Year 2, Month 12, Day 28: I’m Writing Four Days Ahead Of Schedule. Is That Long-Term Enough For You?

Long Island’s “Newsday” runs a thoughtful piece from Kavita Rajagopalan, titled “Climate-change waiting game.” It’s worth a read:

It’s the end of another year, a time to look back and take stock, maybe even make a resolution or two for the future. And there’s no bigger future to contend with than that of the planet. Unfortunately, after two weeks of intense negotiations at the 17th United Nations conference on climate change earlier this month, leaders from nearly 200 countries resolved to . . . wait.

Holding off on serious and coordinated global action to reduce emissions not only drives us closer to irreversible climate change, it gives us the false sense that we really aren’t in the grave danger that we are.

Although delegates agreed to draft a new treaty holding all nations to the same emissions standards and rules, they also agreed they it wouldn’t come into force until 2020. In the meantime, the contentious and flawed Kyoto Protocol emissions standards — which the United States never ratified — have been extended by another decade.

We don’t have another decade to put off a global resolution on climate change. The Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking climate change data, recently reported that global carbon dioxide emissions increased by 5.9 percent in 2010, the largest ever recorded annual jump. This amounts to an additional half billion tons of carbon in our air.

In the last decade, global carbon emissions rose by an average of 3 percent each year, up from the 1 percent annual growth rate of the 1990s. Despite increasingly urgent warnings from leading scientists all over the world, the move toward a concerted global effort to bring down emissions and work together to mitigate climate change has been slow.

Why?

It’s interesting, trying to learn what our tribal ancestors did without thinking: incorporating long-term impacts into our collective decision-making. Sent December 24:

If the industrialized nations are to respond successfully to the challenges posed by the climate crisis, we must change more than our patterns of energy usage. Those ways of living are symptoms of some very deeply rooted misconceptions which must be transformed if the struggle against a changing climate is to end well for us all.

Because Earth’s resources are finite, we can no longer idealize an economy based on the notion of continuous expansion (as Edward Abbey put it, “growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell”). Because the atmospheric changes wrought by our past century’s extravagant consumption of carbon fuels will take thousands of years to go away, we can no longer afford to focus only on the satisfactions and frustrations of the present moment. To accomplish a sustainable society, we — all of us — must learn to think in the long term.

Warren Senders