Summer Summer Moon
Bill McKibben’s voice has been raised in anger, in intelligent discourse, in pleading before the public and the government and recently in organizing a mass movement 350.org. He has an article in this week’s New York Review of Books elegaic opening paragraph:
“We may be entering the high-stakes endgame on climate change. The pieces—technological and perhaps political—are finally in place for rapid, powerful action to shift us off of fossil fuel. Unfortunately, the players may well decide instead to simply move pawns back and forth for another couple of decades, which would be fatal. Even more unfortunately, the natural world is daily making it more clear that the clock ticks down faster than we feared. The whole game is very nearly in check.” NY Review of Books, July 10, 2014.
This article reviews a book on changes in Antarctica, Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent, and two reports: What We Know: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment by the US Global Change Research Program. Both of the reports are available in full at the links.
(Ice cores going back 800,000 years, drilled from Antarctic ice show there has never been a time in earth’s history when the carbon load in the atmosphere was more 290 ppm. The current level, updated monthly from a sensor on Mauna Kea, is above.)
The news is the same as the material I wrote about here while taking the Climate Change MOOC last fall. The Supreme Court today upheld the right of the Federal Government to regulate emissions from stationary sources. In yesterday’s paper Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury under George II, and no Earth Firster proclaimed climate change as the problem of our time and proposed a tax on carbon emissions as a solution. All this does indicate climate change may soon become a matter of real, and painful, policy changes. And not just here, but across the globe.
It is the painful part that gives McKibben his dark tone. Changing over from a carbon fuel based economy will not be easy, cheap, or quick. In other words it’s not politically palatable. Just like social security and medicare reform. Policy makers have Pavlovian resistance to votes that may lose them support in their constituency. It will not be a simple matter to overcome that resistance. And yet it must be done. And it must be done now.
A portion of Paulson’s piece I liked a lot was his opening point “...if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my work in finance, government and conservation, it is to act before problems become too big to manage.” He echoes Thomas Berry’s much earlier work when he says, “Climate change is the challenge of our time.“
It is our work and one we must do together.