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We’re Hot as Hell and We’re Not Going to Take It Any More
Three Steps to Establish a Politics of Global Warming
Try to fit these facts together:
* According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet has just come through the warmest decade, the warmest 12 months, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, May, and June on record.
* A "staggering" new study from Canadian researchers has shown that warmer seawater has reduced phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain, by 40% since 1950.
* Nine nations have so far set their all-time temperature records in 2010, including Russia (111 degrees), Niger (118), Sudan (121), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (126 apiece), and Pakistan, which also set the new all-time Asia record in May: a hair under 130 degrees. I can turn my oven to 130 degrees.
* And then, in late July, the U.S. Senate decided to do exactly nothing about climate change. They didn't do less than they could have -- they did nothing, preserving a perfect two-decade bipartisan record of no action. Senate majority leader Harry Reid decided not even to schedule a vote on legislation that would have capped carbon emissions.
I wrote the first book for a general audience on global warming back in 1989, and I've spent the subsequent 21 years working on the issue. I'm a mild-mannered guy, a Methodist Sunday School teacher. Not quick to anger. So what I want to say is: this is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.
For many years, the lobbying fight for climate legislation on Capitol Hill has been led by a collection of the most corporate and moderate environmental groups, outfits like the Environmental Defense Fund. We owe them a great debt, and not just for their hard work. We owe them a debt because they did everything the way you're supposed to: they wore nice clothes, lobbied tirelessly, and compromised at every turn.
By the time they were done, they had a bill that only capped carbon emissions from electric utilities (not factories or cars) and was so laden with gifts for industry that if you listened closely you could actually hear the oinking. They bent over backwards like Soviet gymnasts. Senator John Kerry, the legislator they worked most closely with, issued this rallying cry as the final negotiations began: "We believe we have compromised significantly, and we're prepared to compromise further."
And even that was not enough. They were left out to dry by everyone -- not just Reid, not just the Republicans. Even President Obama wouldn't lend a hand, investing not a penny of his political capital in the fight.
The result: total defeat, no moral victories.
Now What?
So now we know what we didn't before: making nice doesn't work. It was worth a try, and I'm completely serious when I say I'm grateful they made the effort, but it didn't even come close to working. So we better try something else.
Step one involves actually talking about global warming. For years now, the accepted wisdom in the best green circles was: talk about anything else -- energy independence, oil security, beating the Chinese to renewable technology. I was at a session convened by the White House early in the Obama administration where some polling guru solemnly explained that "green jobs" polled better than "cutting carbon."
No, really? In the end, though, all these focus-group favorites are secondary. The task at hand is keeping the planet from melting. We need everyone -- beginning with the president -- to start explaining that basic fact at every turn.
It is the heat, and also the humidity. Since warm air holds more water than cold, the atmosphere is about 5% moister than it was 40 years ago, which explains the freak downpours that seem to happen someplace on this continent every few days.
It is the carbon -- that's why the seas are turning acid, a point Obama could have made with ease while standing on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. "It's bad that it's black out there," he might have said, "but even if that oil had made it safely ashore and been burned in our cars, it would still be wrecking the oceans." Energy independence is nice, but you need a planet to be energy independent on.
Mysteriously enough, this seems to be a particularly hard point for smart people to grasp. Even in the wake of the disastrous Senate non-vote, the Nature Conservancy's climate expert told New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, "We have to take climate change out of the atmosphere, bring it down to earth, and show how it matters in people's everyday lives." Translation: ordinary average people can't possibly recognize the real stakes here, so let's put it in language they can understand, which is about their most immediate interests. It's both untrue, as I'll show below, and incredibly patronizing. It is, however, exactly what we've been doing for a decade and clearly, It Does Not Work.
Step two, we have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get. If we're going to slow global warming in the very short time available to us, then we don't actually need an incredibly complicated legislative scheme that gives door prizes to every interested industry and turns the whole operation over to Goldman Sachs to run. We need a stiff price on carbon, set by the scientific understanding that we can't still be burning black rocks a couple of decades hence. That undoubtedly means upending the future business plans of Exxon and BP, Peabody Coal and Duke Energy, not to speak of everyone else who's made a fortune by treating the atmosphere as an open sewer for the byproducts of their main business.
Instead they should pay through the nose for that sewer, and here's the crucial thing: most of the money raised in the process should be returned directly to American pockets. The monthly check sent to Americans would help fortify us against the rise in energy costs, and we'd still be getting the price signal at the pump to stop driving that SUV and start insulating the house. We also need to make real federal investments in energy research and development, to help drive down the price of alternatives -- the Breakthrough Institute points out, quite rightly, that we're crazy to spend more of our tax dollars on research into new drone aircraft and Mars orbiters than we do on photovoltaics.
Yes, these things are politically hard, but they're not impossible. A politician who really cared could certainly use, say, the platform offered by the White House to sell a plan that taxed BP and actually gave the money to ordinary Americans. (So far they haven't even used the platform offered by the White House to reinstall the rooftop solar panels that Jimmy Carter put there in the 1970s and Ronald Reagan took down in his term.)
Asking for what you need doesn't mean you'll get all of it. Compromise still happens. But as David Brower, the greatest environmentalist of the late twentieth century, explained amid the fight to save the Grand Canyon: "We are to hold fast to what we believe is right, fight for it, and find allies and adduce all possible arguments for our cause. If we cannot find enough vigor in us or them to win, then let someone else propose the compromise. We thereupon work hard to coax it our way. We become a nucleus around which the strongest force can build and function."
Which leads to the third step in this process. If we're going to get any of this done, we're going to need a movement, the one thing we haven't had. For 20 years environmentalists have operated on the notion that we'd get action if we simply had scientists explain to politicians and CEOs that our current ways were ending the Holocene, the current geological epoch. That turns out, quite conclusively, not to work. We need to be able to explain that their current ways will end something they actually care about, i.e. their careers. And since we'll never have the cash to compete with Exxon, we better work in the currencies we can muster: bodies, spirit, passion.
Movement Time
As Tom Friedman put it in a strong column the day after the Senate punt, the problem was that the public "never got mobilized." Is it possible to get people out in the streets demanding action about climate change? Last year, with almost no money, our scruffy little outfit, 350.org, managed to organize what Foreign Policy called the "largest ever coordinated global rally of any kind" on any issue -- 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, 2,000 of them in the U.S.A.
People were rallying not just about climate change, but around a remarkably wonky scientific data point, 350 parts per million carbon dioxide, which NASA's James Hansen and his colleagues have demonstrated is the most we can have in the atmosphere if we want a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted." Which, come to think of it, we do. And the "we," in this case, was not rich white folks. If you look at the 25,000 pictures in our Flickr account, you'll see that most of them were poor, black, brown, Asian, and young -- because that's what most of the world is. No need for vice-presidents of big conservation groups to patronize them: shrimpers in Louisiana and women in burqas and priests in Orthodox churches and slumdwellers in Mombasa turned out to be completely capable of understanding the threat to the future.
Those demonstrations were just a start (one we should have made long ago). We're following up in October -- on 10-10-10 -- with a Global Work Party. All around the country and the world people will be putting up solar panels and digging community gardens and laying out bike paths. Not because we can stop climate change one bike path at a time, but because we need to make a sharp political point to our leaders: we're getting to work, what about you?
We need to shame them, starting now. And we need everyone working together. This movement is starting to emerge on many fronts. In September, for instance, opponents of mountaintop removal are converging on DC to demand an end to the coal trade. That same month, Tim DeChristopher goes on trial in Salt Lake City for monkey-wrenching oil and gas auctions by submitting phony bids. (Naomi Klein and Terry Tempest Williams have called for folks to gather at the courthouse.)
The big environmental groups are starting to wake up, too. The Sierra Club has a dynamic new leader, Mike Brune, who's working hard with stalwarts like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. (Note to enviro groups: working together is fun and useful). Churches are getting involved, as well as mosques and synagogues. Kids are leading the fight, all over the world -- they have to live on this planet for another 70 years or so, and they have every right to be pissed off.
But no one will come out to fight for watered down and weak legislation. That's not how it works. You don't get a movement unless you take the other two steps I've described.
And in any event it won't work overnight. We're not going to get the Senate to act next week, or maybe even next year. It took a decade after the Montgomery bus boycott to get the Voting Rights Act. But if there hadn't been a movement, then the Voting Rights Act would have passed in... never. We may need to get arrested. We definitely need art, and music, and disciplined, nonviolent, but very real anger.
Mostly, we need to tell the truth, resolutely and constantly. Fossil fuel is wrecking the one earth we've got. It's not going to go away because we ask politely. If we want a world that works, we're going to have to raise our voices.
- Posted in
253 Comments so far
Show AllI'm sorry, but when you're mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, you don't go out and build a bike path. You engage in sustained civil disobedience against the centers of power until they are unable to maintain the illusion of 'business-as usual.' You get arrested by the hundreds outside the White House every damn day until you save the planet. I'm out the door right now to battle invasive weeds. It's a worthwhile thing, but I'm under no illusion that it will solve our most pressing global problem - carbon emissions. When you're as angry as McKibben says he is, you take the battle to the other side. Shaming the polluters has no meaning - they have no shame.
Also, when mad as hell, you SMASH a few things. It worked in the 1960's...
Did it really, though?? No, it didn't, because it led to the election of Nixon as POTUS for two consecutive terms, and this country's been listing to the Right ever since.
I'm fully convinced it ended the slaughter in Vietnam.
Great idea, but there are too many greedy, rich people who could give a damn about tomorrow and too many ignorant, uneducated people who believe in TV/Internet more than facts, so nothing will ever get better.
At least that is my opinion. BUT, I have to admit, I am presently living in China and here it seems the government and media are in 100% agreement that climate change is real. The only drawback is that the economy is developing so quickly here, that much pollution is being spewed. I know educated, middle-class Chinese who think nothing of unwrapping an ice cream bar and throwing the paper litter onto the ground. They look at me funny when I pick up the litter and deposit it into a garbage can that is only 3 meters away. So, once again, I feel the situation is hopeless.
Bill,
We have to enact REAL campaign finance and electoral reform. Industry is buying our elected officials. Period.
The power to change publicy policy is in our hands. The power to gain clean and fair elections is in our hands.
Let's get this done, today!
Other countries have the kind of campaign finance legislation that you speak of.
It makes no difference, the capitalists still have political power.
And electoral reform will make no difference because industry IS our elected officials.
The power to change campaign finance rules and to implement electoral reform lies in the hands of our representatives who are currently bought off by the corporate fascists. They hold all the levers of power. They will not relinquish them voluntarily. The only way to regain those levers of power is to forcefully take them. Stop participating in these sham elections. That is a great starting point for getting this done today.
Agree with BeRad. In addition, I would stop coddling Americns in their intellectual sloth by calling "350 ppm" a "wonky" number. Including politicians. Especially politicians.
Explain in plain English what that number means, with an attitude neither of superiority nor of patronizing "I know this is hard, and if you like stuff like this too much you may have an emotional problem and probably don't relate well to people." How about, "This is simple stuff, and if you can't even understand this, how the hell do you make breakfast in the morning?" Yes, willfully stupid people should be shamed for being willfully stupid and proud of it, at least until they comprehend high school level physics and chemistry.
Why are there not web sites that present this high school level material clearly, even present it using programmed learning so people can get it one step at a time and burn it in with practice? Because we are afraid of stifling their creativity? At this point, we need to stock people's minds with empirical facts and intellectual skills, then worry about creativity. Until then, they will creatively find ways to avoid facing reality.
Well said, spot on.
"This is simple stuff, and if you can't even understand this, how the hell do you make breakfast in the morning?" Yes, willfully stupid people should be shamed for being willfully stupid and proud of it, at least until they comprehend high school level physics and chemistry."
So true, but unfortunately the willfully stupid in this country are celebrated because they are so easily manipulated by our ruling class.
"... but unfortunately the willfully stupid in this country are celebrated because they are so easily manipulated by our ruling class."
That is at the heart of it. The ruling class pats them on the head for being good, little dumb tools (who, on cue, ridicule and attack those on the left trying to make changes for the better which upset their beloved masters), and that seems to them to be the best they can get and so they yearn for that.
"Agree with BeRad. In addition, I would stop coddling Americns in their intellectual sloth by calling "350 ppm" a "wonky" number. Including politicians. Especially politicians."
Personally I would have picked the number 357, as in 357 magnum. Then you could make posters with a giant gun with 357ppm CO2 written on it. The slogan could be something like: "You gotta ask yourself one question if you not going to do something about it. Do you feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?..."
What a FABULOUS marketing idea!
Except Dirty Harry used a .44 magnum:
"I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? "
Yea I know but 44ppm CO2 just doesn't work...
"willfully stupid people should be shamed for being willfully stupid "
It's called peer pressure and it works. No need to be cruel, however.
What you view as "willfully stupid", I view as "highly indoctrinated". The reality is, our media are owned by a handful of large corporations. Watch TV for five minutes and the corporate fascist message is loud and clear between commercials for government mandated auto insurance. Worse yet, google search any issue and you'll always find the right wing opposing opinion prominently displayed at the top of your search results. Why is that so? Google is a corporation. Son of a gun! Ma and pa can post up web sites to their hearts desire but can they compete with well financed astroturf orgs and right wing think tanks?
It isn't a matter of willfully stupid, it's a problem of total indoctrination. Until we come to realize this and start working against it, we have no hope.
"Even President Obama wouldn't lend a hand, investing not a penny of his political capital in the fight."
"Even"? That sissy boy fights for nothing. He has no convictions about anything except "winning" in Afghanistan, a demented and doomed project that absolutely requires millions of barrels of OIL per week to continue. He can't be bothered about the obvious facts of global warming if it means cutting back on oil drilling, in the Gulf and everywhere else, oil addiction, coal burning, and just generally carrying on like it was 1950 all over again. Obama is constitutionally incapable of fighting for this critical issue. He's the leader of the enemies to stopping global warming. The Senate may as well be a convocation of Exxon, Shell and BP executives. The inaction from either body would be precisely the same.
"Last year, with almost no money, our scruffy little outfit, 350.org, managed to organize what Foreign Policy called the "largest ever coordinated global rally of any kind" on any issue -- 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, 2,000 of them in the U.S.A."
This is reminiscent of all the demonstrations and protests against the Iraq invasion in 2002-3, and thereafter, even after the lying Mission Accomplished speech by the Moron in Chief. Corporate media deliberately IGNORES all the rallies and marches, because they're totally on the side of warmongers and polluters who don't give a shit about global warming. Most of corporate media will pay more attention to deniers and those who say we just don't have enough data or evidence it's even happening, "we need more studies" (until eternity), than they will to McKibben and his associates calling for immediate concerted action. Since MSM is owned by the very culprits causing GW, such as GE, they have a vested interest in ignoring all the outrage and anger over the Senate's obtuse, insane obliviousness. Harry Reid is about as effective in this struggle, or any other of real significance, as Tinkerbell would be.
"We need to shame them, starting now. And we need everyone working together."
They're immune to the emotional response known as shame. Just look at the past 50 years for evidence. These assholes can be caught red-handed stealing, rigging elections, taking bribes (lobbyists are bribing them every day), philandering, campaigning against gays while carrying on gay lifestyles themselves, lying about everything under the scorching sun, and THEY ARE SHAMELESS. It's part of the politician's DNA. No gene in there at all that might produce a sense of shame.
As far as "everyone working together," don't we need that desperately for virtually every last atrocity going on these days? If we could get everyone working together, we wouldn't have any problems. When McKibben figures out how to pull that one off, we're home free!
Excellent remarks.
Thinking in terms of foreign policy, maybe the key is to provide compelling evidence that global warming will be disastrous for Israel in the decades to come. Maybe that would finally lead to some real action.
I think we should all work to come together with a new movement that gives us the necessary time to educate, fund, and organize in a way such that everyone will surely see the need for change. I was thinking of calling it 800.org. You see, it's kind of a 'toll free' way of thinking. It gives us adequate time, I think. I am however open to the idea of 911.org (if it's available), because a sense of urgency BEFORE we hit 911 parts /mil c02 seems important.
The Reagan-Bush administration (oligarchy and heist) had but one principal consequence: the Gelding of Americans. We are an entire nation of eunuchs.
Fortunately we can still have pissing contests. Sitting down.
The last =aggressive= image I have is wheelies throwing their bodies from wheel chairs and chaining themselves to the south lawn fence of the White House to make plain to Congress it was necessary to pass an Americans with Disabilities Act. They won. Or, did they? Within 5 years the A.D.A. proved to have all the legal substance of cotton candy. That well-intended body of law is a national disgrace, and persons with disabilities wonder, "Why the hell did we bother?"
At every public demonstration I've seen for a generation the streets are lined with wheeled pushcarts full of Asian trinkets, like wind-up false teeth. The only people who buy them are undercover agents trying to look like they are normal protesters. "Down with - something!" "Up with Something Else!!"
Life upon this planet is based upon carbon, which is now killing us. Would silicone be that stupid?
Trylon
As long as imperialist wars are underway or in the planning stage, and, very importantly, as long as the United States maintains military bases all over the planet, there won't be any serious legislation on global warming and related environmental matters (e.g., oil drilling in the Gulf will continue) by the U.S. government.
Why?
Because the wars and the military bases (which are essential for the wars and the U.S. bullying of the planet) use enormous quantities of oil every single day.
the economic collapse necessary to save the planet will smack up against unemployment, shelter, food and water real quick...
property rights are an impediment to ecologic progress, and must go...
the day comes when one wakes and goes not to school, or work, but turns the big switch off, and lives as the rest of the world...just another one of the myriad creatures sharing a watershed...
what will the planet have left to give? depends on how long we wait to decide...
September 22, 2012?
Well said, my friend. I'm living outdoors, which is fine by me, except I don't have the "right" to build a shelter on "someone else's" land, including the king's forest.
The delay in changing lifestyles is critical. It has taken too long already. The flywheel effect coupled with negative feedback loops will heat, pollute, and degrade the planet for 50 years or more if everything was stopped today.
Deaths from this year's blazing record setting heat are starting to be reported. Incidences of cancers are climbing faster every year from destroyed ozone, polluted air, water and food. Phytoplankton population is already down 40%. More acres of my friends, the trees, are slashed and burned each and every day.
This book is cheap on ebay.
"Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: the unraveling of the american dream" Willian Ophuls
first edition 1973 (?)
last edition 2004 (?)
Peace and goodwill, Buck
found the book, and, yes, cheap...I'll check it out...
The first edition of ""Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity" was in 1977, and apparently the subtitle for that edition was "Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State". By 1992, the subtitle had changed to "The Unraveling of the American Dream".
Buck, dubet and others: Do you ever feel sad that so many books were written, warning of things to come, urging people to change course, and yet not many people acted on those warnings? Or do you feel angry?
This is a very shallow, superficial and lazy generation, not to mention stupid and arrogant. I'm sure there are exceptions, but it seems like a whole generation wasn't paying attention, distracted as it was by other things. And people have the gall to argue on climate change as if the whole thing started last year (when the "climategate" thing happened) or just a few years back (when Al Gore's documentary came out). It's one thing to learn about something rather late, but another thing altogether to pick up only the latest talking points supplied by the denial industry and argue against taking action.
Hey, Alcyon!
It gets complicated to try to grasp how we got where we are...certainly, there are periods that are easier to identify, but the personal issue is difficult...
I am not the most knowledgable about Buddha, but I heard one of his primary faults with humans was denial of one's own 'work', meaning self-responsibility...
In an age where everything we depend upon for survival is provided by others in exchange for our earned wages, self-responsibility regarding daily sustenance is the Unknown...and the un-owned...
the powers own the land, the food, the government, the courts, the banks, the schools, the media, etc...
we are vulnerable to many psychological demons: sloth, denial, shame, fear of violence, loss and death, etc., and those that crave power have used that to advantage, creating a world that provides gratification and distraction at great price that takes place out of our immediate surroundings...
we are also willing participants in our own distractions, which they gladly supply, altered to increase effectiveness on all fronts...
the messages and economic realities permeating our world make even thinking differently incredibly difficult, and with so many parents avoiding such challenges, it's no wonder children are having trouble...
my own son's generation are expecting domestic war, at some not-too-distant point...
physical realities, industrial and chemical devastation at various levels of depth in the natural world, the birth cycle and the food chain are the ones most fascinating, as they are going about their business, day in and day out, regardless of human debate...
radioactivity happens...
as Buck has said, we're so far gone now that even stopping won't make much difference over the next few decades, anyway...
I just don't want to be another generation of parents that lets the bullshit go unchallenged...a charge I'm afraid I level at my parents, and theirs, even if only within...
I don't know what to hope for realistically, so I cling to one straw:
A start date for whatever we choose...a date not so distant as to be too late, nor so soon as to seem unnecessary, or unprepared...
I have chosen September 22, 2012 as my suggested Global Start Date...that would be the day property rights dissolve, for example, and folks stop working at their jobs, and begin focusing on local, sustainable living by their own hand...cooperating with neighbors to best maintain local resources for ongoing use by all the living world...
I have to go...good hearing from you...
Check out my music, if you like...it's free, and relaxing:
http://www.davenjulieboles.com
Good points, dubet - I mean, important things to think about. I think there is a great deal of denial and skirting of personal responsibility even on this forum, and some vague talk of the system being at fault. Or capitalism. Not saying they're not factors, but they got to be so powerful partly (or mainly?) because people weren't paying attention. Just imagining that we live in a democracy doesn't make it so. Democracy takes work, and I think people haven't done enough work.
The British were able to take over India because the Indians weren't looking and the various kingdoms had ongoing tensions between them, so it was easy to start around the peripheries, play them off against each other, while supporting one side with weapons (in exchange for a consideration, of course), and before they knew it, they were paying taxes to a foreign corporation (and later to a foreign government). The first step in gaining control back was waking up. A similar requirement exists today - to wake up to today's reality. Except now, there's the more fundamental danger of pushing ecological limits.
P.S. It's my impression that the Indians are once again not looking and are being distracted, and the country is being taken over by the elite and the corporations (domestic as well as foreign) while the people are distracted. Eternal vigilance - unfortunately there is no escaping from that requirement. Or pay the price.
Move along folks nothing happening here. Just another book and another call for someone else to do something. It's over for Climate change it's not happening till people have no water and no food and then the rich will still stop any meaningful change. Go find and watch the 1970 classic Sci fi B-movie "Soylent Green." In that prophetic movie the Oceans are dead and people are reduced to eating a substance there told is being scientifically created but is really just reprocessed dead people. It predicts a HOT crowded planet with growing wealth disparity, where the Corp/Political elite run everything by the late 21st century and it's looking right on target.
I have mixed reactions to the steps Bill proposes:
Step 1: "Step one involves actually talking about global warming."
We have been talking endlessly about it but nothing true helpful has emerged from it. Those who don't want to talk endlessly about global warming are cast aside as "deniers" and that is WRONG WRONG WRONG !
Step 2: "Step two, we have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get."
The answers are there but everytime someone comes up with reasonable solutions, even the "environmentalists" invent excuses like "this isn't as good a source of fuel" or lie about it "being as bad as fossil fuels". Carbon may be a big culprit but sulfur comes from fossil fuels too and is responsible for the acid rain and damage to the ozone layer. Carbon alone would not have damaged the ozone layer and there are alternative sources that emit far less carbon and none of the other harmful chemicals. It doesn't take advanced organic chemistry to understand that every source of fuel is different and that engines must be tweaked and possibly redesigned. Creativity and innovative thinking have been crushed to the point that even the "environmentalists" will say "yup yup" and try making money out of it just like Algore.
Step 3: "If we're going to get any of this done, we're going to need a movement, the one thing we haven't had."
The movements exist but they are poorly organized, divided from within, often fixed on poor ideas, and end up going against their own goals just to get anywhere. The Sierra Club should be doing teleconferencing rather than flying around in private jets to meetings. Hell, we don't even give credit to thousands of ordinary efforts that are indirectly environmentally friendly.
Finally, he says that we need to muster the bodies, spirit, and passion. The bodies and spirit I can agree on but we'll need more of a universal agreement on that. He is wrong to mention only passion. A mix of passion and compassion are needed to make it work.
There is no way people can or will actually mitigate global climate change. Humans, as a species, are incapable of it. They may whine about it for a while, until the oceans reach their upper lip, but then there will be glorious silence and the earth will breathe a sigh of relief.
By earth standards, we are a minor irritant around for a very short time. By Darwinian standards, we are an abysmal failure as a species capable of long-term survival. Homo sapiens is insignificant, and the planet will thrive without us.
What are you asking for? Replant the planet with trees and leave the rest of the fossil fuels in the ground. (According to Hansen) Even then there are no guarantees. A price on carbon is just not going to do it.
Seeing that this is not going to happen, not in the U.S., not in Europe or Japan, not in Chindia or the BRICs countries, the global political consensus is to turn the planet into Venus, which btw once had water like planet Earth, and to enjoy every minute of exponential economic growth until then.
"For 20 years environmentalists have operated on the notion that we'd get action if we simply had scientists explain to politicians and CEOs that our current ways were ending the Holocene, the current geological epoch. That turns out, quite conclusively, not to work. We need to be able to explain that their current ways will end something they actually care about, i.e. their careers."
The only way to convince a politician that his job is at stake is to show him that there is an organized group in his district which will knock on every door in the district passing out literature condemning his vote or lack of vote on this issue. That kind of effort might counter the TV ads he will run using money from the energy industry.
" Last year, with almost no money, our scruffy little outfit, 350.org, managed to organize what Foreign Policy called the "largest ever coordinated global rally of any kind" on any issue -- 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, 2,000 of them in the U.S.A."
Yes, but how large were they? Does anyone really expect the national media to cover a demonstration in Des Moines at which 300 people showed up?
The number 2000, in the USA, implies that there were 40 to 50 demonstrations in each state. I know there were not 40 to 50 in Indiana, where I live, so where were they all?
Unfortunately, McKibben does not mention (perhaps he does in his book) the movement in the late 1960s that led to the passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts in the early 1970s, and the creation of the EPA. How was that acomplished?
"Yes, but how large were they? Does anyone really expect the national media to cover a demonstration in Des Moines at which 300 people showed up?
The number 2000, in the USA, implies that there were 40 to 50 demonstrations in each state. I know there were not 40 to 50 in Indiana, where I live, so where were they all?"
They cover the TEA party demonstrations with fervor because they have an agenda they agree with. Any protest about global warming will not be televised. They might show up with cameramen and reporters, but they wont air the story. This means we must take it to the next level. We must get rowdy and be willing to smash things and get arrested. Then they'll put it on the news.
And the reporter will say "Global Warming terrorists strike again. People who hate America are smashing things. We've got our brave riot police out there using tear gas, rubber bullets and microwaves to try to get them under control, but I think there's been some damage to local business. Oh here's the police chief now: "We rounded the terrorists up, ages 6-59, and we think we've caught them all. The mayor is turning them over to homeland security, which I think, Bob, plans to render them to black sites in Algeria.""
What do our corporate fascist taskmasters value above all else? Treasure. If radicals start destroying the treasure, I can assure you that things will change. You are right that the propaganda machine in this country will scream "terrorist" but the rules of karma apply. If your goal is not to strike fear in the hearts of people but you are instead focused on striking a blow against the enemy, there will be a tipping point. Cries of "terrorist" by the corporate fascists will soon ring hollow.
The question in my mind is this: how many lay offs, how many foreclosures, how much looting of the treasury, how much destruction of the environment, how many wars of foreign aggression are we will willing to put up with? I see a populace that is fully indoctrinated in the finer art of working against one's own self-interest to the point that "tipping points" might never see the light of day.
nothing we can do about it now...the USA has doomed us all..thanks assholes.
I don't defend US profligacy, but would suggest that the beginning of the deterioration goes much further back than the US - maybe even all the way to the founding of christianity - which has nothing but disdain for life on this planet.
Amen!
I'd go even further and say that it started with the ancient Jews.
Still, what's to be done?
I have to laugh because right now there are 55 posts on this site and about 40 different ideas. And we're all the ones that believe something should be done.
LOL We're screwed.
I'm just preparing to pass info from generation to generation that the natives of this continent had it right. And that's the only way it can be.
No wheels uless it's a ritual medicine wheel. No metals unless they're used as found for jewelry. Heat from wood only. Grow or kill your own food. Take care of your family and respect the elders.
And above all....love the earth as your mother!
Maybe that info will make it through the years of destruction ahead and the survivors will understand why it has to be kept that way.
"LOL We're screwed."
As we should be given our choices in the world.
yes...good...
"Heat from wood only."
Burning wood releases CO2 just as much as burning fossil fuels. In addition, to the extent one has to chop down trees, it hinders the formation of carbon sinks.
Yes it releases CO2. But it's completely renewable and non-polluting. There is virtually nothing in our modern lives that does not require petroleum in it's manufacture or maintenance. Our present lives are simply not sustainable. Unless our numbers are reduced to a point where fossil fuel burning becomes insignificant. And that number would be at about the same number as before fossil fuels were used. So that would be about 400 years ago before the widespread use of coal. Maybe several hundred million.
Look around you. Find anything manufactured; appliances, fixtures, construction materials, even wood, that doesn't require huge energy expenditures in it's manufacture and/or transportation. Not much left is there? I have some rocks and firewood. And even the firewood used gasoline and oil in cutting and hauling.
And it took lots of carbon to manufacture the head on the splitting maul and the carving of the handle was done by machine. Even if done by hand, it required a metal knife that required carbon to smelt the ore, and make the steel that it was forged from and it had to be shipped here probably from Pakistan or Vietnam.
Carbon is much more involved in our lives than most people realize.
>>glb wrote: Carbon is much more involved in our lives than most people realize.
True. That's why its' important to get used to numbers - regarding our consumption levels and realistic potential for renewable energy capacity in the foreseeable future. That should logically point to massive conservation efforts - perhaps even to levels that may be considered "extreme" by many - that is, by those who haven't looked at the numbers.
Even before the industrial revolution, things were becoming dangerously unsustainable in Europe - due to massive deforestation. Wood was used for everything, and there just wasn't enough of it. Coal came in, in the nick of time, so to speak - of course with its consequences.
Consequences....absolutely!
I read of a study done a year or 2 ago that (not sure of these numbers, approximate) each human on the planet requires 13 hectares of land using all known conservation and technologies in order to be sustainable. But there is only 11 hectares per human available. In other words we're sucking the life out of the planet.
I'm sure my figures are wrong but the point is that this world cannot go on as it is.
And Ive said this many times. Many times! If we don't find a way to reduce the population and consumption, mother nature will do it for us. And it will be very ugly.
Burning wheat in Russia may be the beginning of serious food shortages all over the world. And all the carbon in the world isn't gonna feed the people who are already starving.
You can't go back. And I'm not sure most people would trade living the way they are for the way you describe.
The USA has company. Just look up the countries with the highest per capita carbon emissions and ecological footprint.