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Contents this page were published in the September/October, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1997 WFP Collective, Inc.
HOW HUMANS TREAT
THEIR SURROUNDINGS,
EACH OTHER, THEMSELVES
Facing the starkly apocalyptic prospect of nuclear war, citizens across the planet in the 1980s rallied against nuclear weapons. A similar, yet in many ways far more difficult, challenge is upon us now. Our modern conveniences are sending a cloud into the atmosphere as menacing as the bomb's mushroom cloud, but one far less visible. The energy that powers our lives is heating up our climate. If we do not perceive it and respond in a way that reaches to the source of the problem, we will slip into a catastrophe.
Those with any doubt should read Ross Gelbspan's new book, The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth's Threatened Climate (1997, Addison-Wesley). Not only does this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist detail the overwhelming weight of new scientific evidence for climate change, he also uncovers why the biggest story on the planet is not the top story on the evening news.
I sat down with Gelbspan recently to talk about climate change: the science, the solutions and the politics:
First I'd like you to briefly detail the emerging information about climate change.
There are five bodies of evidence. When put together, they create a pretty irrefutable case.
First, a panel of the world's 2,000 leading climate scientists who report to the United Nations concluded at the end of 1995 that the planet is heating very rapidly, that statistics are rather staggering. The 10 hottest years in history have occurred since 1980. The five hottest consecutive years were '91-95. '95 is the hottest year on record. And the planet is heating at a faster rate than anytime in the last 10,000 years.
This panel of scientists concluded that a large part of this heating is definitely due to our emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide from oil and coal. They also indicated an early stage of global warming is a much more unstable climate. ... That involves altered rainfall patterns, much more severe precipitation events, more floods, more droughts, rising sea levels and so forth.
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Unfortunately, most of the business community, which is operating on the free market principles of the global marketplace, sees the climate crisis as yet another opportunity to sell yet another category of goods to poor countries who can barely feed and educate their own poverty-stressed populations... |
A third body of evidence involves the spread of infectious diseases. This is primarily due to the fact that insects such as mosquitoes are now able to survive at altitudes and latitudes which were only a short time ago too cold to support their survival. As a result they are spreading yellow fever, dengue and malaria to populations that have never previously experienced them.
Another body of evidence which I find very compelling has to do ... with actual changes to the planet itself. .... Most of the world's glaciers are retreating at accelerating rates. .... Whole populations of fish, insects and birds are migrating north to seek stable temperatures. In the last three years three ice shelves have broken off of Antarctica.... In the northern forests in Canada the growth of the trees is beginning to flatten. .... In parts of southern Europe a desert is spreading through portions of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. .... The tundra in northern Canada and Alaska, which has for thousands of years absorbed methane and carbon dioxide, is now thawing and releasing those (greenhouse) gases back into the atmosphere...
There's a point people don't understand. They say, "We've just had this very cold winter over the upper Midwest. We had big snowfalls last year. How could we be in global warming?"
It's very simple. As overall warming happens, it increases the evaporation of water. It expands the air to hold more water. Then when a normal atmospheric cycle takes place, if it's in winter it releases much more snow. If it's in warmer times, it releases much more rain. So you're getting much more precipitation in very severe and intense downpours. You're also getting altered patterns of drought.
.... One consequence that is very troubling is that the rate of change of our climate vastly exceeds the rate at which ecosystems can adapt. The panel of UN scientists said that most of our ecosystems can adapt to a change of about one degree Celsius per century. In fact, we're looking forward to a change of three to four degrees Celsius in the next century unless we do something very rapidly to limit our greenhouse emissions.
Ross, why aren't we seeing this headlined on the CBS Evening News? Why isn't it a banner story in the New York Times?
It's a real tough question, Patrick. I think it involves two elements.
One is there has been a very effective and sustained disinformation campaign by the oil and coal industry to basically persuade the public that the issue is stuck in the limbo of scientific uncertainty, that it's not proven and there is no basis for us taking any action. That campaign has involved the use, especially by the coal industry, of about a half-dozen scientists who are skeptical about this. They are calling themselves "greenhouse skeptics." They are not particularly well-regarded by the mainstream scientific community. Nevertheless they have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed funding from oil and coal interests, from OPEC, from U.S., British and German coal, from Cyprus Minerals and so forth....
There is another reason beyond that, simply the larger human reaction of psychological denial. The prospect of a warmer, wetter world conjures images of storms, disease, heat and discomfort. That is very, very frightening and very threatening. The natural human reaction is to not want to believe it, to try to look away from it...
It seems we've got to look to a political solution. You've also detailed how increasing numbers of industries, particularly the insurance industry, are starting to organize a response.
A lot of the banks are now coming on board with the issue. There was a stunning breaking of ranks in the oil industry (in May). The president of the U.S. branch of British Petroleum made a major speech to Stanford University in which he said, "We are departing from the rest of the oil industry. We recognize that climate change is here. We recognize that we must begin to deal with it. And we are beginning to invest in a major solar facility."
... What we really need is this - some political will and leadership to begin to basically rewire the world and replace all our gasoline-burning cars, oil-burning furnaces and coal-fired generating plants with renewable energy. Hydropower when it's appropriate, but windmills, fuel cells, solar panels, all these technologies can give us all the energy we need.
I'm not talking about any decline in our current standard of living. The only thing that keeps them non-competitive is the fact they're still a boutique industry. As soon as they get up to levels of mass production and economies of scale, they will become competitive on a per-kilowatt-hour basis. What we need to do is jump-start those industries.
The first thing that I would see domestically in the United States as a very manageable legislative mandate is this - The federal government is right now spending about $25 billion a year to subsidize coal and oil. If those subsidies were diverted to renewables it would provide the lift-off boost to put them into the big league of global industry.
Another dimension is very important - relations between the developing world and the countries of the north. The next big pulse of carbon that's going to accelerate the warming of the planet will not be coming from the US, Japan and Western Europe. It will be coming from China, India, Mexico, Brazil, Eastern Europe and Latin America, all these economies that are struggling to keep ahead of the undertow of poverty. As a result, what has to happen is a transfer of these climate-friendly renewable technologies to these countries.
Unfortunately, most of the business community, which is operating on the free market principles of the global marketplace, sees the climate crisis as yet another opportunity to sell yet another category of goods to poor countries who can barely feed and educate their own poverty-stressed populations...
Where's Al Gore been on all this? He wrote a book about it. People had great hopes that he would do something.
He has worked behind the scenes at some level with the insurers and with some of the bankers. He has kept a very low profile on the issue. I think the vice president is a very, very politically cautious individual. ...Most of the environmental community is, very disappointed, both with Gore's lack of visibility and with the administration's own withdrawal from their announcement last summer that they accepted the science officially, and that they were calling for certain emissions reductions by the time that the current climate treaty is concluded in December. Since then the administration has withdrawn from that position. They have said they will opt for very much lower levels of emissions reductions. They have rolled forward the date at which they should start to the year 2013.
There is a third and most unconscionable retreat - the Clinton administration has adopted the position of the oil companies and the OPEC nations that any emissions reduction that the US and the OPEC countries undergo must fall equally heavily on China, India, Mexico and Brazil. ... That is a strategy the oil interests have pursued throughout these negotiations. It is guaranteed to stalemate them, and is a recipe for failure...
You have proposed a pretty radical solution yourself, which is to phase out fossil fuel burning in 10 years. Do you think we can possibly do that?
The world right now is talking about emissions reductions of 5-10 percent. The science tells us we must cut our emissions by 60-70 percent if we are to restore the atmosphere to a hospitable state. I do not believe that piecemeal actions will do it. ... The solution has to be of the same order of magnitude as the threat itself. Can we do it? Certainly. This is a country that created an atomic bomb in two-and-one-half years and put a man on the moon in 10 years...
What we don't understand is the incredible economic potential of such a move. The oil and coal industries tell us that something like a 50-percent emissions reduction would cost us five percent of our Gross Domestic Product. What they don't tell us is that the kind of energy transition I'm talking about would create a huge economic boom. It would create millions and millions of jobs all over the world. It would close the gap between the north and the south. In very short order you would see the renewable energy industry eclipse high tech as the central driving engine of growth of the global economyÉ
To find out what you can do, contact the Atmosphere Alliance at atmosphere@olywa.net, (360) 352-1763, or 2103 Harrison Ave NW #2615, Olympia, WA 98502.
Patrick Mazza edits Cascadia Planet. A longer version of this interview is available there.
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