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The First Step to Action on Climate Change is Facing Its Reality
In a past column I have written about a narrow window of opportunity, a period of perhaps as few as ten years within which humanity must make dramatic reductions in worldwide CO2 emissions or run the risk of unleashing dangerous cascades of "runaway" warming. In this scenario, warming would begin to feed upon itself and outgrow the human power to slow it, leading to shifts in temperature, sea level, ocean currents, rainfall patterns, and ecology with the potential to disrupt coastal cities, agriculture, and ecosystems.Minimizing this risk calls for massive improvements in energy efficiency, decreases in consumption, and a rapid shift to clean energy. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that all of this is possible if we were to get serious about public investment and incentives for a life-serving energy system, but ten years is a short window for going about such large scale change, especially in a nation that has not yet gathered itself to rise to the challenge.
A few hours and a little research will provide all of the information you need to come to your own conclusion about the above assessment. But then what? If you find yourself agreeing that we have ten years to address a problem of human survival and that addressing it will require very deep changes in much that we take for granted, how do you find the response that is right for you, whoever you are? What's a fifth grade teacher to do? Or a grandmother? An artist? A carpenter? A student?
The answer to this question doesn't strike most people instantly or with total clarity. Grave threat though it is, climate change isn't at all like a burning building or a raging flood. It's not the sort of crisis that automatically pulls our best selves forward. All our highest capacities are there to draw upon - our creativity, our intellect, our perseverance, our selflessness and courage - but most of us seem to need to hold the reality of global warming in our awareness for some time before ours hearts and souls cipher out a response.
But here is a dangerous irony. While we may need to sit with the reality of climate change for a while before we can see what it is that we are able to offer in response, most minds don't react to our global crisis with calm and deliberate introspection.
Some minds know for certain that calls for immediate and dramatic action are flat out wrong and typical alarmist environmentalism.
Some minds leap with fear for beloved people and places and can't see or think very well beyond that fear.
Some minds quickly find distraction, in daily obligations or solvable problems.
And some minds decide that's its too late anyway because people will never change and one person can't make a difference.
Climate change presents us with all sorts of challenges, but the very first one, the one that must be met before any of the others can even be engaged, is the challenge of opening ourselves to the reality of climate change's existence, scale, and immediacy.
There's no one right way to open oneself to something this big, of course. We each have to find our own way, on our own terms. But we can experiment, and we can share our discoveries with one another.
In that spirit I offer a few ideas:
Talking with others helps. Climate change is everyone's problem so there's no point in trying to face it alone.
Believing in your own sense of reality helps too. As you begin to learn about climate change, the fact that the newspaper headline says 150 New Coal Plants on The Drawing Board, rather than Congress Declares State of Emergency, makes it easy to doubt yourself and your perspective. Don't do this. Instead seek out others who have examined the data, talk it over with them, and consider the possibility that you're the sane one and it is the society that is lost in illusion.
Envisioning what you really want pulls your mind forward, and helps you see the other side of climate change, the push towards what you long for anyway. There is a lot to look forward to in a post-fossil fuel world. I'm more than ready for a super-efficient train system and a flowering of my local economy. I'm ready for less junk-mail and no more planned obsolescence of everything from toasters to telephones. I'm ready for more quality and less quantity and more time with my family. I'm ready for the last day of the last war over oil.
Whatever you see when you envision your world once it's moved beyond fossil fuels, treasure that vision, allow it to reveal itself to you more and more clearly. One reward for realizing how much you dislike the current drift towards disaster is discovering just how much you want something else. Whatever this something else is, you can learn to describe it with passion and vividness, and in doing so, you can chip away at the unconscious belief in our culture that we are already living in the best possible way, and that any accommodation to climate change would therefore be sacrifice.
This is not a matter of imagination only, of course. Once you really take in the reality of a ten-year window to address climate change, without question, you will begin to try new things. Who knows what: biking to work, running for Congress, organizing your community, planting your first vegetable garden.
Whatever it is, in choosing it, you will be opening yourself to the messages of an astonishingly beautiful planet and trying to figure out how to live according to its elegant and non-negotiable terms.
And the human spirit can bear a lot of fear and worry and grief when it is held up by a purpose as large and life-affirming as that one.
Elizabeth R. Sawin is the Director of Sustainability Institute's Our Climate Ourselves program and is a writer, teacher, and systems analyst who lives with her family as part of an intentional community and organic farm in Hartland, Vermont. For more of her writing visit www.ourclimateourselves.org
16 Comments so far
Show AllSix and a half billion people and counting. Also eating, polluting, destroying, consuming, extinguishing, depleting and fighting over the spoils.
The argument; The Earth is Naturally Warming, it may well be but how can "We" deny that the billions of people and the way we are living is not adding tremendously to it!
The reason the neocons deny human culpability for climate change is they are deeply worried about their investments in a growing economy, which MUST grow if they are to become as rich ans powerful as they have been led to believe is their birthright. Tragically, they fall victim to their own excesses and the weather chaos that is now upon us will modify their growing economy far more dramatically than any possible legislation for living in peace and balance with the Earth.
"Elizabeth, your column was good, but ignored the obvious solution — drastic measures to control population growth in countries with the largest envronmental footprint. This will never happen, of course."
Done!! From Science News...
"Scientists have been working for years to understand the causes in developed countries of an apparent half-century-long decline in sperm quality—lower counts, reduced motility, and higher fractions appearing malformed. One hypothesis attributes this trend to the increasing prevalence of certain hormonally active chemicals, including phthalates, in the environment and in people's bodies."
http://tinyurl.com/ypgx6c
As usual, nature bats last.
Elizabeth, your column was good, but ignored the obvious solution -- drastic measures to control population growth in countries with the largest envronmental footprint. This will never happen, of course.
Right on communitarian. If only people realized it's cost effective to work WITH nature and the elements, rather than against her; but when insatiable profit is sought, nothing can quench that chasm of emptiness in individuals who wrestle with that (spiritual) illness.
"There is a lot to look forward to in a post-fossil fuel world." - indeed, and we can have it all right now - and contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time - we have been brainwashed to want everything that is 'on sale', everything that is the newest 'fashion', everything that some Hollywood 'star' is wearing or driving or endorsing - corporate players may have control of mass marketing channels but we have control of blogs - there is now an opportunity for us to rebut corporate spin at their level
First, I think we should call this what it is . . .
Global Warming -- the orginal name -- which makes the HEAT we are feeling clear.
Secondly, we don't know if we have ten years!
Third, we should immediately tackle getting gasoline driven autos off our roads. We can have Electric Cars on our roads in two weeks. If GM doesn't want to do it, our people's government can raise corporations to do it.
The first batches of electric cars should replace the oldest 20% of the cars on the roads -- and we should aim for replacing every car in 5 years. Government should subsidize production -- and purchases. The old and evil yardstick of a dollar bill by which the oligarchy has been making decisions for us is dangerous to humanity and our planet. Manifest Destiny/Man's Dominion Over Nature -- and Capitalism -- have to go -- they are out of spirit and time with Nature and human beings.
In replacing cars, we have to judge what the value to the health of the planet would be in removing a gasoline-driven car -- without doubt, sufficient to purchase a new electric car.
We also have to take back control of our natural resources -- why are they in the hands of private families, anyway?
We need a government strongly sponsoring vegetarianism - even Veganism -- and we need to begin to limit the animal-farming which is polluting our water, lakes, streams. We need strong sponsorship of birth control and reproductive rights.
Farming should be local; we should stop dragging apples across country, asparagus from Peru!
Electricity should be local; there isn't any need to have a central Enron supplying everyone's electricity.
We can't eat toxic sludge, nuclear waste, petroleum, depleted uranium . . . let's stop producing it.
Violence is being pushed upon us as a society -- offered every day by our media as something normal. It isn't.
Wars should be unheard of; yet, we have a four year war going, reminiscent of Vietnam.
We have a president who arrived by courtesy of our Supreme Court and hackable black box voting. We are a superpower which now tortures people, and when too embarrassed to let it be known, we send them to other outlaw nations to be tortured.
This president is escorting fascism over America's threshold as he runs his outlaw, corrupt administration.
How much more destruction of our own "democracy" and "people's government" will we tolerate?
a government that can not control guns will never control global warming activity - people will have to do it on their own, leading by example, informing but not preaching - a few more Hurricane Katrinas and more politicians will start to listen (sadly, it will take major disasters to get their attention) - oil is just about finished, the estimates of reserves published by OPEC governments have been inflated since 1983 when they agreed to set maximum extraction targets on the absis of reserves - internal combustion engines are the next dinosaurs
Here is the problem in a nutshell ... there is a very classic graphic description of change. It is a curve that very quickly tends downward (initial disruption and adaption) and then, and this is the big point, if the change takes effect positively, the curve starts to go back up. If the change is really positive the curve continues up above the level at which it started. All of this assumes that the change takes hold.
If the change goes poorly, the original downward curve never turns back up and you have failure.
No one has any idea how to manage this change on a community, state, national or global level to keep the curve from going infinitely down.
One more point ... and this is the killer ... effecting positive change is enhanced by the application of resources. This of this as investment capital or any other metaphor. If the issue is conserving energy, there goes the application of resources. This makes it doubly tough.
Unfortunately, this is a problem that will not easily be solved by the application of lots of good-willed people. There are far more bad-willed people than good-willed ones and they are the challenge. How do we get them to think and act collectively. We haven't found a good way yet beyond brute force.
All the green proposals are excellent in themselves, but there is nothing that we, as individuals, can do to stop the earth from heating up, melting the polar caps and turning the foothills of the rockies into beachfront properties. We are already seeing this relentless buildup of heat as the Greenland ice melts.
The polar caps and the oceans are keeping us cool. When all the ice has gone it will get warmer much more quickly.
Only cooperative action at state, national and international level on a par with the Manhatten project could possibly bring the necessary scientific skills and technical resources to bear on the problem.
There are many things that can be done about global warming. The powers that be have the greed disease. This disease means you only look at your short - term gains. Nothing else matters. Close the plant, outsource the job, use child labor, blacklist union representatives, buy a congress to put it all in law with a business subsidy; as long as you get your cash. They will cause confusion and pit the good vs the ideal. Prices for energy efficient and energy producing goods will be high to prevent real change. All for an extra buck.
Note this is NOT a conspiracy, just the dark side of the invisible hand of the unregulated market.
Government and regulation are required to prevent monopolies, protect the environment and internalize the costs of energy production and consumption.
I'm off the grid! Little house big yard.
Anyone can drasticly reduce their carbon footprint if they gave it the same priority as other major aspects of their lives - but they don't. For starters:
Don't use a car for commuting or routine errands. Relocate if you have to accomplish this. Use public transit, bicycle, or buy a small motor scooter (battery-electric versions are available). You may have a super green solar house with compost pile and organic garden, but if you are commuting in a single-occupant car 100 miles round trip per day you are completely erasing the benefit, plus some.
buy as small a home as you can - an apartment or townhouse with a common wall is the most energy-efficenent type of shelter.
Keep heat at a max temperature at 62 in winter.
Don't use AC or limit it to a small window unit for sleeping.
The compact-fluorscent stuff is ok, but why leave a light on in any unoccupied room anyway?
Eat low on the food chain.
Seek a "right-livlihood", avoid any job related to oil, coal, automotive, or the military industries.
Many will say "this stuff is completely impractical for me!" But that's a cop-out. People relocate or change jobs all the time for other reasons. It is all about priorities.
Australia. While the whole world is concerned about climate change (Global Warming) in reallity are our Governments really serious about reversing this situation. The clear and present answer to this is NO. I could site hundreds of issues the Governments of the world have ignored for decades. Just consider this: Here in Australia our brilliant minded Government has just allowed the go ahead (removed some limiting legislation) for Nuclear Power. Our Prime Minister is totally pro Nuclear and has made the statement tha Nuclear Power is "Clean, Green, Cheap, Safe and Sustainable". The fact is that none of this is true; although any Government or vested interest parties will vigorously defend these points ( if YOU are concerned with Global Warning look at the Nuclear Cycle for yourself, ask how much clean water is used in the whole process from the Mining to the Storage of Waste, look at the costs involved, look at the many billions of dollars that the Government subidises this industry, and ask could this money be better spent on renewable and 'sustainably' technologies- Nuclear has a finite resource there for it is not sustainable) The only reason the world is not using renewable Energy systems is because of the massive power of the Oil and Coal Industries, and now also the Nuclear Industry.....ALL of which are not renewable and not sustainable. and our Governments know this. If you, any reader of this article are really concerned about our future and you do nothing.................
real world - yes, I have many of those items you list but I have made a decision to use them less - we don't have to go cold turkey and live in caves - if everyone used their car less than they do now, say by 20%, it would result in a pretty substantial reduction of energy usage - if everyone cut back on the time they shower by 20% we would use less water - etc, etc, etc - don't think because someone owns a car that they are not responsible - that is the classic excuse of those who can't be bothered to do even a little - the problem with the argument 'all or nothing' is that it is not 'real world' - in my view, it's a case of whenever possible do as much as you can to move us in the right direction but just do it