Prez Elect Obama’s Green Team nominations came just after the United Nations’ annual climate change conference sputtered to an indecisive close at Poznań, Poland last week, failing to set ambitious new goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Al Gore rallied future hope saying, “To those who are fearful that it is too difficult to conclude this process with a new treaty by the deadline that has been established for one year from now in Copenhagen, I say it can be done, it must be done. Let’s finish this process at Copenhagen. Don’t take the pressure off. Let’s make sure that we succeed.”
Bill McKibben, a leading environmentalist, was one of the first to describe global warming as an emerging environmental crisis in his 1989 book The End of Nature. His latest book is called Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He is also co-founder of the environmental mobilization campaign called 350.org. The number 350 refers to calls for a new global target to reduce carbon dioxide levels to no more than 350 parts per million. Just returning from Poland where he attended the UN climate change conference in Poznan, he comments on the changing paradigm as the seriousness of the situation is setting in:
The politics of this, as opposed to the policy, is finally starting to change as more and more people begin to realize that we’re way deeper into the climate problem than we thought.
First thing that happened was that the small island nations and less-developed countries of the world, the first and most vulnerable victims to climate change, sharpened their rhetoric considerably. They started talking about survivability and asking other nations, many of which complied, to sign a pledge saying that whatever they did, they would try to build a climate policy that allowed all nations of the world to survive, not to sink beneath the rising seas or the expanding deserts. I mean, we’re seriously talking, in the not-too-distant future, about hauling flags down outside the UN, because those countries no longer exist. That began to sharpen, the rhetoric.
The other thing that happened—was a part of Gore’s speech, that got him by far the longest and lustiest round of applause—was when he said—and this was an [enormous] breakthrough—that we have to start aiming for 350 parts per million CO2. That sounds like a small technical change from 415 parts per million, the current goal, but in fact it changes every aspect of this debate. Since we’re already past 350—we’re at about 387 parts per million now; that’s why the Arctic is melting—it means that we have to treat this as the full-on emergency that it is, not one more problem on a long list, but the absolute central keystone problem that we have to go to work on in the most impassioned way right now.
Now, look, the momentum of the talks is such that they’ll kind of drag on in their current form for a while towards Copenhagen next December. But I think that the reality of the world’s—the reality of the physics and chemistry in the atmosphere is beginning to overtake the political reality that’s been the main feature of these talks. We’re going to see a much sharpened, much heightened debate with a lot more people getting a lot angrier and demanding actual change.
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