January 1st, 2019 by Steve Hanley | Clean Technica
Bill McKibben has been writing about climate change for 30 years. Along the way, he has been arrested multiple times, spat on, had his life threatened, and been spied on by minions working for fossil fuel companies. Oh, he also founded 350.org, whose stated mission is to keep the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below 350 parts per million. The world blew by that benchmark some time ago and is racing toward the 450 ppm level.
He has written almost 30 books on the subject, including The End Of Nature in 1989 and Oil & Honey
in 2013. If you want to be fully informed on the topic of climate
change, the writings of Bill McKibben are the definitive source.In a piece for Rolling Stone dated December 1, 2017, McKibben penned these words, “The technology exists to combat climate change — what will it take to get our leaders to act?” As 2018 draws to a close, it is appropriate to examine his thesis and see what, if anything changed this year. McKibben started his Rolling Stone piece with these words:
“If we don’t win very quickly on
climate change, then we will never win. That’s the core truth about
global warming. It’s what makes it different from every other problem
our political systems have faced.
“I wrote the first book for a general
audience about climate change in 1989 – back when one had to search for
examples to help people understand what the ‘greenhouse effect’ would
feel like. We knew it was coming, but not how fast or how hard. And
because no one wanted to overestimate – because scientists by their
nature are conservative – each of the changes we’ve observed has taken
us somewhat by surprise. The surreal keeps becoming the commonplace.”
Watching The Arctic Melt
“[W]ith global warming, the fundamental equation is precisely what’s shifting. And the remarkable changes we’ve seen so far — the thawed Arctic that makes the Earth look profoundly different from outer space; the planet’s seawater turning 30 percent more acidic — are just the beginning. ‘We’re inching ever closer to committing to the melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which will guarantee 20 feet of sea-level rise,’ says Penn State’s Michael Mann, one of the planet’s foremost climatologists. ‘We don’t know where the ice-sheet collapse tipping point is, but we are dangerously close.'”As if to underscore Mann’s and McKibben’s warnings, on December 5, NASA posted a video on YouTube showing how the Arctic ice sheet has melted from September, 1984 through September, 2016. It’s pretty scary stuff. [To view the video, click here.]
A Herculean Task
What could have been painless 30 years ago is now a Herculean task, McKibben writes. “To meet the planet’s goal of holding temperature increases under two degrees Celsius, we have to cut emissions 4.6 percent annually till they go to zero. If we wait till 2025, we have to cut them seven percent annually. If we wait till 2030 — well, it’s not even worth putting on the chart. I have to sometimes restrain myself from pointing out how easy it would have been if we’d acted back in the late 1980s, when I was first writing about this — a gradual half a percent a year. A glide path, not a desperate rappel down a deadly cliff.”Predatory Delay
The villains of the piece, as we all know, are the oil and gas companies that have pursued a deliberate policy of promoting uncertainty about climate science. Furturist Alex Steffen calls this tactic “predatory delay, the deliberate slowing of needed change to prolong a profitable but unsustainable status quo that will be paid by other people eventually.”It’s not just oil and gas companies doing this. The utility industry has put together a well funded campaign that encourages state legislatures to oppose rooftop solar systems and solar incentives. Industry analyst Nancy LaPlaca says, “Keeping the current business model just another year is always key for utilities that have a monopoly and want to keep that going.”
Even the AFL-CIO, which normally has supported progressive policies, has signed on to pipeline projects because they will provide jobs for its members. Human beings are genetically programmed to react to short-term self interest. That as much as anything may seal the planet’s fate. The fossil fuel industry is more or less content with the Paris climate accords because they will allow them to continue extracting their reserves and monetizing them over time.
Read more of the article, including information on renewable energy solutions and a Green New Deal, at Clean Technica
No comments:
Post a Comment