Ross Gelbspan
Author
The Heat Is On and Boiling Point
Sunday Afternoon - September 16, 2007
* Presentation for the “Impacting U. S. Policy” Panel Discussion with Claire Greensfelder, Ross Gelbspan,
Michael Northrop, Betsy Taylor, Steve Kretzmann, Jared Duval, Arjun Makhijani, Randy Hayes,
Tom Goldtooth, and John Passacantando.
I know the conference is dedicated to the triple crisis of global warming, oil depletion and
accelerating extinctions.
To those, I'd like to add a fourth crisis: the existential crisis that faces us all.
Despite a number of inventive plans to curb the warming and cut energy use, we
are brought up short by the speed with which the climate is changing. The peril is
compounded by the unconscionable failure of the US mainstream press -- which has been
passively complicit in both the escalating climate crisis and the diplomatic powder keg
waiting to be ignited by the coming squeeze on oil.
Let me offer three large gauge observations about what we are really facing in
the climate crisis.
The first is its speed. Global warming has blindsided all of us. It didn't even
surface as an issue in the public arena until 1988. That was the year the UN first began
to put in place the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That same year, NASA
Scientist Jim Hansen went before Congress to testify that "global warming is at hand."
Today, a mere 19 years later, scientists are telling us that we are approaching --
or are already at -- a point of no return in terms of staving off climate chaos. That is an
incredibly short period of time -- the blink of an eye historically speaking -- for such
enormous changes in these massive planetary systems.
The second point -- which presents one of the most difficult aspects of the
challenge -- has to do with lagtimes and feedbacks. Carbon dioxide stays up in the
atmosphere for about 100 years. So many of the impacts we are already seeing are
probably the result of emissions we put up in the 1970s and 1980s -- just as China and
India were beginning to ramp up their surge of coal-fired industrialization. This makes it
virtually inevitable that we will see more events of the magnitude of Katrina and the
European heat wave of 2003.
The final point involves the extreme sensitivity of the Earth's systems to just a
tiny bit of warming. As you know, the glaciers are melting, the deep oceans are
heating, violent weather is increasing, the timing of the seasons is changing and all over
the world plants, birds, insects, fish and animals are migrating toward the poles in search
of stable temperatures. And all that has resulted from one degree of warming. And for
context we are looking forward to a century of four to 10 degrees more heat.
On the military front, eleven admirals and generals recently declared climate
change a major threat to our national security as disruptions trigger more conflict in
countries whose crops are destroyed by weather extremes, whose land is going under to
rising sea levels and whose borders are overrun by environmental refugees.
What we need is a rapid worldwide switch to non-carbon energy wind, solar,
tidal and wave power and, ultimately, hydrogen fuels. And we need it yesterday.
Contrary to the propaganda of big coal and big oil, that does not mean we will all
have to sit in the dark and ride bicycles. Those sources can give us all the energy we
need in ways that could make the human enterprise far more compatible with the
requirements of a stable species home -- even as it liberates us from the excesses of our
own self-destructive hyperaffluence.
Today, as the urgency of the situation becomes increasingly vivid, people are
scrambling to focus on other approaches -- any other approaches -- to avoid confronting
the central take-home message: we can no longer keep burning coal and oil.
For example, we see lots of renewed attention given to various forms of carbon
trading. The unfortunate truth is that we can not finesse nature with accounting
tricks.
Other experts are pushing for mechanical carbon sequestration. To me, this type
of program represents a full employment act for companies like Bechtel and Halliburton.
Secondly, we should know by now that there are profoundly unknowable -- and
potentially very high-risk -- consequences in trying to geo-engineer ourselves around
nature's roadblocks. Invariably, these kinds of efforts come back to haunt us with
unintended consequences. My third objection is really simple-minded: how many
windmills could we build for the cost of one carbon-sequestration plant or one nuclear
plant? The answer is: very, very many indeed.
Nor can this problem be solved by lifestyle changes. It's not enough just to turn down
your thermostats, carpool and change your lightbulbs. The real impact comes from
telling lots of other people -- loudly and clearly -- why you're doing these things. That
way you will be creating a political base for the really big-deal political changes nature
requires.
From a personal standpoint, this issue as enraging as it is depressing.
We have been brought to the point of no return in terms of climate change -- and the
prospect of oil-based warfare -- by massive coal and oil companies who put their annual
earnings reports above our collective future.
Peabody Coal, ExxonMobil and their allies have relentlessly attacked the science. And in
so doing, they marginalized the findings of more than 2000 scientists from 100
countries reporting to the UN in what is the largest and most thoroughly peer-reviewed
scientific collaboration in history. They also misrepresented the economics of an energy
transition. And with their champion in the White House, they are effectively sabotaging
the world's efforts to move forward with a meaningful climate treaty.
In short, big coal and big oil have essentially privatized truth. They have demonized the
U.S. in the eyes of the rest of the world. And given the impacts of climate change in
poor countries, they are making a mockery of our basic instincts of human solidarity.
The implications of continued inaction are frightening.
A growing body of evidence indicates we have already entered into an era of runaway
climate change. Given the recklessness of the fossil fuel lobby, it seems only a matter
of time before we go over the cliff, enter a state of collective free-fall and crash-land at
global ground zero.
An increasingly inflamed climate will also put our tradition of democracy,
corrupted as it is, at even further risk. When governments have been confronted by
breakdowns, they have traditionally resorted to totalitarian measures to keep order in
the face of chaos. While the emergency may be short-lived, there are too many
precedents in which a temporary state of emergency has led to a much longer state of
siege. So one frequently overlooked potential casualty of accelerating climate change
may be the democratic process itself.
Add the escalating squeeze on our oil supplies, which could intensify our meanest
instincts, and you have the ingredients for a long period of repression and conflict.
To be sure, the planet will survive the coming breakdown. And so will some fraction of
the human population. But it seems clear that nature will be exacting a terrible price in
exchange for giving us one more chance to try one more time to finally get it right.
The question is whether we will be able to emerge from the coming turbulence as a more
cooperative, humane and nurturing species -- or whether we will regress into a more
defensive and fortressed kind of tribalism?
I think it's critical that we begin proactively -- with whatever remaining stability nature
allows us -- to start to reorganize ourselves in ways that can preserve an equitable social
order in the face of a coming era of chaos.
On the most pedestrian level, that suggests a world in which we eat primarily locally and
regionally grown food. It suggests we conduct as much of business as possible through
telecommuting rather than traveling. It also suggests that we take our energy from a
wide array of decentralized technologies -- solar, wind, wave and tidal power, small scale
hydro, home-based fuel-cells and the like -- which are best suited to their natural
surroundings. To that end, I will be taking a few minutes to lay out strategies which I
believe would propel a rapid global transition to non-carbon energy sources.
Socially, I think, it means we need to reorganize ourselves so that we conduct
something like 80 percent of our governance at the local, grassroots level through some
form of consensual democracy -- with the other 20 percent conducted by our
representatives at the global level.
That, in turn, implies our phasing out of this long historical era of nationalism --which is
as outdated as it is toxic -- and which elevates our geographical differences over our
biological similarities. We all need now to think of ourselves as citizens of one
profoundly distressed planet.
I think that understanding involves a recognition that a clean environment is about far
more than endangered species, toxic substances and the "dead zones" that keep
spreading off our shorelines. A clean environment is a basic human right. And without
it, all the other human rights for which we have worked so hard will end up as grotesque
caricatures of some of our deepest aspirations.
So here's the real challenge for all of us:
How do we -- in the most immediate and compelling way possible -- make the
links between the local and global?
One way may be to focus on solutions.
Economists tell us that every dollar invested in energy in poor countries creates far more
wealth and far more jobs than the same dollar invested in any other economic sector. If
we in the North were to spearhead the transfer of clean energy to developing countries
that would do more in the long run than anything else to address the economic
desperation that gives rise to so much conflict, despair and anti-US sentiment.
What the US must do is to join the rest of the world in a common global project
to rewire the world with clean energy. The centerpiece of the last chapter of my book,
Boiling Point outlines three global strategies that could accomplish this transition. And
while we are not dogmatic about the details, we do believe it represents a model of the
scope and scale of what we need to accomplish.
Briefly, the main elements of the plan involve:
* Redirecting more $250 billion in subsidies in industrial countries away from
coal and oil and putting them behind carbon-free technologies;
* Creating a large fund, which has been estimated at about $300 billion a year
for a decade, to transfer clean energy to poor countries. This could come from a tax on
international currency transactions, from carbon taxes in the North or from a tax on
international air travel proposed by a former British environment minister; and
* Adopting within the Kyoto framework a progressive fossil fuel efficiency
standard that would go up by three to five percent a year. Under this mechanism, every
country would start at its current baseline to increase its Fossil Fuel energy efficiency by
five percent every year until the 80 percent global reduction is attained. That means a
country would produce the same amount of goods as the previous year with five percent
less carbon fuel. Alternatively, it would produce five percent more goods with the same
carbon fuel use as the previous year. Since no economy can grow at five percent for
long, emissions reductions would outpace long-term economic growth.
For the first few years, countries would meet the five percent goal simply through
efficiencies by getting the waste out of their current energy systems. And when those
efficiencies become more expensive to capture, countries would meet the annual goal by
drawing more and more energy from renewable energy sources most of which are 100
percent efficient according to a Fossil Fuel standard.
And that would create the mass markets and economies of scale for renewables that
would bring down their prices and make them competitive with coal and oil.
I do believe a plan of this type -- regardless of the details -- would create millions of jobs,
especially in developing countries. It could begin to turn impoverished and dependent
countries into trading partners. It could begin to reverse the obscene and widening gap
between the world's wealthy and poor nations. And it would jump the renewable energy
industry into being a central, driving engine of growth of the global economy.
Ultimately, it could bring the people of the world together around a common
global project that could transcend traditional alliances and antagonisms -- even in
today's profoundly fractured, degraded and combative world.
Stepping back to a wider-angle view:
The economy -- like it or not -- is becoming truly globalized. The globalization
of communications now makes it possible for any person to communicate with anyone
else around the world. That is a truly breathtaking development.
And since it is no respecter of national boundaries, the global climate makes us
one.
If I could envision one positive outcome from our current situation, it would be that the
coming traumas will catalyze a transformation of our most basic values. We hear much
about Islamic and other foreign fundamentalisms. But there is virtually no self-awareness
that we, in the U.S., are blindered by our own free-market fundamentalism with its
magical belief in the divine power of markets.
Clearly any solution to the climate crisis must be global. It is equally clear that it
requires a reversal or our current relationship to this de-facto corporate state which has
reduced our human roles to little more than agents for the movement of money. We
need to take political control of these engines of production by revoking the
constitutional fiction of corporate personhood and enacting a citizen-mandated set of
regulations that directs corporate productivity into the service of a more sustainable,
global and, most emphatically, more equitable world.
We also hear many complaints about the costliness of addressing the climate
crisis. But the real economic issue in rewiring the world with clean energy is not cost.
The real economic issue is whether the world has a large enough labor force to
accomplish this task in time to meet nature's deadline.
But therein lies the catch -- nature's deadline. A growing number of scientists
agree that we are already too far along a catastrophic trajectory to avoid significant
disruptions. So my enthusiasm for the healing potential -- on many different levels -- of
something like these solutions is tempered by one persisting question: how are people
of good will and social conscience supposed to respond in the face of a coming age of
collapse?
There is no body of expertise -- no authoritative answers -- for this one. We are
crossing a threshold into uncharted territory. And since there is no precedent to guide
us, we are left with only our own hearts to consult, the intellectual integrity to look
reality in the eye, whatever courage we can muster and our uncompromising dedication
to a human future that reflects the combined aspirations of every single person in this
room.
-- Ross Gelbspan (Sept. 2007)
