By Daniel Rigney
I’m
no climate scientist, but as a concerned citizen I’ve made an effort in
recent years to understand what climate scientists are trying to tell
us. The more I’ve learned, the more concerned I’ve become about both the
short and longer-term consequences of climate change.
That’s why I recently bought
carbon offsets
(my new passion) to cover my flight to New York City to participate in
the recent People’s Climate March, led by Bill McKibben’s activist
group, 350.org.
I didn’t go just to escape Houston’s annual
summer steambath, although that was a welcome bonus. I was there to
march with 1,500 of my fellow Unitarian Universalists (UU’s) and more
than a third of a million others in support of strong United Nations
summit initiatives to halt the rise of destructive global climate change.
I’ve previously recounted
my personal experience of the march,
which I describe as paradoxically both festive and serious-minded. If
you’d like a more vivid sense of having been there yourself, I recommend
the second half of
this brief video.
The march will be remembered, I hope, as a landmark event marking a
turning point in the nearly inevitable transition from a carbon-based
world economy to a more renewable, sustainable one.
Here are some of the serious concerns and motivating hopes that impelled me to march.
REASONS FOR CONCERN
The CO2 Curve
I’ve
been personally concerned about climate change ever since I first saw
Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and learned about the
Keeling Curve. Gore
reported that in 1958, climate scientist Charles Keeling began
measuring concentrations of CO2 (parts per million molecules of dry air)
in earth’s atmosphere. In that year he observed a concentration of 315
ppm. We now know that CO2 levels have been climbing steadily upward ever
since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 1700s,
from pre-industrial levels of about 280 ppm to this year’s all-time
recorded high of 400+ ppm.
You can see in the graph below that
this trendline has clearly begun to bend upward. Following its current
trajectory, CO2 readings will approach 1000 ppm by 2100, when many of
today’s newborns will still be alive to feel the effects.
Source: NOAA, Mauna Loa Observatory
Warming of the Atmosphere
Because
carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, ice core data reveal a
close relationship between CO2 levels and temperature levels through
the millennia, as shown below.
Source: Marian Koshland Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
Scientists
expect increases in global temperatures (i.e., global warming) to have
wide-ranging impacts, including increasing probabilities of extreme
weather events, floods, droughts and famines, species extinctions
(reducing earth’s biodiversity), melting icecaps and permafrosts,
receding coastlines, and other threats to flora and fauna, including
us.
Environmental
destabilization would almost surely bring economic, political and
military destabilization in its wake, increasing the likelihood of food,
water and oil wars and mass migrations around the world, and severely
undermining the security of advanced industrial societies like the
United States, to say nothing of the world's struggling developing
nations.
Thus investments in the transition to clean energy are
simulataneously investments in a more stable economic and political
future for most of the world's people. Unfortunately, the world's
economic markets are notorious for their focus on short-term gains (now
measured in nanoseconds) at the expense of long-term foresight. The
short-sightedness of economic markets is a severe impediment to the
solution of our slow-motion climate crisis, though it's not a market
defect most neoclassical economists enjoy talking about.
Taking
the longer view, it would be reckless, not “conservative,” of us to
ignore the industrial spike in atmospheric CO2, and to delay immediate
action to reduce our dependence on the fossil fuels that are driving
this trend.
Warming of the Oceans
In
the earth’s heat system, our atmosphere absorbs only about 2% of the
additional heat it receives from the sun. More than 90% is absorbed by
the oceans. Warming seas absorb increasing amounts of CO2, becoming more
acidic and
killing sea life in the process. Warming causes the ocean’s waters to expand and land ice to melt,
raising sea levels at an accelerating rate and threatening coastal cities and agricultral regions with inundation. Even during the recent 15-year “
hiatus” or “high plateau” in atmospheric temperatures, the oceans have continued to warm and expand.
Fear of Feedback Loops
One especially troublesome aspect of climate change is the looming likelihood that further warming will set off several
self-amplifying feedback loops,
accelerating the warming process and potentially producing runaway and
irreversible climate changes beyond our control. Two such feedbacks
loops are the albedo (reflectivity) of polar ice and the thawing of
permafrosts in the tundras of Siberia and Canada.
Melting ice
reduces the reflectivity of the earth’s surface, turning more of that
surface into heat-absorbing dark water, which further warms the air and
oceans, thereby melting even more ice. A similar vicious cycle will
occur if and when the warming atmosphere melts Russian and Canadian
frozen ground or permafrost, releasing vast quantities of sequestered
carbon dioxide and methane into the air, and setting off further warming
and further melting.
Another self-amplifying feedback loop
involves the warming of the seas, which increases the volume of
heat-trapping water vapor in the atmosphere, further warming the oceans.
Warming seas also release from the ocean floor dangerous plumes of gas
bubbles from thawing methane clathrate (“flammable ice”), which surface
as greenhouse gases and warm the air and seas even further.
It
is crucial that we slow or halt these potentially devastating feedback
loops before it’s too late. How late is too late? Let’s not wait to find
out.
Population x Per Capita Energy Consumption
Compounding
these problems is global population growth. The world’s population has
now surpassed 7 billion people, and demographers expect it to level
off at 9-10 billion later in this century. But it is not just
population growth
per se that puts a growing burden on Earth’s ecosystems, but also accelerating growth in the world’s energy consumption
per capita,
as rapidly developing countries such as China and India continue to
industrialize. The sooner the world’s economies abandon fossil fuels in
favor of renewables, the cleaner and less environmentally destructive
human industrial activity will be.
Climate Justice
I’m
especially concerned that the ill effects of global warming will be
felt most severely by those who live closer to the equator than we in
the Global North do. Tropical climates will become more unbearable,
tropical diseases more prevalent and difficult to eradicate. Floods and
rising oceans will inundate large and heavily populated regions of
Southeast Asia in particular. It is sadly ironic that
those who will suffer the greatest burdens of climate change are the very populations least responsible for creating them,
since people who live in the poorest countries consume only a small
fraction of fossil fuels per capita as we in the advanced industrial
world do. The unfairness of this tragic outcome should trouble anyone
with a social conscience.
REASONS FOR HOPE
The Rise of Renewables
Fortunately
for future generations, not all of the climate news is bad. Signs of
hope are appearing across the horizon. For instance, prices of
renewables -- wind and solar power in particular -- are currently
falling rapidly, making these cleaner energy sources economically
competitive with fossil fuel in some locales. Al Gore’s recent
Rolling Stone article, “
The Turning Point,” gives us reason to hope that the transition to renewables is already well underway.
We are also seeing substantial public and private investment in research and development projects, such as the
energy initiatives currently underway at MIT and elsewhere, offering hope of
breakthroughs in renewable energy technology, improved battery storage, and energy-efficient systems such as mass transit networks and green architecture.
The problem of global warming won’t be solved by a single silver bullet, Bill McKibben argues, but rather by
silver buckshot,
as a multitude of creative minds around the world work intensely on
multiple fronts to create a world in which future civilizations can
emerge and evolve.
Each of us can be a part of the solution,
whether in our homes, in our work, or in political actions and campaigns
supporting climate-smart platforms and initiatives.
But one
thing is becoming clear: We can no longer wait for our leaders to lead
us. It's up to us now. As one slogan in the New York march phrased it,
"We're the ones we've been waiting for."
Shrinking the Human Footprint
Our
first priority, of course, must be to shrink our carbon footprints
across the full spectrum of human activities, from residential and
commercial consumption to industrial and agricultural production to
transportation and dietary practices. Fortunately, there are plenty of
things we can do to reduce carbon emissions. We can be both personally
and politically engaged in support of energy-efficient technologies,
higher emission standards for power plants and motor vehicles,
recycling programs, and divestment campaigns. We can reduce the
environmental impact of shipping by supporting local producers. We can
reduce or eliminate our consumption of beef and other environmentally
destructive food sources. Above all, we can seize every available and
affordable opportunity to switch from fossil fuels to renewables in the
energy choices we make every day.
Supporting Carbon Capture
As
we work to reduce our carbon emissions, and to keep fossil fuels such
as coal and oil in the ground, we must also endeavor to capture and
sequester more atmospheric CO2, putting carbon back into the ground and
keeping it there by supporting projects that promote reforestation,
restorative agriculture through carbon enrichment of soils, and
innovative and promising technologies such as “artificial trees”
designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I prefer
old-fashioned natural trees myself, but I’m for whatever works.
Supporting Carbon Taxes
Another
important issue concerns the appropriate pricing of fossil fuels. The
external costs of carbon emissions, including their health and
environmental costs, are not currently reflected in their prices, and so
we are in effect passing these costs, as invisible taxes, onto the
shoulders of future generations.
Although it will be a tough
sell politically, many of us in the New York march support a carbon tax
(or failing that, a cap and trade system) to honestly reflect the real
external costs of carbon fuels. This would make renewables relatively
cheaper and more price-competitive against fossil fuels, and thereby
reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.
To be sure, campaigns
to price fossil fuels at levels that reflect their true health and
environmental costs will face stiff political opposition from those
industries, such as coal, oil and gas, whose economic interests are
threatened by the transition to renewable sources of energy. These rich
and powerful industries are currently mobilizing well-oiled political
lobbies and slick public media campaigns to forestall the inevitable
transition to renewables.
But in the end, their efforts cannot
prevail against the laws of nature. As greenhouse effects continue to
narrow our options for civilizational survival and human well-being, we
will have little choice but to respond to changing climate realities by
accelerating the transition to renewables. The twilight of the carbon
age is fast approaching, and the dawn of an age of sustainable
alternatives is on its way.
Supporting Carbon Offsets
Personally, I’ve recently become interested in helping to promote
carbon offsets
as a potentially significant way to reduce our carbon footprints.
Carbon offsets are contributions to the funding of projects (wind,
solar, reforestation, restorative farming, etc.) designed to reduce (or
offset) the carbon emissions we currently emit into the atmosphere. My
wife and I, using a simple and
free online carbon calculator,
determined that by buying high-quality carbon offsets, we could
compensate for our household’s entire carbon footprint (including my
plane trip to New York) for just $250 apiece per year.
We bought our offsets from a reputable non-profit environmental organization recommended by the online magazine,
grist.com.
I think of the purchase of carbon offsets as a
voluntary carbon tax,
for those who can afford to pay it and want to walk the talk. It’s a
modest price our household is willing to pay on behalf of future
generations. In effect, well-certified offsets allow us to reduce our
household’s annual carbon footprint to
net-zero with the press of a “submit payment” button.
In addition, we’ve recently switched to a utility company that sells
power generated entirely by wind, further offsetting our carbon
footprint and becoming
net-negative in our household’s
emissions. It’s a good feeling to be fighting global warming on the home
front, however we may choose to do this -- whether it's by driving
less, resetting our thermostats, weatherizing, insulating, solarizing,
composting, replacing old bulbs with LEDs, using Energy Star
appliances, or buying carbon offsets. Everyone can do something from
home.
Sources of Cultural and Spiritual Hope
Thus
far I’ve emphasized the economic and material dimensions of the climate
issue, but there are important cultural and spiritual dimensions as
well. Many of us are coming to question the relentlessly materialistic,
crudely selfish and acquisitive values that underlie unrestrained
consumer capitalism. Our current consumer economy is continually pushing
us toward ever greater accumulations of “stuff,” and valuing quantity
of wealth over quality of life.
Philosophical and religious
wisdom traditions, at their best, restrain our impulse to live
mindlessly and irresponsibly in the pursuit of material accumulation. In
a world in which the fundamentalist wings of religious faiths seem
continually at war with each other, I was inspired in New York to see
the
progressive wings of the world’s major faiths converging, both literally and figuratively,
on the issue of climate justice and the moral imperative for a
compassionate response to suffering.
We of many faiths were marching together, in the same direction, in the
shared desire to build a more equitable and sustainable world – a world
worth living in – for future generations.
I
was
especially proud to be marching alongside some 1,500 of my fellow
progressive Unitarian Universalists, or UUs. Coming from Houston,
de facto
capital of the western hemisphere’s carbon economy, I was a welcome
oddity in a crowd consisting mainly of eastern seaboarders. Several were
pleasantly surprised to see that
even Texas was in the house.
As
UUs, we’re committed to what we call the Seventh Principle, or respect
for the web of interdependence of which we are all a part. Our
denomination has recently voted to divest fossil fuel stocks, and our
Ministry for Earth advocates for the achievement of UN climate goals,
offering several programs (Green Sanctuary, UU Climate Action Teams,
Commit2Respond and others) in support of a just and expeditious
transition to a more renewable and sustainable world.
Marching
in New York with a large religious contingent that included
representatives of many other traditions – Christians of many
denominations, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others – we shared a
rare moment of interfaith solidarity with one another. It did a heart
good.
But What Has Posterity Ever Done for Us?
Now
that I’m older and slowly realizing I won’t be around forever, I find
myself doing more things with the well-being of future generations in
mind. Eric Erikson calls this attitude “generativity.” Others call it
“giving back” or “paying it forward.” I’ve found that doing good things
for the sake of future generations, and planting saplings in whose full
shade I may never live to sit, can be a fulfilling way to live a life.
Some
years ago, the economist Robert Heilbroner posed the challenging
question, “What has posterity ever done for us?” How we answer that
question may tell us a great deal about what kind of people we are, and
whether our species can look forward to a future worth having.
Many of the children born today will likely live to see the 22
nd
century. I want to leave them a sustainable world, and a world worth
living in. That’s why I marched in New York, and that’s why I’m
returning home renewed, sustained, and wanting to be a bigger part of
the solution.
DR
-- originally posted in
Danagram on opensalon.com
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