We have a climate emergency, according to a new book that was published online this week called "Climate Code Red: The case for a sustainability emergency." It can be found at http://www.climatecodered.net/
It's about 100 pages, and the summary and key points are great. There are two things that stick with me.
- "There is already enough carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere to initiate ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland and to ensure that sea levels will rise metres in coming decades."
Why do people still not believe this? For some reason, there are some people that believe that this either isn't happening, or that it's "not that big a deal." I think this may now be cited in just about every climate change report. If you still don't think reducing carbon emissions is an important issue, check out this video.
- "Our conventional mode of politics is short-term, adversarial and incremental, fearful of deep, quick change and simply incapable of managing the transition at the necessary speed. The climate crisis will not respond to incremental modification of the business-as-usual model."
Basically, we have to do something NOW - we really can't afford to wait any longer, hence the "emergency." I agree, but can we really accomplish anything in the immediate future? It seems that in the US we're stuck with the status quo until January 20, 2009. However, even after that who knows what the new President's energy and environmental policies will be and whether Congress will go along with it.
Are we really stuck until next January? I hope not, but I have a bad feeling...
Monday, February 4, 2008
Climate Emergency?
Labels:
climate change,
election,
policy,
sustainable development
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1 comments:
I hate to be cynical, but, yes Greg, I think we're stuck until January of 2009. We have a lame duck president who's not interested in good environmental policy in the first place. We also have a Congress that is being held by a very slim majority in a presidential election year. They're going to have to focus on things like the economy and Iraq if they want to get re-elected.
This doesn't mean we need to be a lame duck group of activists. We should be putting major effort into electing new leaders who are at least promising to do something about climate change. We should also be preparing for fight hard for good environmental policies under an administration that might actually be willing to listen to us. And everyone needs to get out there and vote-- don't miss your primary or caucus if it's today!
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