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TechnoratiFor Many Years, It Was a Hollow Joke. But This Year, We're On The Cusp of Real Progress
For too many years, Earth Day has seemed a kind of hollow joke. We gather in our parks and on our beaches, we pledge to protect the planet's environment, and then we go home to continue living in President Bush's America, where virtually nothing happens to make the earth a safer place to live. How could it when the environmental committees in Congress were chaired by men who insisted global warming was a hoax? The stagnation had grown so bad that by last spring I hardly wanted to be a part of Earth Day at all.
What a difference a year makes. After Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," and after last fall's election, America feels different. Gridlock on Capitol Hill hasn't ended yet, but I sense it soon will.
Last weekend, working with seven new graduates from Middlebury College where I teach, I helped organize a nationwide day of global-warming protests. We launched our website, stepitup07.org, in January, asking people to hold rallies on April 14. Since we had no money and no organization, our expectations were low: We secretly hoped we might be able to organize a hundred of these demonstrations.
Instead, last Saturday, there were 1,400 demonstrations across the nation. All 50 states were amply represented. There were evangelical churches and sorority chapters rallying; demonstrations took place on ski slopes and bike paths. Even underwater scuba divers off the coral reefs of Key West held up the same sign as everyone else, demanding that Congress cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050.
We couldn't have pulled off those rallies a year ago - and if we had, that 80 percent demand would have seemed extreme and radical. Instead, it's now emerging as a realistic request. Just in the past few weeks, presidential candidate John Edwards has made it the centerpiece of his energy policy. Most of his rivals haven't announced their targets yet, but expect them to be in the same range. Meanwhile, several bills have been introduced in Congress. Last Saturday, dozens of members of Congress took part in our rallies, including Rep. Ed Markey (D) of Massachusetts, who will chair the new House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
None of this means change will come easily. The opponents - big energy companies chief among them - are some of the most powerful political players in the country. For 20 years, they've kept action on global warming at bay. But the science has grown too obvious, and the political demands too loud, for that shutout to continue. Instead, the special interests are trying to carve out the easiest deal they can.
After so many years of no progress at all, some environmentalists will find any deal hard to resist. But in fact, precisely because we've delayed action so long, we need to hold firm now for reductions in coal, oil, and gas use large enough to meet the minimum scientific requirements. Demanding an 80 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2050 is not pie-in-the-sky; it's the kind of signal we need to send if we're going to affect investment decisions, subsidy policy, and every other part of our policy.
So this Earth Day (April 22), the talk shouldn't be sentimental or vague - or discouraged. It should come with a couple of numbers - 80 percent by 2050. And it should be hopeful. Because even though the transition to a green economy has yet to begin, we can finally see it looming on the horizon. It's as pretty a sight as spring wildflowers spreading across the meadows.
Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author of "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future."
© 2007 The Christian Science Monitor
20 Comments so far
Show AllCom_n_sense,
Perhaps the Earth itself inexorably passes through birth, growth, evolution, decline and death, no matter what we do, we are driven by our appetites and attitudes to their inevitable conclusion - ecocide and extinction. Yet, we have minds to plan a life in balance to last for multiple generations into the future. It's a paradox.
After witnessing all my live the stupidity of man I have come to the conclusion that this world would be better off without people screwing it up.
Kurt Vonnegut's book "Cat's Cradle" sums it up quit well. Man's ingeniousness coupled with his stupidity will do us in.
Recently, one of the most under-reported stories has been the disappearance of bees. The jury is still out on what's causing this extinction, GAF, global warming, pesticides, and the most recent theory cell-phones. If it is indeed cell-phones it would be fitting that mankind would blab himself to death.
What ever it is we don't have enough time to figure this out and replenish the bee population before crops yields are effected.
Einstein said that without bees mankind would last a mere 4 years. At the rate we've been losing them next year would be the point all bees disappear.
The Mayan calendar ends December 21, 2012. Maybe they were on to something.
After many years of useless ranting about how to change our environment I despair.
Ladies- It works like this. When it is absolutely clear to men that they will get more sex by working to change Global Warming and remove pollutants from the atmosphere things will change quickly. Right now big trucks and PlastiCrap (TM) are the way to a woman's....well you know.
Until then your children and grandchildren will face an increasingly degraded environment and climate-forced disasters. Katrina, big Nor'easter, Australian mega-drought, dead bees. Coming to your kids soon.
It's about the birds and the bees vs. the Hummer SUV's. Right now I see pretty women driving massive SUV's and none at eco-fests.
Protect your gene line.
Whoever organizes environmental activities and whatever they do, they must somehow bring about two basic changes that are absolutely necessary for the human race and civilization to survive --
1. Reduce the human population through family planning programs.
2. Recycle 100% of industrial and human waste.
If we fail to do this very soon, we will all eventually die in the growing violence provoked by relentless overcrowding, and from diseases caused by the rising levels of pollution. Like any living organism, the Earth can only take so much abuse before it collapses in a disrupted climate and weather chaos. It's happening now, but perhps we still have time to stop it, maybe.
As best as I can count , it looks like seventeen remarks for Bill McKibben and two remarks against ; we'll let the number two stand even though both were written by newworldorder. It's inexorable my dear watson . It took fifty years of relentless lobbying to Congress by Suasan B. Anthony , Barbara Cady Stanton and their followers in the Suffregette Movement to convince Congress to write into law , women's right to vote and within several years every country in Europe followed suit. Feel free to correct me on the chronological details.
The point is this : Anthony and Statton didn't give in ; neither will McKibben , Gore , Edwards , Nader... and the thousands , nay millions of Americans who think like the above seventeen .
A message to newworldorder et al , you are being ignored so lead , follow or get out of the way
Please write or call your national representatives/senators at least once a week - telling them to Impeach the whole Bush regime. Do it weekly over and over again til the bastards are out of our white house! That will be a big step towards cleaning up the environment
Congratulations on organizing those global-warming protests and demonstrations! I wish I could do that. I wish that global-warming was of greater priority on North America's agenda. A tragedy occurs, and it makes headlines for days, and the state of the world has its attention diverted.
If we didn't feel guilty about producing global warming, then we likely wouldn't do anything to help reduce its effects. Sometimes we need to feel guilty to do something productive.
I'll believe that we can stabilize no less reduce our carbon output when I see the laundry hanging out to dry in any gated community in this country!
While it is tempting to dismiss the grammatically-challenged postings of 'new world order' as just another rant by a right-wing nutcase, I fear that they signify a fundamental shift in the tactics of the global warming skeptics. In the wake of the IPCC's latest scientific report and its unequivocal findings that global warming is occurring and is almost certainly (i.e., with a probability of at least 90%) the result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the climate change skeptics are finding it harder and harder to use their old fallback of "scientific uncertainty" to justify delaying action. Instead, their new tactic seems to consist of branding all those who call for restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions as anti-capitalist, socialist, communist, etc.
Case in point: 'new world order' argues that "Global warming is just another conspiracy to try to bring us down to the same level as the rest of the world." This baldly echoes a recent diatribe by the President of the Czech Republic in testimony before the U.S. Congress, where he likened environmentalism to communism and labelled it as "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity" (see http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/03/29/159/). This same sort of fear-mongering can be seen, albeit on a more subtle scale, in the recent proclamation by the Conservative government of Candian PM Harper that meeting the country's obligations under the Kyoto protocol would bankrupt its economy.
The reason I point out this disturbing trend is because we will be hearing much more of this from the right in the coming months (notice that 'new world order' cites the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which anyone with a lick of sense knows is a propaganda machine for the fossil fuel industry). So those of us who realize the absolute imperative for reductions in greenhouse gases need to be aware of these new tactics of the climate skeptics, and we need to counter them effectively. For example, we should cite the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics...). This review, representing the most comprehensive economic analysis of climate change performed to date, concluded that "the costs of action – reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the
worst impacts of climate change – can be limited to around 1% of global GDP each
year," while the costs of failure to act would be 5-20% or more of annual global GDP. In other words, the catastrophic economic effects of climate change represent a greater potential threat to the world economy than the costs of limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
So gird your loins, my friends, because it's going to be a tough battle ahead...
Congress will reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050? Not likely.
When's the last time you had your meds checked, new world?
Dponcy - Well said!
A target 43 years hence is a grand prevarication, given that we need a global 80% cut just to stop adding to the problem of a huge excess of airborne greenhouse gasses.
To continue adding to the problem for 43 years is patently absurd.
That said, I warmly congratulate Bill McK on his initiative, and fully recognize that such a target date can be greatly advanced once a sufficient number of Americans have been killed by unprecedented weather events.
The numbers I'd like to see the US fulfill are a 5% cut by 2012, being the average of Kyoto commitments and the year the Protocol is completed.
Whether the US bothers to ratify the protocol is an issue of image only, and of little practical value at the cost of a major political contest.
The importance of 5% by 2012 is that back in the '90s the US signed "the Berlin Mandate" for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change,
formally agreeing that Industrialized nations (Annexe 1) should significantly reduce their GHG outputs below 1990 levels before Developing nations (Annexe 2) would be asked to follow suit.
This has been Bush's main deceit on the issue - by refusing to ratify Kyoto the US has reneged on its solemn word -
Until this position is remedied, there is little or no prospect of the requisite Treaty of the Atmospheric Commons being negotiated.
Which is why the world needs to see America commit itself to achieving 5% by 2012 !!!
Regards,
Billhook
Adam West:
You present a false dichotomy. Addressing climate change does not obviate the need to address other important issues. Furthemore, climate change is not unrelated to foreign policy issues. If we had a sustainable energy system, powered by solar and wind, many of our foreign policy problems would be solved as well. Also consider that the people likely to suffer most from the effects of climate change are those in developing countries, not those of us in the developed world who have been causing most of the problem. For more information, check out the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest Summary for Policymakers, which is the consensus view of international climate scientists:
http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM13apr07.pdf
In response to the first comment by 'new world order'. I am with you buddy. I just wish that at the end of the film they would have simply said that indeed man is screwing up the planet but to jump on the climate change band wagon is foolish. I kinda knew this when I first heard of An Inconvenient Truth and boycotted it and told others to skip it too. Getting all worked up about climate change diverts the public from more important issues. George would rather us debate climate science than American foreign policy. Personally I feel MEDIA REFORM is more urgent an issue than global warming. Think about it. adamwestfakey@yahoo.ca
LOL ....global warming as a fraud. Brought to you by the same people who don't believe in evolution and will sell you books saying the Grand Canyon is only a few thousand years old. I guess we should all be thankful that this crowd has advanced at least into the 16th century and now admits the earth is not flat.
My personal guess is that we are already too late to stop feedback mechanisms from wrecking havoc, but too late to act is still better than never.
Some very basic stuff. There's no debate on the theory that certain gasses cause a greenhouse effect. There's also no debate on the hard evidence that the concentration of these gasses in our atmosphere is increasing. Thus the bs wording in the first post about "man-made" .... guess what you flat earth neaderthals .... physics isn't going to care about whether those gasses are man-made or not. They are there, the earth is going to get hotter. If you want to run around BS'ing people that somehow humans aren't to blame for this, well it would just be funny if it wasn't getting in the way of the people who actually want to try to solve the damned problem.
Steve Hammons: As a Cherokee (Cherokee Nation), let me assure you that your idealized stereotypes about American Indians are off the mark. My tribe recently outlawed gay marriage and kicked African-Cherokees (Freedmen) out of the tribe. Unfortunately, a lot of them are redneck Okies first, and Cherokee second. They are just as likely to vote Republican and drive SUVs as anyone else.
80% by 2050 is a good goal, but I think we need something a little more tangible than that. A date 43 years in the future is license for procrastinating America to believe there is no urgency. We have to act now, in the next few years, to stop disasterous feedback mechanisms from taking the whole thing out of our control.
Maybe as more Americans become aware of branches of their family trees that have American Indian roots, we will see an emerging consciousness about taking care of our Earth and the Nature around us.
Some Americans are aware of the Indian genetic background in their families, some are unaware or only have suspicions about Indian DNA within them from generations past.
Perspectives on Nature, the land, trees, plants, animal life are related to our psychology and our backgrounds.
For more on this, the article below may be of interest:
"Who is a Cherokee? Many Americans have Indians in the family tree"
PopulistAmerica.com
March 14, 2007
http://www.populistamerica.com/who_is_a_cherokee
Regardless of science, anyone with an iota of common sense should grasp that the sheer numbers of persons, animals, automobiles and other waste-producers on this planet would indeed have an effect on our ecosystem. Fraud? Only if you believe God whisks our emissions away to heaven where they become angel wings...
I can't believe that piece of propaganda is still popular on Google Video.
The Great Global Warming Swindle, was 'grossly distorted' and 'as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two' said one scientist who was TRICKED into being into the film.
- http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2031455,00.html
The film is filled with global warming deniers, NOT climate scientists, who are paid off by the oil industry.
http://www.desmogblog.com/a-global-warming-swindle-play-by-play
Over 99.9% of peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals accept global warming as fact. Stop spreading lies.