80 percent lower than 1990 levels by 2050… that’s what science says greenhouse gas emissions must be cut to avoid the worst disruptions faced by civilization since an apparent comet strike and the great floods that ended the last “ice age” (apologies to those with brains less dense than mine, who realize just how complex are the intermingled causes of atmospheric warming happening now; I speak here as if all effects were simplified into a CO2 equivalent).
By comparison, the much maligned Kyoto Protocol called for the industrialized world to trim emissions between 6 and 8 percent from 1990 levels by 2012. Without the USA, even this modest “test run” of climate change reduction activity ran afoul, resulting in an 10% global increase to 2009 (36 ppm increase / ~353 ppm 1990, and probably reaching a 12% global increase by the end of the treaty in 2012). The pending Copenhagen agreement being hailed by the US and China is a new and costlier attempt now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 3% under 1990 levels by 2020. And then create another 77% reduction below 1990 levels within the next thirty years, as the global human population heads upwards toward 9 billion or more? It strains credulity. And do not forget that this severe target (80% below 1990 levels by 2050) was in response to an assumption that doubling CO2 levels marked a danger point, when it was in fact nothing more than the hypothetical case chosen in the late 19th century (Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier's 1824 theory was labeled the "greenhouse effect" when Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius coined the term during his painstaking year-long hand calculations of the rough effects of a halved and doubled level of CO2). The real danger point at which climate appears to enter an uncontrolled spiral is now agreed to be around 350 ppm CO2 equivalent, which we passed back in the late 1980s (the atmosphere now contains about 390 ppm CO2 equivalent, increasing 2 ppm per year).
To sit back and say, “Well, then I guess there’s nothing we can do any more” is to forget that adaptation consumes far more energy, capital and labor than anyone alive today can comprehend, dwarfing to meaninglessness the current US budget debates over health care issues. All future life bodes that we include mitigation as a strategy, even as we adapt, until the attempts prove ineffective a hundred or a thousand years from now. In a recent book The End of the Long Summer, Author/reporter Dianne Dumanoski recognized,
"It will take conscious effort to resist taking refuge either in despair – in the conviction that 'it's too late' – or in the alternative, to bask in groundless, sunny optimism that 'we'll figure out something, because science always does.' "
The one thing to come clear out of the Copenhagen climate talks will be consensus of obligation to help the world's poor half (“half” sounds so much smaller than the 3,400,178,237 people included in the US Census Bureau’s estimated global population on 11/30/2009). If the world’s investment in these people only results in the American dream for all (a spectacular result for those of us who make or sell things for a living), then truly we will have lost the planet. In the United States, it seems to me that a pending climate agreement with transfer of $10 billion of wealth annually to the world’s poor to assist with mitigation and adaptation could become a vehicle to finally settle debts with African Americans and native peoples who have long sought justice. Why not complete reparations to the descendents of the slaves freed by President Lincoln and to any Native Americans who are still left behind, in the poor half of the world’s population? Direct wealth transfer would utilize all the vaunted strengths of the free market to help: those most in danger to relocate, those with unsustainable infrastructure to reinvest and reinvent, those with insufferable lives to better their circumstances.
We in the culture-defining US must lead toward a survivable planet by example, a duty we have essentially shirked at the highest levels (Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart Stores, Chevron, ConocoPhillips to name only those US companies in the top 10 global corporations, and not to beleaguer further the US people and its congress/President with their timidity) to date. Blaming China is cowardly, as that country’s emissions per capita remain (for now) right at the limit of sustainability, about 4 tons CO2 equivalent per person per year. The lack of change in America, where we continue our 20 tons per person per year “lifestyle” binge, has been inexcusable since at least 1959 (if you go by Dr. Edward Teller’s-Dr. Strangelove’s-warning in “Energy Patterns of the Future” presented to energy industry elite at the 1959 “Energy and Man” symposium in NYC). Business as usual is by now an outright crime against humanity, as viewed by our children.
President Obama, much as I love him, feels constrained to make a whirlwind visit and speech then leave the true negotiations to others at Copenhagen, a bully pulpit function in the absence of real legislative US action. Every city should host a vigil or a protest to bring attention to the momentous nature of the discussion and decisions that will be made there. If you want to be a part of the action on the 11th or 12th of December (Bill McKibben of www.350.org is calling for coordinated action on either the 11th or 12th): vigils outside congressional offices, letters to the editor, op-eds, or local direct action. Visit or join your www.1sky.org local group for more.
