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Civilization’s last chance
Bill McKibben, Los Angeles Times
The planet is nearing a tipping point on climate change, and it gets much worse, fast.
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Even for Americans — who are constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little terminal right now.
It’s not just the economy: We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn corn into gas, it helps send the price of a loaf of bread shooting upward and helps ignite food riots on three continents. It’s that everything is so tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the “limits to growth” suddenly seem … how best to put it, right.
All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.
There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
… A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.
After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can’t do this one light bulb at a time. And if this 350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well, sometimes those passes get caught.
We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that “350” stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.
Hansen’s words were well-chosen: “a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not.
Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won’t exist, at least not for long, this side of 350. That’s the limit we face.
Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is The Bill McKibben Reader.
(11 May 2008)
Also at Tom Dispatch.
The Defining Moment for Climate Change
Contributor Joseph Neri writes:
There’s that year, 2012, again.
Danish PM links Energy Security and Climate Change
(Danish media)
The Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who is also EU president forerunner according to some major media, sent strong political signals when hosting a climate conference in the Danish parliament on the 9th of May 2008. According to the PM, Denmark needs to take the international lead in creating a green technological revolution, benefiting the climate as well as future energy policy. The oil from the North Sea effectively makes Denmark the only net exporter of energy within the EU, thereby being independent from instable regions where human rights are being violated.
“This is indeed a comfortable situation. For the sake of energy security as well as the climate, we must therefore break away from our dependence on oil”.
The British economist Nicholas Stern was one of the invited conference guests. In line with Mr. Stern’s views, the Danish PM stated: … “costs from doing something about climate change certainly does not exceed the costs from doing nothing”.
The Danish liberal-conservative government used to be very sceptical towards the view that climate change is caused by human activities.
The government has now – at least rhetorically – come full circle towards hosting the 2009 Conference of the Parties for The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with the hope of negotiating a successor to the Kyoto protocol.
Sources: jp.dk/uknews/politics/article1335163.ece www.berlingske.dk/article/20080509/politik/805090357/
(9 May 2008)
Assembled by EB contributor Poul Holm Andreasen.
David Attenborough: ‘Wasting energy is an appalling thing’
Marissa Newhall, Washington Post
… Q: A lot of people are trying to make conservation a part of everyday life. What really counts?
Attenborough: The main thing is to avoid waste, to recognize that waste is actually sinful, and it is a gross damage to the world’s environment from all kinds of points of view. Wasting energy is an appalling thing to do, and the way that we have squandered energy — and particularly fossil energy — not knowing what we were doing, is a catastrophe.
Q: Have you noticed the effects of climate change in your work over the years?
Attenborough: My job is to make programs about tropical rain forests, so I go to where they are, not to where they’ve been cut down. So I get a rosier view than others do. But I can’t help but notice changes. The most obvious one is that since I’ve been making programs, there are three times as many people living on this planet than before.
(11 May 2008)
