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Climate Change: Local Action Speaks Louder Than Global Words
International climate talks may be failing to make progress, but the grassroots movement around the world has never been stronger
Post-Copenhagen gloom seems to be morphing in to pre-Cancún despondency. In the battle over how to combat climate change, world leaders have descended to the level of petty bickering. Progress at the latest round of talks in Tianjin last week was timid, and some pundits are already declaring December's COP16 summit in Mexico to be dead in the water.
In the real world this year, Pakistan and China suffered flooding and mudslides, Russia's forests burned, and millions of people in Niger and Sahel Africa faced famine due to crop failures resulting from extreme heat and drought. A 100-square mile piece of ice broke off of Greenland's Petermann glacier, and 17 countries experienced their highest-ever temperatures, while only one country recorded a record low.
Climate change will have increasingly devastating impacts. We are all in the same boat and it is sinking. Many continue to argue about why and how fast it is sinking, and who should be the first to plug the holes. But others are out there rolling up their sleeves – people everywhere are just getting on with making the boat seaworthy again. Such efforts were celebrated in a worldwide work party on Sunday, with more than 7,300 events in 188 countries. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, there were low-carbon lunches, tree-planting events, solar installations, bike rides and waste recycling efforts.
There is a lot going on outside the negotiations, and it is inspiring. India, the Philippines and South Africa are among a number of larger developing nations, already experiencing the damaging effects of global warming, who have identified the competitive advantages to be reaped from a lower carbon economy and have made ambitious plans for emissions cuts and renewables investments.
The president of the Maldives, one of the nations most imminently threatened by climate change, has pledged to make his country carbon neutral by 2020. Several other small nations are taking a similar path. Antigua and Barbuda, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, the Marshall Islands and Samoa all pledged to slash greenhouse gas emissions and pursue green growth and development.
It's become clearer than ever that those nations that fail to lead on renewable energy risk becoming the big losers. Increasingly, money is flowing towards the green future. As the US Senate baulked at even the weakest of climate and energy bills in August, Deutsche Bank announced its annual "green" investment dollars – worth $6bn-$7bn (£3.8bn-£4.4bn) – would now focus on opportunities in China and western Europe. The bank's head of asset management described the US as "asleep at the wheel on this industrial revolution".
While Washington and others slept, China this year emerged as the leader in the green energy race.
Ordinary people across all time zones have accepted that it is now a matter of looking for solutions, rather than arguing about the nature of the problem. The 10 October "day of doing" was just the start of a wave of action this week, with additional campaigns planned for 16 October (World Food day) and 17 October (Anti-Poverty day). By the end of the month, hundreds of thousands of people will have stood up for action on global warming and its effects.
The momentum is growing, and it sends a simple message to politicians: the mandate for change is here and now–- we're doing our part, now you do yours.
Delegations heading for Cancún must realise that the ground is shifting beneath their feet. Make no mistake, we still need an international agreement: to ensure the scale of investment sufficient to keep temperature rise below 1.5C, and to do right by the poorest nations and communities which suffer disproportionately from a problem not of their making. At the very least, Mexico must deliver a clear acknowledgment that the targets on the table are insufficient to stave off catastrophic climate change, and real progress on key issues such as climate finance (additional money, not reheated leftovers). This would not only help restore trust in the international negotiations, but bring politics back into step with the public mood.
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25 Comments so far
Show AllWhile all of us applaud local efforts to reduce our carbon footprints, we need to understand a point that the author doesn't discuss.
Local governments in many countries are constrained by these damnable so-called free-trade agreements from controlling their local environments. Efforts to enact city, county, and state ordinances and laws to limit polluting activities are met with lawsuits based on these agreements.
q
The resolve/awareness to act locally for our own survival must reach an intensity strong enough to ignor or cut through the matrix of commercial death from above.
When "they" see your success, they will follow your lead.
This is somewhat similar to the people staying in their homes when the fraud-based foreclosures are served. The emperor has no clothes.
Just do it!
I'm thrilled over the positive efforts by local governments in cities, towns and countries around the world to affect change; that is our only hope, to create the wave from the bottom up. But if we don't start including "zero population growth" as a part of the big pie, it won't matter what anyone does. Why aren't the same people organizing rallies to switch from fossil fuels to more energy efficient methods also talking about overpopulation of the human being? Therein lies the biggest problem ever: OUR NUMBERS.
I'm all for the great changes taking place around the world. Next action let's hand out condoms too. The root of all global problems lies in, "TOO MANY PEOPLE!"
I sure haven't seen any whales or dolphins at the gas pump filling up lately, not to mention no gorillas or Dodo birds dumping their plastic garbage into the ocean to create floating dead zones.
BTOB (back to one billion)
Elizabeth Tjader
Are you volunteering?
One person in the USA consumes orders of magnitude more than people in impoverished nations.
Your simplistic proposal for saving the earth by population reduction over looks this one basic fact.
True, but there are orders of magnitude more people outside the USA than inside the USA.
Your simplistic response overlooks this one basic fact.
We've got to do both: yes, radically reduce US per-capita consumption, absolutely ... but also halt exponential "capita" growth -- both domestically and globally. I don't see how we can avoid continued environmental self-destruction without doing both.
Economic development in poor countries typically reins in population growth. Reason? Poor countries are more likely to delegate women to subservient roles. Thus constrained, what's an intelligent, ambitious woman to do... especially about her inability to earn any kind of retirement or Social Security? Answer: pop out as many little b**tards as she can, and hope one of them moves to America and ends up rich. Its a stunningly simple calculus: pop out 10 kids, 3 die in childhood, 4 never get anywhere, leaves you with a fantastic chance of living comfortably into old age.
We assume people in poor countries are stupid. Nothing could be further from the truth. They have an excellent understanding of their immediate situation, and what they can do to increase their odds of living a full, happy life.
This was first fully understood in Italy in the 1960s. Thanks to economic development and liberal policies that encouraged women in the workplace, women saw an alternative to motherhood as a life-path. Suddenly, Europes highest birthrate became Europes lowest birthrate.
Actually, only one order of magnitude.
one in seven people live like USAians, the "first world lifestyle"
That's not a difference of an order of magnitude difference
Also the birth rate has already been dropping all over the world for decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rates
Bucky Fuller showed us that if we wanted to, we could build smarter cities that house more people sustainably in smaller areas and let the world start healing itself without population reduction
This article comes across as terribly pollyannish to me.
In my area, gasoline prices are going down, SUV continue to fly off the dealers lots, public transit is being slashed - which will trigger a flight of employers from the transit-friendly downtown to the transit-impossible outer suburbs. Five years on, Me and my wife remain the lone pioneers and users of 2-wheel, traffic-capable plug-in electric transportation in western Pennsylvania.
Our probable new governor promises a completely unregulated and untaxed gas drilling boom.
Public hostility toward any action in addressing global warming is at an all time high. Every politician denounces "socialistic cap and trade". ("Cap and "trade", in the manner of "Obamacare", being opposition to ANY measures to address AGW.) I cannot comment on the wind farms going up in my area without someone commenting "those things would never be build without socialistic government subsidies". Next time, I will remind them that their car depends on a socialistic government subsidy called "streets and highways".
It may get a lot hotter as the Sun has been in a sustained quiet phase and the active (more heat and radiation phase) of the usual eleven year cycle is a few years away.
The contribution of the solar cycle is regarded as an unimportant factor in global climate. The variation in solar radiance is one watt per m^2 out of 1367 watts per m^2.
I think 0.2 or 2 tenths of a degree over an 11 year period will melt a lot more polar ice and make the ocean a little warmer.
The sun is in a cool period now, so i don't think it is "unimportant".
The warming is not as strong as green house gasses, but the next 15 years the sun will be hotter and it does have an accumulative effect.
Where did you get the 0.2 degree figure from? Scientists agree that the 11 year solar variation, about, 0.07 percent, is not a significant factor in the earths climate.
If you visit the SOHO or SDO sites, you will see see that the quiet period ended early this year and there has been a lot of sunspot activity.
Maybe all scientists don't agree, Sabo.
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-
on-earth/glob-warm.html
"Solar irradiance changes have been measured reliably by satellites for only 30 years. These precise observations show changes of a few tenths of a percent that depend on the level of activity in the 11-year solar cycle. Changes over longer periods must be inferred from other sources. Estimates of earlier variations are important for calibrating the climate models. While a component of recent global warming may have been caused by the increased solar activity of the last solar cycle, that component was very small compared to the effects of additional greenhouse gases. According to a NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) press release, "...the solar increases do not have the ability to cause large global temperature increases...greenhouse gases are indeed playing the dominant role..."
Where did you here the suns heat variation is not important? This is just another reason why green house gases must be decreased. I am not denying Global Warming if that is what you think.
I am hoping for winter not quite so cold.
Last winter's temperatures were fairly mild here in the mid-Atlantic US.
All politics is federal.
Just a note to those who believe birth rates are dropping all over the world. Big deal, look a little deeper, though it appears birth rates might be slowing down, the base population has grown exponentially over the last two hundred years. Gee, what does that mean? From a mathematical point of view, it means birth rates are not dropping at all.
Example: 10 humans have 2 children each. 20 humans have 1 child each. That's a no brainer. Now imagine 7 billion humans having 2 children. Not a pretty picture for planet Earth. We add 80 million new humans to the earth every year.
The population of human consumers is not dropping at all.
Elizabeth Tjader
The population-people have a serious misunderstanding of how capitalist economics works. Fossil fuel use is a function of economic activity, and the type of economic activity, not population. Lower the earths population to 1 billion, and the capitalists would simply find ways to get the average populant to use at least 5 times more. It is not at all hard to do.
DID you all know :
The Famous, Magnificent Giant Seqouia and Redwood trees of northern california - some individual trees actually as old as 5,000 years --
could not survive or thrive if the vast network of underground tiny mushrooms and related species disappeared? it is this vast, complex underground network, like a living nervous and blood-system that is the foundation of the great forests and all living things in it...for being the one that continually refreshes and enriches and mixes that ground on which all others depend.
food for thought.
I did, and their root systems go but eight feet down. In days of yore, they used to fell them with dynamite. 80% of the wood would be rendered unusable for lumber, but the trees so massive that huge profits were still made by the barons.
Anyway, your point is well taken. Respect all life and the web of interdependence. The smallest organisms are as important as the largest.
A short story for my friend teddy;
Camping in Kings Canyon Sequoia National Park is free in winter for those brave or nuts enough. So, I shoveled out four foot of snow under a giant and struggled to hike around. Got back to the truck in early afternoon to warm up some soup. BOOM shhhhhhhh. The sun warned the trees three hundred feet up and they dropped snow bombs on the unwary below.
Brave or nuts, you decide. Muir would have done it if he had wheels, but probably have picked a spot out from under.
Peace and goodwill, Buck
It's beyond strange that people keep proclaiming China the leader in clean energy when they are in fact the world's biggest polluter and getting bigger all he time. China is going to bury the world in soot and CO2 regardless of what the rest of us do. And they are doing it with Australia's help as the fat cats ship coal to China while there continent burns it's way to hell. Ultimately nobody cares enough to abandon their own comforts for the sake of change.