climate change – Hank Kalet

Convincing argument on climate

The deniers are wrong about climate change — it is happening and it’s happening more quickly and with more pwerfully than our political will can stand.

But the deniers — and big business — have enough traction on this to keep things stalled.

So we need a more effective argument to make sure we move ahead with efforts to control carbon emmission — such as this one offered by Robert Frank in his column in the Business section of Sunday’s issue of The New York Times:

WE don’t know how much hotter the planet will become by 2100. But the fact that we face “only” a 10 percent chance of a catastrophic 12-degree climb surely does not argue for inaction. It calls for immediate, decisive steps.

Most people would pay a substantial share of their wealth — much more, certainly, than the modest cost of a carbon tax — to avoid having someone pull the trigger on a gun pointed at their head with one bullet and nine empty chambers. Yet that’s the kind of risk that some people think we should take.

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Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Grassroots: Climate security

My Progressive Populist column is available here, on climate change, poor nations and the need to do something to protect them.

World leaders spent two weeks in Copenhagen and all we got was this?

It took two weeks of talks in Copenhagen, after two years of preliminary talks and in the end, to much fanfare we got….

A big, fat nothing.

Here is how The New York Times describes the so-called Copenhagen Accord:

The plan does not firmly commit the industrialized nations or the developing nations to firm targets for midterm or long-term greenhouse gas emissions reductions. The accord is nonetheless significant in that it codifies the commitments of individual nations to act on their own to tackle global warming.

The accord provides a system for monitoring and reporting progress toward those national pollution-reduction goals, a compromise on an issue over which China bargained hard. It calls for hundreds of billions of dollars to flow from wealthy nations to those countries most vulnerable to a changing climate. And it sets a goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2050, implying deep cuts in climate-altering emissions over the next four decades.

But it was an equivocal agreement that was, to many, a disappointing conclusion to a two-year process that had the goal of producing a comprehensive and enforceable action plan for addressing dangerous changes to the global climate. The messy compromise mirrored the chaotic nature of the conference, which virtually all participants said had been badly organized and run.

The accord sets no goal for concluding a binding international treaty, which leaves the implementation of its provisions uncertain. It is likely to undergo many months, perhaps years, of additional negotiations before it emerges in any internationally enforceable form.

Goal-setting is nice, but we have moved well beyond the time when we can just set some goals and hope for the best. We still use too much oil, still burn too much carbon and we have done nothing to protect the poor, low-lying nations who will bear the brunt of the bad stuff — and there remain few if any incentives to keep developing nations from doing what we did to build our economies.

Why should China and India make serious efforts to address the issue, when we have shown an unwillingness to do the same?

The cautious optimism proffered by some environmental groups is really nothing more than face-saving given that, in reality, we are in no better of a position on climate change than we were before these talks began.

Focus on climate, not just energy

The New York Times gets it — the climate crisis is, in fact, a crisis and requires more than the rather timid approaches we’ve taken so far. While it calls the House energy bill a good start — I think it is unfortunately weak — it castigates a Senate that is likely to gut what little good is in the bill. It says “there are small but disturbing signs that what this country might have to settle for is another energy bill.”

The atmosphere in the Senate is just short of mutinous. The mandatory cap on emissions has virtually no Republican support. There is talk of a turf war between two key Democrats, Barbara Boxer and Max Baucus, whose committees share jurisdiction over the bill. On Thursday, 10 Democrats from states that produce coal or depend on energy-intensive industries said they could not support any bill that did not protect American industries from exports from countries that did not impose similar restraints on emissions.

That means that the current bill, with its relatively weak 17 percent cut by 2020, is likely to look far different come the fall — especially with the White House remaining “disengaged” on an issue that was one of Barack Obama’s chief focuses during the campaign.

What is needed “is a climate bill,” the paper says, “one committed to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in a way that engages the whole economy and forces major technological change.”

Without such a bill, America will lose the race against time on climate, lose the race for markets for new and cleaner energy systems, and forfeit any claim to world leadership in advance of the next round of global climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

U.S. inaction might then lead to international inaction as the developing economies — in particular, India and China — point to us as hypocrites and refuse to play ball on the issue.

Another reason to be aggressive on climate change

This story in The New York Times is scary and offers just another reason to stop playing around and curb our emissions:

There could be 200 million of these climate refugees by 2050, according to a new policy paper by the International Organization for Migration, depending on the degree of climate disturbances. Aside from the South Pacific, low-lying areas likely to be battered first include Bangladesh and nations in the Indian Ocean, where the leader of the Maldives has begun seeking a safe haven for his 300,000 people. Landlocked areas may also be affected; some experts call the Darfur region of Sudan, where nomads battle villagers in a war over shrinking natural resources, the first significant conflict linked to climate change.