EcoWatch - Greg M. Schwartz
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| Individual consumer and voting choices loom large in the climate change battle and can directly influence the fate of the planet. If enough people demand Earth-friendly products and energy solutions (and politicians who support such solutions), grassroots movements can become groundswells, then economic tsunamis. Whether the political capital from the Paris summit is enough to power a consumer movement to catalyze the clean energy revolution needed to halt global temperature rise may well determine the fate of the free world. |
Despite having had a heart transplant
three years before, Lonnie Thompson ascended to 22,000 feet and braved
-35 degree F temperatures on a mountain peak in far western China in
2015 to do his job as an ice-core paleoclimatologist. The
renowned professor from the Ohio State University has extracted and examined ice cores from around the world since 1974. He
testified before the U.S. Senate about global warming in 1992, detailing the havoc
climate change is wreaking on the planet.
The testimony came in the wake of
Thompson's 1991 realization
that something unprecedented was happening when he observed melting
taking place at the summit of the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru. The melting
was washing away vital historic data, something that hadn't happened in
1,800 years of records there. "That was the first time that [I said]
ok, there's something really significant going on here on a longer time
scale," Thompson said, who noted that a recent visit in 2015 revealed
the ice cap is now smaller than it has been in at least 6,600 years.
By examining ancient ice cores and
their surroundings, Thompson assesses how rapidly ecosystems changed in
the past, then compares those systems to today's systems to forecast the
climate changes that await current and future generations. "I enjoy what we do and I believe what we do is extremely important," said Thompson, 67. "Many of these ice fields that we drill, particularly in the tropics in low latitudes, will disappear."
A large majority of scientists are now convinced that global warming
poses "a clear and present danger to civilization," according to
Thompson.
"Ice is fine up until you reach the
melting point and then everything changes. And it changes very abruptly.
Every system that has been studied has thresholds in it, and a lot of
those thresholds in the future we don't know," Thompson said. "Those
surprises are what's most difficult for societies to adapt to."
Thompson's concern about the unknown is tempered however by his faith in humanity to alter course.
"At the end of the day, we advance as
we go through time. We didn't leave the stone age because we ran out of
stones, we found a better way to produce energy … This is ultimately
what happens now," Thompson said, noting that Ohio State now gets
25 percent of its electricity from wind and has installed
geothermal fields
to heat and cool its dorms. "So the change is coming and it will be
fought, and the last people to change will be our government on this
issue, but the change is coming from bottom up …"
The COP21 United Nations Climate Summit
To address the global threat and resistance to change, representatives from 196 nations attended the 21st Conference of the Parties (
COP21), held in Paris late last year as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
COP21 was widely billed as humanity's
last chance to draft a plan to prevent the most catastrophic effects of
climate change. The ultimate goal was to have the participating nations
agree to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions to the extent that the
average global temperature would not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius
above the average pre-industrial temperature. Though that 2-degree goal
has generally been deemed by scientists to be sufficient to contain the
damage done by climate change, many particularly vulnerable nations
advocated for a 1.5-degree target (which remains a UN goal.).
Germany proposed
the 2-degree threshold in the 1990s, and more than 100 countries agreed
on that limit at the Copenhagen Accord at COP15 in 2009.
The global temperature has risen .85 of a degree C since 1885, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The scientific community generally
agrees that if the world continues to burn fossil fuels at its current
rate, the 2-degree increase could be reached by mid-century, and 2100
could see an increase by as many as 5 degrees. Reports from the IPCC,
World Bank and National Research Council indicate that the 2-degree rise
would lead to much larger wildfires, more intense hurricanes, a
reduction of important food crops, extreme drought, continued Arctic
melting, a drastic rise in sea level and increased flooding.
The IPCC has said that
a 5-degree rise
would lead to "major extinctions around the globe" and to a
"reconfiguration of coastlines worldwide." A recent report published by
the National Academy of Sciences indicated that doing nothing to reduce
climate change would lead to a
sea-level rise that would pose
an "existential threat" to cities such as Boston, New York, Miami and New Orleans.
In October 2015, Christiana Figueres,
executive secretary of the UNFCCC, announced that the voluntary
emissions goals that participants had submitted for COP21 would only
limit forecasted temperature rise to 2.7 degrees, at best.
Greenpeace and Amnesty International
released a joint statement during the summit
that said, in part, "Climate change is a human rights issue. Already
today, many people around the world have their rights to life, water,
food, health, housing and other rights impacted by climate impacts." The
statement then denounced the 2.7-degree level. "This is far higher than
the 1.5-degrees C most vulnerable countries see as the maximum, if they
are to survive …"
President Barack Obama and Sec. of
State John Kerry, among numerous other politicians, proclaimed triumph
at the end of the summit, as the agreement represents the entry into
what some participants called "the beginning of the end for the fossil
fuel era." The agreement commits the 196 signatory countries to work
together to limit global temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees C,
while calling for a stop to the rise of greenhouse-gas emissions as soon
as possible. Though there is a mandatory review of targets every five
years, the agreement has no legal enforcement mechanism.
The climate-justice community had
mixed reactions to the summit process and outcome. Karen Orenstein, a
senior international policy analyst with non-profit organization Friends
of the Earth, said Obama's actions don't match his rhetoric.
"It's hard in Paris to see U.S. media
and others … sort of framing the U.S. and Obama as climate leaders and
climate champions when that couldn't really be further from the truth,"
Orenstein said in an interview during the summit. "When you look at what
the U.S. is putting on the table as far as emissions reductions, as far
as financial contributions for developing countries, it's just
magnitudes below what would be called for if the U.S. were living up to
its responsibilities."
Orenstein cited Friends of the Earth's "
Keep It In the Ground"
campaign—which calls for the end of leases on public land for
fossil-fuel extractions—as one of the organization's primary efforts to
address climate change. Others include trying to eliminate corporate
loopholes from the tax code and cutting subsidies to Big Oil.
In Paris, Sec. of State Kerry announced the U.S. would double its
$430 million pledge to the UN's climate Adaptation Fund. That figure to
assist developing countries with climate mitigation and adaptation
projects, however, is dwarfed by the
$20.5 billion
the U.S. doled out in fossil-fuel subsidies in 2015, according to
environmental advocacy group Oil Change International. Orenstein credits
President Obama for being ahead of many members of Congress but says
he's still way behind the science.
"Those guys [climate change deniers
in Congress] are sort of living in the dinosaur ages. And so Obama is
maybe 1950, or something like that, but we're actually 2015, where we
know what the science says and we know what the science says we have to
do about it," Orenstein said. "But our politics get in the way. And you
can decide that your yardstick is the current political reality, or you
can decide that your yardstick is physical reality. For Friends of the
Earth, our yardstick is physical reality."
Orenstein also cited the importance
of fossil-fuel divestment, the need for cities to decentralize and
localize their energy sources and the need to decrease the influence of
money in the political process. Electing politicians who have the
ambition to fight the climate problem will also help, she said.
One high-profile politician who has displayed such ambition is Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate
Bernie Sanders. After politicians in Paris claimed triumph at the end of the UN summit,
Sanders issued a press release with another view:
"While this is a step forward it goes nowhere near far enough. The
planet is in crisis. We need bold action in the very near future and
this does not provide that," Sanders declared. "We've got to stand up to
the fossil fuel industry and fight for national and international
legislation that transforms our energy system away from fossil fuel as
quickly as possible."
Two days before sending out the press release, Sanders had announced a
"People Before Polluters" climate action plan
to cut U.S. carbon pollution 40 percent by 2030, and more than 80
percent by 2050, by taxing carbon polluters, repealing fossil-fuel
subsidies and making huge investments in clean energy.
Cities can and have taken the lead
where federal policy lags. San Diego, California made a trailblazing
move shortly after the summit when it passed an ordinance
vowing to move to 100 percent renewable energy in 20 years. Portland, Oregon
passed a resolution in November
that opposes local expansion of any new fossil-fuel storage or
transportation projects, and Boulder, Colorado has been working to dump
its investor-owned energy utility and launch a
public municipal utility that would have an easier time moving away from
fossil fuels and toward
renewable sources.
The energy debate also includes those
who advocate for nuclear power but the Nuclear Information Resource
Service in Washington DC held a "Paris and Onward" telebriefing in early
February where energy experts testified strongly in favor of renewable
energy.
Dr. Arjun Makhijani,
president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
(IEER), lauded COP21 as remarkable for getting all countries to
unanimously agree to take action for the first time and for targeting a
goal of 1.5 C. But he noted that Earth had passed the threshold for 1.5 C
in 2011, explaining this means we must not only go to zero emissions
but to negative emissions. He flat out rejected nuclear power as a
solution due to its logistical limitations.
"We have no time or money to waste, we
can't afford to be pursuing technologies that cost too much for not enough impact," Mahkijani said of
nuclear power in the telebriefing before concluding that "Nuclear is everything we don't need."
Climate Change and the Fossil-Fuel Economy
Friends of the Earth's Orenstein also lamented the difference between
the non-binding nature of the Paris agreement with global trade
agreements: "The degree of legality and commitment in this negotiation
is nothing compared to a trade agreement."
Michael Stumo, CEO of Coalition for a
Prosperous America, a DC–based nonprofit that aims to establish "a new
and positive" U.S. trade policy, wrote in an email, "The trade
agreements are a major contributor to increased carbon emissions. The
U.S. promotes global supply chains rather than domestic supply chains.
Most carbon emitting industries in the U.S. are quite efficient in
relation to the past and in relation to the non-European world. As U.S.
government trade policy incentivizes those industries to be relocated in
non-regulated, developing-world countries and China, the emissions
escalate. If the U.S. was still the manufacturing powerhouse instead of
Asian countries, carbon emissions would be far less globally."
President Obama and Kerry have worked hard to gain support for the controversial
Trans-Pacific Partnership,
a trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries. Many environmental,
labor and civil rights groups object to the agreement, however. "The TPP
will likely cause more global carbon emissions than any Paris talks
could possibly negate," Stumo said. "Any environmental provisions in TPP
are either not coupled with enforcement measures or highly unlikely to
be enforced by the U.S. government. We have never done so before under
past trade deals."
While in Paris for the summit, Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Program, wrote in an email, "The
United States is clearly pursuing a trade agenda that would undermine
its goals on climate change. The TPP would empower foreign corporations
to challenge climate policies in private trade tribunals and would
require the United States to automatically approve exports of natural
gas to countries in the agreement.
The TPP is counterproductive to the goal of the Paris talks to reduce global climate threats."
Shortly after the Paris summit, Sec. Kerry appeared on ABC's
This Week
and declared, "The result will be a very clear signal to the
marketplace of the world that people are moving into low-carbon,
no-carbon, alternative, renewable energy. And I think it's going to
create millions of jobs, enormous investments into R&D, and that
R&D is going to create the solutions, not government."
However, John Perkins, former chief economist for a major international consulting firm and bestselling author of
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (an
exposé on international financial skullduggery by what he terms "the
corporatocracy"), has another view: "If you read some of the most
celebrated economists in the world today, two Nobel prize winners,
Krugman and Stiglitz, you'll hear both of them saying the market really
doesn't determine much from a standpoint of supply and demand," Perkins
explained. "Supply and demand curves are meaningless, the market is
driven by politics. And politics is driven by big corporations and so
therefore big corporations drive the market. The old economic theories
are basically BS. They're beautiful wonderful theories but they don't
really have any relationship with the reality of global economics
today."
Renowned author and climate justice activist
Naomi Klein agrees that markets can't be relied on to solve global warming. She credits Kerry for connecting climate change with the
civil war in Syria,
but feels his approach to the problem is lacking. "I think his
solutions are completely inadequate, as are Obama's," Klein said in a
February meeting in Santa Monica, California with supporters of
Climate Hawks Vote, a grassroots organization devoted to electing politicians that prioritize climate justice.
Climate Change and Terrorism
In addition to the environmental and
economic effects of climate change, extreme weather conditions are now
affecting political stability in some regions. The Pentagon and
Department of Defense released a
report in 2014 calling climate change a "threat multiplier," then followed with a
report
in the summer of 2015 on "the security risks of climate change." The
second report stated that climate change can and will aggravate problems
such as poverty, environmental degradation and ineffectual leadership,
and will hamper the ability of governments to meet the basic needs of
their populations.
Francisco Femia was ahead of the curve when he co-founded the
Center for Climate and Security
in 2010. The DC-based think tank, which consists of a board of senior
retired military leaders and security professionals, aims to address the
unprecedented challenges that climate change presents to security. Many
security analysts cited climate change as a factor in the November
attacks by ISIS terrorists on Paris, while also acknowledging that
political unrest and the refugee crisis in Syria contributed. Femia
said, "the risk factor of climate change has gone up significantly" in
recent years and cited research indicating that the recent worst drought
in Syria's history was made two to three times more likely because of
climate change.
"Now, of course, it wasn't just
climate change that contributed to the unrest and that migratory flow,"
said Femia. "It was also natural-resource mismanagement by the Assad
regime. They were heavily subsidizing cash crops like cotton, which are
very water intensive, using flood irrigation where you waste 60 percent
of your water. So you can't absolve governments of their responsibility.
But, yeah, climate change is basically putting an additional pressure
on existing security risks. And then when a state fails, obviously
terrorist organizations can take advantage of that failure."
The drier the climate gets, Femia
said, the more precious water resources become, giving terrorist
organizations like ISIS the ability to seize those resources and
leverage them against their opponents and populations at large.
"The point is that climate change
makes all of these other risks worse, and so we should do something
about it," Femia said. "So there's been a debate about, 'Well, is
climate change the biggest security risk?' That kind of misses the
point—it's kind of the wrong question. The issue is that climate change
interacts with other security risks and makes it worse. And so I think
that's how we should be thinking about it … and that's definitely how
the security community thinks about it."
Some observers found the timing of
the Nov. 13 Paris attacks suspicious, in that they created a national
state of emergency in France that led to a ban on the huge climate
justice protests that were planned for COP21. While not speaking to a
conspiracy theory per se, Naomi Klein has suggested that the ban on
protests in Paris had a significant effect. "I don't know that it would
have changed the agreement, but I think it would have changed people's
understanding of what happened. I think there would have been a million
people in the streets of Paris without that ban. That's what they were
projecting," Klein said in a January
talk in Canandaigua, New York billed as "Capitalism vs. The Climate: Reflections on the 2015 UN Climate Conference."
Saving the Planet
Two days before the Paris summit was over, an international coalition announced a
"Break Free from Fossil Fuels" global action for May 2016
that intends "to shut down the world's most dangerous fossil fuel
projects and support the most ambitious climate solutions." Though it
lacks an enforcement mechanism, the Paris agreement at least generated a
wealth of political capital that will pressure governments and the
corporate sector to take action against climate change.
"Most of the needed words are there; however, they are, for the most part, weak," IEER's Makhijani wrote in a
December blog post.
"To give them effect and keep most fossil fuels in the ground will take
the global equivalent of the movement that stopped the Keystone
Pipeline… Actually achieving a limit of 1.5°C will mean taking the tiger
out of Exxon's tank and putting it into the Paris Agreement."
Such a political battle is already
occurring against entities determined to fight tooth and nail to
maintain the status quo. The Obama administration's
Clean Power Plan was temporarily halted
by a 5-4 decision from the Supreme Court in early February, after the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulatory effort to reduce
pollution from power plants was challenged by a 29-state coalition led
by Texas and West Virginia. The plan seeks to cut carbon emissions from
power plants by roughly one-third by substituting natural gas and
renewable energy sources for coal. Litigation over the plan will
continue in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit though and
advocates for the plan believe it will stand on its merits.
"The
Clean Power Plan
has a firm anchor in our nation's clean air laws and a strong
scientific record, and we look forward to presenting our case on the
merits in the courts," Vickie Patton, general counsel of the
Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement following the decision.
The case demonstrates the nature of the political obstacles to
implementing the goals of COP21 influence the fate of the planet.
If enough people demand Earth-friendly products and energy solutions
(and politicians who support such solutions), grassroots movements can
become groundswells, then economic tsunamis. Whether the political
capital from the Paris summit is enough to power a consumer movement to
catalyze the
clean energy revolution needed to halt global temperature rise may well determine the fate of the free world.
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