The Most Important Number on Earth

Sooner or later,
you have to draw a line. We've spent the last 20 years in the opening
scenes of what historians will one day call the Global Warming Era-the
preamble to the biggest drama that humans have ever staged, the
overture that hints at the themes that will follow for centuries to
come. But none of the notes have resolved, none of the story lines yet
come into clear view. And that's largely because until recently we
didn't know quite where we were. From the moment in 1988 when a nasa scientist named James Hansen
told Congress that burning coal and gas and oil was warming the earth,
we've struggled to absorb this one truth: The central fact of our
economic lives (the ubiquitous fossil fuel that developed the developed
world) is wrecking the central fact of our physical lives (the stable
climate and sea level on which civilization rests). For a while, and
much longer in the US than elsewhere, we battled over whether this was
true. But warm year succeeded warm year and that fight began to
subside. Instead, the real question became, is this a future peril, the
kind of thing you take out a reasonably priced insurance policy to
guard against? Or is it the oh-my-lord crisis you drop everything else
to deal with? Will Hitler be happy with the Sudetenland, or is the
world going to spend every cent it has, not to mention tens of millions
of lives, fighting him off? Trouble, or TROUBLE? These last 12 months,
we've found out.

It was September 2007 that the tide began to turn. Every summer Arctic sea ice
melts, and every fall it refreezes. The amount of open water has been
steadily increasing for three decades, a percent or two every year-it's
been going at about the pace that the hairline recedes on a middle-aged
man. It was worrisome, and scientists said all the summer ice could be
gone by 2070 or so, which is an eyeblink in geologic time but an
eternity in politician time. In late summer of last year, though, the melt turned into a rout-it
was like those stories of people whose hair turns gray overnight. An
area the size of Colorado was disappearing every week; the Northwest
Passage was staying wide open all September, for the first time in
history. Before long the Arctic night mercifully descended and the ice
began to refreeze, but scientists were using words like "astounding."
They were recalculating-by one nasa
scientist's estimate the summer Arctic might now be free of ice by
2012. Which in politician years is "beginning of my second term."

The
key phrase, really, was "tipping point." As in "I'd say we are reaching
a tipping point or are past it for the ice. This is a strong indication
that there is an amplifying mechanism here." That's Pal Prestrud of the
Center for International Climate and Environmental Research-Oslo. Or this, from Mark Serreze, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center
at the University of Colorado: "When the ice thins to a vulnerable
state, the bottom will drop out...I think there is some evidence that
we may have reached that tipping point, and the impacts will not be
confined to the Arctic region."

"Tipping
point" is not, in this context, an idle buzzword. It means that the
physical world is taking over the process that humans began. We poured
carbon into the atmosphere, trapping excess heat; that excess heat
began to melt ice. When that ice was melted, there was less white up
north to reflect the sun's rays back out to space, and more blue ocean
to absorb them. Events began to feed upon themselves. And in the course
of the last year, we've seen the same thing happening in other systems.
In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report
showing that 2007 had seen a sudden and dramatic surge in the amount of
methane, another heat-trapping gas, in the atmosphere. Apparently, one
reason is that when we burned all that fossil fuel and began raising
the temperature, we also started melting the permafrost-melting eight
times more of it in some places over two decades than had thawed for
the previous 1,000 years. And as that frozen soil thaws, it releases
methane; enough of it now bubbles out to make "hot spots" in lakes and
ponds that don't freeze during the deepest part of the Siberian winter.
The more methane, the more heat, the more methane. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The
final piece of the puzzle came early this year, and again from James
Hansen. Twenty years after his crucial testimony, he published a paper
with several coauthors called "Target Atmospheric CO₂" (.pdf).
It put, finally, a number on the table-indeed it did so in the boldest
of terms. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on
which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted," it
said, "paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO₂ will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

Get
that? Let me break it down for you. For most of the period we call
human civilization, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
hovered at about 275 parts per million. Let's call that the Genesis
number, or depending on your icons, the Buddha number, the Confucius
number, the Shakespeare number. Then, in the late 18th century, we
started burning fossil fuel in appreciable quantities, and that number
started to rise. The first time we actually measured it, in the late
1950s, it was already about 315. Now it's at 385, and growing by more
than 2 parts per million annually.

And
it turns out that that's too high. We never had a number before, so we
never knew whether we'd crossed a red line. We half guessed and half
hoped that the danger zone might be 450 or 550 parts per million-those
were still a little ways in the distance. Therefore we could get away
with thinking like the young Augustine: "Lord, make me chaste, but not
yet." Not anymore. We have been told by science that we're already over
the line.

And
so we're now in the land of tipping points. We know that we've passed
some of them-Arctic sea ice is melting, and so is the permafrost that
guards those carbon stores. But the logic of Hansen's paper was clear.
Above 350, we are at constant risk of crossing other, even worse,
thresholds, the ones that govern the reliability of monsoons, the
availability of water from alpine glaciers, the acidification of the
ocean, and, perhaps most spectacularly, the very level of the seas. It
is at least conceivable that instead of a slow, steady rise in the
height of the oceans, we could see rapid melt in Greenland and the West
Antarctic, where much of the world's frozen water resides. We can't
rule out, warns Hansen, a sea level rise of up to 20 feet this century.
Plug that into Google Earth and watch waterfront developments turn into
high-priced reefs. We can't rule out, in other words, the collapse of
human society as we've known it. "If humanity wishes to preserve a
planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which
life on Earth is adapted..." We should add the phrase to the oath of
office for every politico on the third planet.

So what does this mean? If you took 350 to be the most important number on the planet, what would it imply?

In
essence, it means that we've got to transform the world's economy far
more quickly than we'd hoped. Almost everyone knows that this
transformation is coming-that by century's end we won't be relying on
fossil fuel, both because the oil will have run out and because the
environmental damage will be intense. But the question is how quickly.
The kind of change envisioned before last year was still a little
leisurely-maybe the developed world cutting its carbon emissions 15 or
20 percent by 2020. That's far more than the Bush administration or its
energy-industry cronies would go for, of course-at ExxonMobil's annual
meeting last spring, ceo Rex
Tillerson said he envisioned a world that still used fossil fuel for
two-thirds of its power in 2030. A world where change came slowly
enough that everyone could make every last penny off their sunk
investments in coal mines and oil platforms. And a world where
politicians didn't need to raise the price of carbon steeply, and hence
didn't need to arouse voters.

But
the 350 world looks different. We're not worried we might have a weight
problem. We've been to the doctor and the doctor has said, "Your
cholesterol is too high. Scaring me. You're in the danger zone. You
need to change your diet and then you need to pray that you get back
down where you're supposed to be before the stroke that's coming at
you." When that happens, you clean the cheese out of the refrigerator
and go cold turkey.

In energy terms, that would look like this:

[ 1 ] No
more new coal plants, because although the world still has immense
amounts of coal, it's immensely dirty. And the people who tell you
about clean coal are blowing smoke-literally.

[ 2 ] A
cap on the amount of carbon the country can produce-which, in essence,
is a tax. America would say, just as it does now with sulfur from coal
plants, "We're only going to release so much carbon every year." CO₂
would stop being free; in fact, it would become expensive. In order to
simplify the process, the upstream producer who mines, imports, or
sells the fossil fuel would get the tab. ExxonMobil would have to pay
dearly for a permit to release x amount of carbon, a cost it would pass
on to consumers. Then those consumers would use less, and markets would
go to work figuring out all the possible ways to cut demand and boost
renewables.

[ 3 ] An international agreement, including China and India, to do the same thing around the world.

Now, these are
three of the hardest tasks we've even thought about since we took on
Hitler. They go to the very heart of the way our economy operates: We
get most of our electricity from fossil fuels, any increase in the
price of energy affects every single part of the economy, and China and
India are pulling people out of poverty largely by burning cheap coal.
If you're a person who uses a lot of fossil fuel, i.e. an American,
then they're unappealing. If you're a person who would like to use even
a little energy, i.e. almost anyone in the developing world, then
they're maddening. And yet they are what the physics and chemistry of
the situation dictate. So the question becomes, how to make them happen?

The
logic imposed by 350 is fairly straightforward. In order to keep
Americans from rebelling, we need to take the money we're charging
ExxonMobil for those pollution permits and return it to the
taxpayers-everyone needs to get a check every month to, in essence, buy
us all off. To help make us whole for the price rises that will
inevitably come, the price rises that will do the work of wringing
fossil fuel out of the economy. ExxonMobil would pay, then we'd pay-but
we'd get some of the money back in the mail. We've got to make the
switch so fast that it's going to be brutally expensive-think $10
gas-and our democracy will never support it for long without that
monthly check.

But
we can't give ourselves back all the money. Because some of it is
needed to make the rest of the world whole-to build windmills for the
Indians so they won't use the same cheap coal that we used for 200
years in order to get rich. That is, we're going to need a Marshall
Plan for carbon-with the same mix of idealism and self-interest that
motivated the Marshall Plan in Hitler's wake.

We
also need serious investment in infrastructure, both technological and
human. For instance, concepts like concentrated solar power-those big
mirror arrays in the desert-have gained real momentum in the last 18
months. Former Clinton administration energy analyst Joseph Romm
recently calculated that such arrays could provide America with all of
its electricity from a 92-square-mile grid in the Southwest desert-but
only if promoted via loan guarantees for the entrepreneurs who build
them and a new generation of transcontinental transmission lines.
Meanwhile, demand is skyrocketing for small rooftop solar panels, but
increasingly there's a shortage of trained installers, which means our
community colleges need money to start training them. No matter what
the price of energy, homes aren't going to insulate themselves-this is
the great opening for a green-jobs revolution. (See "The Truth About Green Jobs.")

You'll
note here I'm talking more about what we should do in the US House (and
Senate) in the next year or two than which bulbs you should be changing
in your house. diy
conservation makes great practical sense, but we won't save the planet
that way. One by one, trying to do the right thing, we add up to...not
nearly enough. You cannot make the math work that way-there are too
many sockets and too many tailpipes and most of all too much inertia
for voluntary action to do the trick. It didn't work when President
Bush made voluntary reduction by corporations his global warming
"policy," and it won't work fast enough with individuals either.

Which
is not to say that life at home doesn't need to change. It does-and it
will, once we've taken the political step of making the price of carbon
reflect the damage it does to the environment. Look at what happened
this past year when the price of gas finally rose far enough to get our
attention. We began riding trains and buses in record numbers. Total
miles driven fell, sharply, for the first time since we started keeping
records in 1942. We groused and moaned and we started to change.
General Motors decided to sell its Hummer factory.

If
we get that check every month to cover some of the damage, it will help
attenuate the very real heat-or-eat dilemma that will grip many people
this coming winter, but the incentive to change will still be there.
Buses and bikes. Smaller homes that are easier to heat. Solar panels,
bought on the installment plan with loans paid off from the power
generated on your roof. Local food (and lots more local farmers).
Vacations in the neighborhood-no more jetting off for the weekend.

You
can see every one of these trends in embryo already, driven by the
run-up in energy prices that we've seen so far. The quick contraction
of the airline industry. The collapse in home values in the distant
suburbs, while homes along the commuter rail lines fare better. Again
the question is all about pace-what will make them happen fast enough,
across a wide enough swath of the planet. Al Gore
set the example with his call for a 10-year conversion to noncarbon
electricity. It's at the outer edge of doable, and the outer edge is
where we need to be. We'll have plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on
sale by 2010. The question is, can we have nothing else on sale by
2020? We built more than half of the interstate highway system in a
decade. Would rebuilding our rail networks to a European standard be
all that much harder? Can we get the price of energy up quickly enough
to get markets on the task of finding a low-carbon way of life that
works? And by works, I mean reverses the flow of carbon into the
atmosphere. Because physics and chemistry won't reward good intentions.
Methane is seriously uninterested in compromise. Permafrost,
notoriously, refuses to bargain. Even the absolute political power
represented by King Canute couldn't hold back the rising seas. Those
forces will only pay attention if we can scramble back below 350.

Forcing
that pace requires a new kind of politics. It requires forging a
consensus that this toughest of all changes must happen. The consensus
must be broad, it must come quickly, and it must encompass the whole
earth-they don't call it global warming for nothing.

The
list of things on which we've achieved a broad and deep global
consensus is pretty much limited to...Coke Is It. And that took
billions of dollars and several decades, and it involved inducing
people to drink sugar water. The odds against a strong global movement
about anything tougher than that are low, with language barriers,
religious barriers, cultural barriers. And we start from such
incredibly different places-Americans use 12 times the energy of
sub-Saharan Africans.

And
yet we do have this one tool that at least offers the possibility, a
tool that wasn't fully there even a few years ago. The Internet-and its
attendant technologies, like cell phones and texting-does link up most
of the known world at this point. You can get pretty far back of beyond
in most of the world, and someone in that village has a mobile.

And
we have a number-350. The most important number on earth. If the
Internet has a cosmic purpose, this could be it-to take that number and
spread it everywhere on the planet, so that everyone, even if they knew
little else about climate change, understood that it represented a kind
of safety, a bulwark against the monsoon turning erratic, the sea
rising over their fields, the mosquito spreading up their mountain.

I'm
part of a group of people calling ourselves 350.org. Our goal is
simple-to try to get people everywhere to spread that number. We've
started finding musicians and artists, athletes and video makers, and
most of all activists, the kinds of people who are working to save
watersheds or babies, or to educate girls or to block dams, or any of
the other thousand lovely things that won't happen if we allow the
basic physical stability of the planet to come unglued. We need a lot
of noise, and we need it fast, in the scant months-14 now-before the
world meets in Copenhagen next December to draw up a new climate
treaty. Because one clear implication of 350 is that that treaty is our
last real chance to get it right. If we don't, then all we'll be
dealing with is the consequences. Once the ocean really starts to rise,
dike building is pretty much the only project.

It's
not clear if a vocal world citizenry will be enough to beat inertia and
vested interest. If 350 emerges as the clear bar for success or
failure, then the odds of the international community taking effective
action increase, though the odds are still long. Still, these are the
lines it is our turn to speak. To be human in 2008 is to rise in
defense of the planet we have known and the civilization it has spawned.