The Nation
(The Nation) This
column was written by Bill McKibben.
Dusk On Earth
The Nation: The Planet Has Reached Its Tipping Point, and
It's Time for a Hail Mary Pass
Even
for Americans, 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 sends the
price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three
continents. It's that everything is so inextricably 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 (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a
paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it
argued--and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper--"if
humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization
developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate
evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced
from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Hansen cites six irreversible tipping
points--massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among
them--that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of
them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind
us.
So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your
cholesterol is way too high, and if you don't bring it down right away, you're
going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if
you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It's like
watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to
take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.
In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the pill
and we are stomping on the gas--hard. Instead of slowing down, we're pouring on
the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon
dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year--two
decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.
And suddenly, the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent
greenhouse gas, accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar
as well. Apparently, we've managed to warm the far north enough to start
melting huge patches of permafrost and massive quantities of methane trapped
beneath it have begun to bubble forth.
And don't forget: China is building more power plants, India is pioneering the
$2,500 car, and Americans are converting to TVs the size of windshields that
suck juice ever faster.
Here's the thing. Hansen didn't just say that, if we didn't act, there was
trouble coming; or, if we didn't yet know what was best for us, we'd certainly
be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere. His phrase was: "...if we wish to preserve a planet similar to
that on which civilization developed." A planet with
billions of people living near those oh-so- floodable coastlines. A planet with ever more vulnerable forests. (A beetle,
encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill ten times more
trees this year than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of
Canada. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere, and apparently
dooms Canada's efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, already in doubt
because of its decision to start producing oil for the US from Alberta's tar
sands.)
We're the ones who kicked off the warming; now, the planet is starting to take
over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice
white shield that reflected 80 percent of incoming solar radiation back into
space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80 percent of the sun's heat. Such
feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had
in mind.
And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them--to reverse course.
Here's the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his
job when the Bush Administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his
predecessor): "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we
do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the
defining moment."
In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are
supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord. When
December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on
Copenhagen to sign a treaty--a treaty that would go into effect at the last
plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric
CO2.
If we did everything right, says Hansen, we could see carbon emissions start to
fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the
atmosphere. Before the century was out we might even be on track back to 350.
We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner
screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.
More likely, though, we're the Coyote--because "doing everything
right" means that political systems around the world would have to take
enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power
plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation.
(Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global
warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making
car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way we made them
turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making
trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.
It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so
little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it
means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely
with the poorest ones, so that they can develop dignified lives without burning
their cheap coal.
That's possible--we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we could do it again,
this time in relation to carbon. But in a month when the President has, once
more, urged us to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring phrase "gas tax
holiday" has danced into our vocabulary, it's hard to see (though it was
encouraging to see that Clinton's gambit didn't sway many voters). And if it's
hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter
as much carbon apiece as we do.
Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try. In fact, it's
about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.
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 eighteen 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.
By Bill McKibben
Reprinted with permission from The Nation.