Climate of Our Future

Climate Crisis Coalition

The Carbon Crisis. By Bill McKibben, The National Geographic Magazine, October, 2007 issue. “It’s impossible to precisely predict the consequences of any further increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. But the warming we’ve seen so far has started almost everything frozen on Earth to melting; it has changed seasons and rainfall patterns; it’s set the sea to rising. 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. Our task is less inspiring: to contain the damage, to keep things from getting [further] out of control… The past couple of years have seen a series of reports indicating that 450 parts per million CO2 is a threshold we’d be wise to respect. Beyond that point, scientists believe future centuries will likely face the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and a subsequent rise in sea level of giant proportion… If concentrations [of atmospheric CO2] keep increasing by two parts per million per year, we’re only three and a half decades away… As precedents for [massive] collective effort [that will be required of us], people sometimes point to the Manhattan Project to build a nuclear weapon or the Apollo Program to put a man on the moon. But those analogies don’t really work. They demanded the intense concentration of money and intelligence on a single small niche in our technosphere. Now we need almost the opposite: a commitment to take what we already know how to do and somehow spread it into every corner of our economies, and indeed our most basic activities… We need to figure out how to change [our energy intensive] habits. Probably the only way that will happen is if fossil fuel costs us considerably more… The most straightforward way to raise the price would be a tax on carbon… switching away from taxes on things we like (employment) to taxes on things we hate (global warming). That may be too much to ask for — but if it is, then what chance is there we’ll be able to take on the even more difficult task of persuading the Chinese, the Indians, and all who are lined up behind them to forgo a coal-powered future in favor of something more manageable?… In the end, global warming presents the greatest test we humans have yet faced. Are we ready to change, in dramatic and prolonged ways, in order to offer a workable future to subsequent generations and diverse forms of life? If we are, new technologies and new habits offer some promise. But only if we move quickly and decisively–and with a maturity we’ve rarely shown as a society or a species. It’s our coming-of-age moment, and there are no certainties or guarantees. Only a window of possibility, closing fast but still ajar enough to let in some hope.”