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Global Warming: It's not
about the carbon
By Jim Miles
ccun.org, October 25, 2007
While there are
still many people debating whether or not global warming is occurring, or if
it is caused by human factors or just another of ‘na
tu
re’s’ na
tu
ral cycles (after all, are not humans a part of na
tu
re?), the most educated voices are now saying: Yes it is
human caused…and it’s all too late.
Not necessarily
too late to try and do something about it, but too late to think we can stop
it. At best, the recently
emerged view is that global warming, no matter what we do, will increase for
some decades before it is even slowed down, let alone stopped; at best that
means the varying societal interests need to ac
tu
ally do something about the process rather than throw out
political homilies and plati
tu
des that mean little.
Two recent
conservative magazines have produced articles that quite boldly say it is
too late, we cannot stop it. The
National Geographic Magazine, which at times prides itself on its
non-advocacy of positions by presenting balanced reports, quite plainly
says, “No matter what we do now, that warming will increase some –
there’s a lag time before the heat fully plays out in the atmosphere.
That is, we can’t stop global warming.”
[1] More impressively in
my mind is a similar article in Foreign Policy (FP) magazine that says
essentially the same thing, but in even stronger language: “
B
ut the mounting
sc
ientific evidence, coupled along with economi
c a
nd political realities, increasingly suggests that
humanity’s oppor
tu
nity to prevent, stop, or reverse the long-term impacts
of climate change has slipped away.”[2]
Too late folks,
the game is over!
B
ut perhaps not as the articles indicate the solutions, as
per the Geographic, “in
every case…will demand difficult changes,” and from FP, “Riding out
the consequences of a warming world will be difficult, and we need to
prepare now.”
Even
more dramatically, if one can look at the significance of the information,
B
ritain’s Stern Review [3] on the economics of climate
change indicates, “Ultimately, stabilization – at whatever level – requires that annual
emissions be brought down to more than 80% below current levels.”
80%? That figure is well
beyond any political or environmental target that has made it through public
di
sc
ourse.
B
ritish
columbia
,
Canada
, is talking
about a 33% reduction in emissions by 2010 without having any significant
plans in place to do so, and while the national government had initially
heavily endorsed
Kyoto
, it has not
produced even minimal results from their statements on that accord.
The
United
States
never even
bothered to sign on to
Kyoto
,
recognizing at least in
tu
itively the political uselessness of trying to
change their own
behaviour.
The answer from the Stern Review is based on economics:
Action on climate change will
also create significant business oppor
tu
nities, as new markets are created in low-carbon energy technologies and
other low-carbon goods and services. These markets could grow to be worth
hundreds of billions of dollars each year, and employment in these sectors
will expand accordingly.
The
Stern Review continues with its economi
c
a
nalysis
and at least identifies the reality of the current global economic struc
tu
re
between rich and poor:
All countries will be affected. The most vulnerable
– the poorest countries and populations – will suffer earliest and most,
even though they have contributed least to the causes of climate change. The
costs of extreme weather, including floods, droughts and storms, are already
rising, including for rich countries. Adaptation to climate change – that
is, taking steps to build resilience and minimize costs – is essential. It
is no longer possible to prevent the climate change that will take place
over the next two to three decades, but it is still possible to protect our
societies and economies from its impacts to some extent.
Can
we really grasp the significance of all this?
Is it possible to really do something about it all?
And are economi
c a
nswers the right way to go?
My quick answers are no, maybe, and definitely not.
FP provides a
pessimistic economic view:
given
the
sc
ale
and complexity of modern economies and the time required for new
technologies to displace older ones, only a s
tu
nning
technological breakthrough will allow for reductions in emissions that are
sufficiently deep to stop climate change.
The
Stern Review is quite optimistic, unrealistically so in my estimation:
Tackling climate
change is the pro-growth strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in
a way that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor
countries.
The
Geographic is much more cautious and much more closer to the truth, whether
intended or not:
Many
of the paths to stabilization run straight through our daily lives, and in
every case they will demand difficult changes.
Daily
Significance
I doubt very much that the average person can truly comprehend the
significance of this information. In
the west we live surrounded by global riches, wealth beyond the carrying
capacity of our own lands and, sometimes, most people’s imaginations.
Food and energy supplies are imported daily from thousands of miles
away. The transportation of food
and its initial production are energy intensive, and energy supplies are
coming increasingly under the gun, a si
tu
ation
I will come back to later. Yet
because of our riches we can afford the food and the energy.
We can afford to use more energy – and this is the big point missed
by all three commentaries on climate and economics – for our consumptive
lifestyle, for the purchase of many unnecessary, unneeded products that both
consume energy in their use and consume energy for their production, for our
leisure travel, for our sta
tu
s
and emotional comfort. We live
in a society designed for the ultimate consumer, the automobile and its
related economi
c
a
ctivities
from the millions of units produced annually to satisfy our sta
tu
s,
greed, and need for speed and power, to the malls where they transport us to
consume even more of our environment. The
propaganda of consumption (some call it advertising) builds on the rationale
of greed and on the largely unsubstantiated need for ‘growth’ which in
tu
rn
is almost purely defined in economic terms but not social terms, on the
right to deserve all these riches, and to flaunt them to the rest of the
world as our right and heritage and religious justness.
Ultimately, we can afford to survive the worst effects of global
warming…or so we think…or so we ignore.
The rest of the world struggles with lack of food, poor water and
sanitation, disease, lack of basic education and medical services.
Their economies struggle with equality more so than ours do,
aggravated by the disasters of ‘struc
tu
ral
adjustments’ and other accomplishments of the western based global
financial rulers of the W
ash
ington
Consensus, the World
B
ank,
the IMF, WTO, OECD and other organizations related in kind and mind.
The daily significance of life for an increasing number of global
citizens is to try and put even one square meal on the table, to survive
another day waiting for medical attention they may never see, to live
without aspiration for sons and daughters to do more than continue in a
similar vein, to get an education that will permit them to make a healthier
more stable global social climate.
The rest of the world suffers, essentially, from our grab for resources
and riches, a grab that is protected by the ‘hidden fist’ of the
military, by the covert actions of the CIA and other agencies operating
clandestinely at their will. People
live in areas suffering from authoritarian rule because the west, mostly the
United
States
but also including its European partners, could not tolerate any form of
successful social democracy that did not bend to the will of the more
enlightened economies and philo
sophie
s
of neoliberalism and ‘free’ markets.
These are not people that are too much concerned with the global
environment. How can they be
when their own environments are poisoned by industrial wastes, controlled by
transnational corporations that care little for the environment as a living
space or as a working space, when their indigenous crops are replaced by
global corporations and large
sc
ale
factory farming, when they themselves are reduced to poverty wages removed
from the land that once supported them.
Ultimately, they will be the ones to suffer the most from global
warming as they can afford nothing or little beyond their next meal.
I realize that this is an overstated dichotomy, as there are gradations
of economi
c a
nd
social su
sc
eptibility
between the two, and not just in separate countries but within countries and
regions as well, but the point I am obviously making is that the developed
countries control of the global riches, through the force of military might
and economically subversive tactics makes it so that the rest of the world,
and the poor everywhere, will suffer significantly more from the still as
yet fully unexpected and unanticipated impacts as advanced global warming
comes upon us. Most of us living
in the west remain wilfully or ignorantly removed from thinking about the
consequences of our lives as we see the good life perhaps diminished but not
gone. The others are too busy
struggling for daily survival to even be aware of the si
tu
ation
or at best have the leisure to contemplate what it means.
At either end of the spectrum and all along its continuum, not many
can grasp the significance of what is yet to come if these predictions are
correct.
It’s not just the carbon
The effects of global warming should be generally well known in a
superficial intellec
tu
al
level: the loss of species, the invasion of species into new areas, bigger
and stronger storms, more heat and more mois
tu
re,
rising sea levels, changes in agricul
tu
ral
production, habitat loss, loss of the ice caps and the surprising theory of
a European ice age caused by the stopping of the ‘Atlantic conveyor’
heat exchange system, and other nuances along the same lines as the
preceding. In our comfortable
richness we pay only lip service to these while doing ‘green’ activities
such as recycling, or cycling to work once in a while to assuage our
environmental con
sc
iousness
into thinking it has done something positive, or perhaps some have attended
environmental protest to save a forest or pond, only to drive home to their
relative comfort in neighbourhoods where forests and ponds have long since
disappeared.
Governments talk at great lengths about carbon and what to do with it.
Cars need to go ‘green’, carbon taxes can be applied, carbon
credits can be traded, and new carbon emissions goals are set but go
unsupported with legislation and action.
Research for more climate resistant crops is encouraged, hoping to
sustain the previous cen
tu
ries
green revolution in agricul
tu
re.
Transit is obviously one of the better ways to reduce carbon, but
cities continually plan with major road expansions whose increased traffic
will greatly offset the smaller gains made by a weaker rapid transit
infrastruc
tu
re.
The government always
tu
rns
to the people, urging everyone to reduce energy use by shutting off light
bulbs and computers to help clean up the air.
Neon lights are touted as being part of the answer without
recognition of the energy required to make them and then to dispose of them
safely and guard against chemical pollution from their retired carcasses.
Nuclear energy is becoming green again, as it does not add to global
warming, only to the radioactive pollution and contamination of large
sectors of the world while at the same time encouraging the nuclear industry
and all that it encompasses within our increasingly militaristic society.
Modern technologies of solar power, wind power, and tidal power are
encouraged but are far from eliminating our reliance on carbon derived
fuels. As always, the
mantra of growth keeps raising its ubiquitous head, keeping governments
trapped in their own circular arguments of not wanting to damage the economy
and therefore not applying standards as stringently as would be necessary to
prevent carbon increases.
All those suggestions to slow or halt the rise in carbon pollution sound
impressive and good, but as indicated at the beginning it is all too little,
too late, except for the Stern Review that sees a bright light with all the
money to be made from the new technologies.
Unfor
tu
nately,
leaving carbon cleanup to the profit makers will probably be just as
damaging to the ecology and the economy (except for the very few on high) as
the actions of the IMF, WTO et al have been to the ecology and climate of
the developing and undeveloped countries of the world with their attempts to
eliminate poverty and create democracy.
Corporate trading of carbon credits or carbon ‘debts’ will only
ensure more profits to the already wealthy but will not help the polar bears
keep the ice they need to survive on, nor the indigenous populations of the
Andes keep the glaciers that provide the majority of their water.
Even with all the positive actions compounded, we will not stop global
warming. The ac
tu
ality
of doing everything in our power to stop carbon emissions is limited by the
reality of societies’ momen
tu
m
towards growth and consumption, and it is this point where the argument
tu
rns
– it is not about the carbon. Carbon
is simply the
sc
apegoat,
the ‘evil other’ that threatens us, the by-product for our societal
destruction of the environment. We
are all looking for the solutions in the wrong area.
Certainly halting carbon emissions is the overall goal, but diplomati
c
a
nd
economi
c a
ttempts
to change anything significantly will not succeed within our current
economic lifestyle.
B
lame
the consumers – we’re all guilty
In one recent
review, I was criticized for blaming the consumer, making the consumer the
victim of global warming in the manner that the empires of the world blame
the people being occupied as being the aggressor and the fault for all their
problems. It is a ridiculous
comparison: an occupying army labels itself the ‘victim’ of the occupied
peoples aggression through ideological rhetori
c a
nd control of the media; the so-called ‘aggressors’
have no recourse to significant media and must suffer the deadly effects of
occupation in silent fear – or in open rebellion.
To label consumers as ‘victims’ in this comparison is bizarre as
they have immensely more freedom to complain and agitate for their wishes
and desires within a safe society.
Are we
‘victims’ of anything? Well,
one could claim to be a victim of our societies brainw
ash
ing by way of all the corporate advertising/propaganda
that is so omnipresent as to be a constant background radiation, mostly
unrecognized, to our lives. We
could be ‘victims’ of corporate and government collusion to keep our
consumptive economy growing because they cannot visualize anything less then
the perpe
tu
ation of their own power.
B
ut compared to staring down the barrel of a machine gun,
or listening to the whine of incoming munitions, or watching approaching
helicopters with their made in America missiles, to have a consumer labelled
a victim is senseless.
Theoretically we
are all educated to have free choice and free speech and we only make
ourselves victims if, when we come to the realization that we are destroying
our environment and our lives, we do nothing about it except apply some
superficial activities to ease the guilt of our lifestyle.
We are capable of making choices, individually and collectively,
using our intelligence, social con
sc
ience and freedoms (admittedly increasingly limited under
the rubric of the ‘war on terror’) to change our personal direction and
our government’s direction.
It is our lifestyle that is to blame, and even if we somehow manage
to arrest climate change at a new static level we are still consuming way
too much of our environment to be able to reverse the overall affect of
global warming and its co-protagonists, pollution, resource exhaustion, and
war.
Certainly,
let’s reduce our carbon emissions, but also let’s re
tu
rn to the Geographic statement that bears repeating:
Many
of the paths to stabilization run straight through our daily lives, and in
every case they will demand difficult changes.
I find this a
rather powerful statement within its simplicity for all that it implies.
“Our daily lives” will have “difficult changes” not just
asked of them, but “demanded” of them and one way or the other, the
climate itself will “impose” these changes on us.
B
ring home the military.
Our economy, our
huge consumptive economy, our “daily lives” are based on the control and
extraction of wealth from the undeveloped or developing countries.
Quite na
tu
rally, at least at the peoples’ level, at the
indigenous level, they somehow do not see our enlightened benevolence and
spiri
tu
al beneficence that supposedly accompanies this
extraction. Our control of these
resources then comes back to the ‘hidden fist’, again a rather powerful
phrase aided by the simplicity of its visual image.
Routinely over the course of Twentieth Cen
tu
ry history, that fist has both been hidden and revealed.
When hidden, it sometimes is caught out as in the Iran-Contra ‘
sc
andal’, but generally it is free to undermine
democratic governments, destroy indigenous democracy movements, and
generally support corporate initiatives be it for control of land for banana
production, for control of mineral resources, for control of oil resources,
or more technically for control of genetic materials of indigenous species
as well as the human genome.
When visible it
is obvious to the eye, but concealed behind the rhetoric of democracy,
freedom, liberal free markets, with the over-riding justification being the
racist and bigoted ‘war on terror’.
B
ut it is only concealed to the home town crowd, those
imbued with the rhetoric of justification that argues constantly of good
intentions, superior civilization (the white man’s burden), and with the
patriotic hubris of America first, best, and always.
It is time to engage in the viewpoint of the ‘other’:
the indigenous peoples of the world who continue to suffer under the
subjugation of corporate and militarily supported minority governments; the
Islamic followers who are now universally condemned in spite of rhetori
c a
bout freedom and equality, subject to racist barriers
promoted under the ‘war on terror’; and all other faiths and peoples
whose beliefs and values do not adhere to the corporate free market
perspective of the world.
As much as they
are thought to be the ones that will suffer most from fu
tu
re global warming, we have much to regain from them, the
most important being our sense of balance in regards to our own
self-importance in the world. In
short, we must change ourselves - our way of thinking and our way of acting.
Solutions – ‘growth’ or
minimalism
There are two
main routes that we can follow as global warming increases.
First, we do little or nothing as we are currently doing – or
little or nothing as is envisioned by our brilliant far-sighted leaders –
let na
tu
re beat the crap out of everyone and then continue to run
the same militarized corporate economy for our own strategic security and
the rest be damned. It would not
be a pretty world. Or
secondly, we can change our thinking, and more importantly change our
actions, our lifestyle, and the kind of society we support, an
all-encompassing change that brings the recognition that we can no longer
continue consuming the planet as we are, that we do not need all the ‘s
tu
ff’ that advertising creates a ‘need’ for, that we
do by necessity need to live a more minimalist lifestyle.
Unfor
tu
nately, in countries with minimal or no social safety
net, such as the U.S., the impact of decisions to change lifestyles and
change government operations will be felt most strongly by the working poor
and the shrinking middle class. It
still might not be pretty, but it would set exemplars for fu
tu
re generations to avoid the same trap that we are
currently in.
We need to end
the militarist conquest of the other peoples of the world in order to free
them from being regarded as the ‘evil’ other, that the ‘other’ has
the same hopes, wishes, and desires as we do for a peaceful existence, food
on the table, a happy family life, a shelter to live in, and work that makes
a meaningful contribution to our families and society; and free them from
having their resources extracted and pollution and waste and poor health be
their inheritance, that their resources are for their own use and benefit,
and for fair trade with countries that wish to purchase them.
We need to change
our economic views, such that in a finite world with an increasing
population, the distribution of goods and services trends towards egality.
We need to realize that the individualistic free-for-all of
‘free’ trade does not and will not promote equality and democracy, that
the majority of successful societies and countries have succeeded by not
following the free trade maxims, but by having strong social supports in
education, health, working conditions and workers rights, the rights of
women and children, and protection for the environment.
It seems bizarre that we still need to call for that kind of world.
Growth should no
longer be the mantra, nor should the slightly improved version
‘sustainable growth’ be allowed to fool us any longer.
This needs to be done at many levels, within our personal lives at
home, within the broader framework of local communities, at federal
political levels where leadership change is a necessity if anything
effective is to be done, and finally at the international level where a
reconditioned UN could be effective to bring about more global equality,
coordinated with the shutting down of military alliances (NATO, SEATO et al)
and other organizations that are extensions of the corporate military
western mindset.
The specifics come
down to personal actions, actions taken at home to consume much less in
material goods and in luxury services, to shop locally for food and
entertainment. The American
economy, and those tied into it, are already in significant trouble with the
massive accumulated debt of “an unvisualizable, indeed unimaginable, $37 trillion, which is
nearly four times Uncle Sam's GDP [italics added]" [4] It is also
inconceivable that such a debt supported economy, faced with growing
international competition, will be able to survive much longer.
Instead of supporting the economic debt by spending beyond personal
means, we need a re
tu
rn to the idea of
saving and buying locally, an idea that supported the growth of the ‘Asian
tigers’ before they allowed themselves to open up to global speculative
markets. Either way, economic
meltdown, or atmospheric meltdown, the economies and our lifestyles are
endangered.
Will our economy
suffer? Of course it will,
especially in the GDP measurement of things under the growth mantra.
B
ut another personal change towards taking actions to
promote and participate in socially/globally responsible governments will
alleviate much of that di
sc
omfort. And
besides, if the
sc
ientists and environmentalists are correct in their
conclusions as presented at the beginning of this article, we will become
very uncomfortable anyway. Na
tu
re “will demand difficult changes.”
Conclusion
It is now
recognized that global warming is happening, that it is happening faster
than expected, that in order to reduce carbon output we need to make changes
to our usage of carbon consuming compounds.
I have argued here that carbon is not the cause, it is simply the
sc
apegoat. The
real cause, the real culprit is you and I, those of us within the huge
consumptive and unsustainable free market economy that obsessively quests
for growth in a finite world. The
changes that need to be made need to occur at all levels of society, from
personal actions broadening out to civic, federal and international actions
that create a radically less consumptive world with significantly more
freedom and societal health for all humanity.
Notes:
[1] McKibben,
B
ill
. “Carbon’s
New Math”, National Geographic, October, 2007. http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-10/carbon-crisis/carbon-crisis-p3.html
[2] Paul J. Saunders and
Vaughan
Turekian, “Why
Climate Change Can't
B
e
Stopped,” Foreign Policy, September, 2007.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3980
[3] Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/3/2/Summary_of_Conclusions.pdf
[4] Andre Gunder
Frank, cited in Auerback, Marshall. “Giant in decline,” Asia Times.
January 25, 2005
. www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GA25Dj01.html
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