, devoted to reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.
