NEWS & REPORTS

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Global Warming:
"We Fiddle While the Planet Burns"

a talk by Ross Gelbspan, March 2006

As the signals from the planet become progressively more urgent, the Bush administration turns its back on the challenge, the American press remains in denial, and the environmental establishment seems to have gone into hibernation. We are, as the British paper The Independent, put it, "sleepwalking into an Apocalypse."

There are some reasons for this negligence.

We are obsessed by our fear of terrorism.

We have been, for some inexplicable reason, blindsided by the aftermath of the Iraq war.

Our trick-or-treat economy is as unnerving to investors as it is cruel to workers.

And the U.S. country seems more politically polarized than at any time in memory.

So I think it’s very important to understand that climate change is not just another issue in this complicated world of proliferating issues.

It is the issue which, unchecked, will swamp all other issues.

Conversely, I deeply believe that the real solution to the climate crisis may well contain the seeds for solutions to some of the most threatening problems facing humanity today. A real solution to climate change has the potential to begin to mend a profoundly fractured world.

Take, for example, our newfound vulnerability to terrorism.

The most obvious connection is that the solution to the climate crisis – a rapid worldwide transition to clean energy – would dramatically reduce the significance of oil – and with it our exposure to the political volatility in the Middle East .

That volatility will only become more explosive, given the approaching exhaustion of the region’s oil reserves.

Much more relevant, I think, is the fact that the U.S. generates a quarter of the world’s emissions with five percent of its population. And since poor countries are much more immediately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change – our continuing indifference to climate change will almost guarantee more anti-U.S. attacks. This warning was echoed last year by the head of the IPCC.

The real truth about terrorism is that, aside from hardening airports and nuclear plants, there is no way to protect any complex, highly organized society from guerrilla attacks. In the long run, what is really needed is a major change in our posture to developing countries.

Economists tell us that every dollar invested in energy in poor countries creates far more wealth and far more jobs than the same dollar invested in any other sector. Were the U.S. to spearhead a wholesale transfer of clean energy to developing countries, that would do more than anything else in the long term to address the economic desperation that underlies anti-U.S. sentiment.

On the economic front, it seems clear the entire global economy is susceptible to periods of stagnation. While tax cuts and interest rate reductions can provide short-term fixes, I think any recipe for stable long-term economic health must include a component of public works programs – in this case, a public works program to rewire the globe with clean energy.

Without question, that would be the most productive investment we could make in our future. Within a decade, it generate a major and continuing worldwide economic lift-off.

Finally, of course, there is the climate itself:

Unintentionally, we have set in motion massive systems of the planet with huge amounts of inertia that have kept it relatively hospitable to civilization for the last 10,000 years. We have heated the deep oceans. We have reversed the carbon cycle by more than 650,000 years. We have loosed a wave of violent weather. We have altered the timing of the seasons. We are living on an increasingly narrow margin of stability.

While the world’s governments have spent nine years trying to ratify emissions reductions of five to seven percent, a larger reality is being ignored. The science tells us clearly we must cut our emissions by at least 70 percent if we are to allow the climate to re-stabilize.

As Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, declared recently, we have a 10 year window to begin to make "very deep cuts" in our carbon fuel use if "humanity is to survive."

The British ecologist, James Lovelock, was even more pessimistic. Two months ago, he declared that we may have already passed the point of no return in our ability to stave off climate chaos.

While some aspects of the science are dizzyingly complex, the facts underlying the science are quite simple. Carbon dioxide traps in heat. For 10,000 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has remained the same -- 280 PPM—until the late 19 th century when the world began to industrialize using more coal and oil. That 280 is now up to 380 – a level this planet has not experienced for at least 650,000 years. That 280 will double later in this century to 560 PPM which correlates with an increase in the global temperature of 4* to 10* F. By contrast, the last Ice Age was only 5* to 9* F colder than our current climate. Each year, we are pumping seven billion tons of heat-trapping carbon into our atmosphere whose upper extent is about 10 miles overhead.

The most visible evidence of this new climatic instability lies in the relentless succession of extreme weather events all over the world during the past few years.

Let me note a few highlights just from last year -- 2005:

* At the beginning of the year, two feet of snow fell in the hills outside Los Angeles .

* In February, a 124-mile-an-hour windstorm shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and the UK .

* Last summer, a severe drought in the Midwest dropped water levels in the Missouri River to their lowest on record this summer.

* In July, the worst drought on record in southern Europe triggered wildfires in Spain and Portugal and left water levels in France at their lowest in 30 years.

* That same month, a lethal heat wave in Arizona kept temperatures above 110 degrees for a week and killed more than 20 people.

* In August, the Indian city of Mumbai received 37 inches of rain in one day -- disrupting the lives of 20 million people.

* Days later, global warming hit the U.S. with a vengeance in the form of Katrina, Rita and Wilma. While global warming does not make more hurricanes, it does make them more intense. Katrina bore the unmistakable fingerprints of a warming-amplified storm -- while Wilma was the most intense North Atlantic hurricane on record.

* And 2005 apparently surpassed 1998 as the hottest year on record.

The economic consequences of these intensifying weather extremes are visible in the rising disaster relief costs to governments and the escalating losses of the world’s property insurers.

During the 1980s insurance losses to extreme weather events averaged $2 billion a year; in the 1990s they averaged $12 billion a year. In 1998, the insurance industry lost $89 billion to extreme events -- more than it lost during the entire decade of the 1980s. The head of the Re-insurance Association of America has said that unless something is done to stabilize the climate, it could well bankrupt the industry.

But the stakes involve far more than the survival of the insurance industry. Last year, the UN projected that losses from climate impacts will reach $150 billion a year within this decade. Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, estimates that within several decades, losses from climate impacts will amount to $300 billion a year. And the largest property re-insurer in Britain projects that, unchecked, the impacts of climate change could bankrupt the global economy within 65 years.

Politically, there is a strong totalitarian threat to climate change. It is easiest to see in certain poor countries whose ecosystems are as fragile as their traditions of democracy. It is not hard to foresee governments resorting to permanent states of martial law in the face of food shortages, droughts, floods, incursions of environmental refugees and epidemics of infectious disease.

A couple of years ago, following a four-month spell of drought and frost, 700,000 Papua New Guineans left their homes and began wandering the countryside in search of food, water and warmth. And officials said they could not control the situation. Fortunately, Australia came to their aid, but the situation is a vivid illustration of the kind of political instability that climate change implies.

The escalation of climatic instability holds anti-democratic potentials for the North as well. It will cause big job losses. It will shrink foreign markets. It will impair the flow of industrial commodities from abroad. This is not the kind of climate in which democracy flourishes. This is the kind of climate that could easily lead to food rationing, with its associated black-market crime. It could lead to the militarization of disaster relief forces to maintain social order. The threat is imminent enough that the Central Intelligence Agency is studying the potentials for political destabilization from climate-related disruptions.

Two years ago, the Pentagon released a major planning scenario detailing mass-migrations, wars and all kinds of political chaos that would result from a rapid climate change event. What is really significant about this document is that it reclassifies climate change from an environmental problem to a national security threat.

Let me just run through one more body of evidence:

* Warming expands water. Officials recently relocated 40,000 inhabitants from their island homes in the South Pacific which are being submerged by rising sea levels.

Heat changes ecosystems. Two recent studies in the journal Nature reported that animals, insects, birds, fish and whole ecosystems all over the world are migrating toward the poles in a futile search for temperature stability.

Warming is also accelerating in the deep oceans -- down to a depth of two miles. In addition to fueling stronger storms, that deep ocean warming is also causing the break up of Antarctic ice shelves— three pieces at least the size of Rhode Island have broken off since 1995. A little more than a year ago, the largest ice shelf in the Arctic -- 3,000 years old, 80 feet thick and 150 square miles in area -- collapsed.

* The oceans are also becoming acidified from the fallout of our carbon emissions. The pH of the world's oceans has changed more in the last 100 years than it did in the previous 10,000 years.

* High above the oceans, most of earth’s glaciers are retreating at accelerating rates. The biggest glacier in the Peruvian Andes was retreating by 14 feet a year 20 years ago; today it is shrinking by 99 feet a year. And the amount of icemelt flowing into the sea from the largest glacier on the planet -- the Greenland ice sheet -- has doubled in the last 10 years. It is losing 3 cubic miles of ice a year -- enough to cover the state of Maryland with ice a foot thick.

* The Siberian and Alaskan Tundras, which for thousands of years absorbed methane and CO2, are now thawing and releasing those gases back into the atmosphere;

* In a truly striking finding, for the first time in history, humanity has consumed more grain than it has produced for four years in a row -- due to changes in the climate.

* And we have actually altered the timing of the seasons. Because of the buildup of atmospheric CO2, spring is now arriving almost two weeks earlier in the northern hemisphere than it did 20 years ago.

Without realizing it, we are changing the rhythms of nature by which we have planted our crops, and lived our lives and written our poetry for 10,000 years.

Finally, climatic instability is bad for human health. The most obvious impact comes from heating. Recently, the UN’s weather agency (World Meteorological Organization) predicted a worldwide doubling of deaths due to heat waves in the next 20 years. Witness the 35,000 heat deaths in Europe two summers ago.

Those heat deaths bear a very specific signature of human-induced global warming. One finding of climate scientists is that as the planet warms, the nighttime low temperatures are rising about twice as fast as the daytime high temperatures -- because carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases are trapping in the heat and preventing the normal nighttime radiational cooling. That means that when a person's body becomes heat-stressed, it does not experience the traditional nighttime cooling that allows it to recuperate. And that is what seems to have happened in Europe.

There is another, more complex set of health impacts – and they involve the warming-driven migration of tropical diseases. Warming accelerates the breeding rates and the biting rates of insects. It accelerates the maturation of the pathogens they carry. And it expands their range by allowing them to live longer at higher altitudes and higher latitudes. As a result, mosquitoes are now spreading yellow fever, malaria and dengue fever to populations which have never previously been exposed. Globally malaria quadrupled between 1990 and 1995.

The British medical journal, the Lancet, has called indifference to climate change a form of "bio-political terrorism."

So the consequences to our social existence are truly profound. As one world-class scientist co-chaired the IPCC told me: “If this newly unstable climate had begun 150 years ago, the planet would likely never have been able to support its current population.”

This, then, is the central drama underlying the issue: the ability of this planet to sustain civilization versus the survival of the largest commercial enterprise in human history. The oil and coal industries together generate more than a trillion dollars a year in revenues. They support the economies of more than a dozen countries. In this battle, their resources are virtually without limit.

For more than a decade, the fossil fuel lobby has mounted a extremely effective campaign of deception and disinformation, almost exclusively in the U.S., to persuade the public and policy-makers that the issue of atmospheric warming is still stuck in the limbo of scientific uncertainty. That campaign for the longest time targeted the science. And in so doing, it marginalized the findings of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the U.N. in what is the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history. It then misrepresented the economics of an energy transition. And most recently, with its new champion in the White House, it has attempted to demolish the diplomatic foundations of the climate convention. And it has been extraordinarily successful in maintaining a relentless drumbeat of doubt in the public mind.

More than a decade ago, Western Fuels, a $400-million coal consortium, declared in its annual report it was launching a direct attack on mainstream science and enlisting several scientists who are skeptical about climate change—Fred Singer, Pat Michaels and Robert Balling. It turned out these three skeptics received about a million dollars in a three-year period from coal and oil interests which was never publicly disclosed until we published it.

Western Fuels and several coal utilities then launched an extensive public relations campaign which called for local press, radio and TV appearances by these greenhouse skeptics. According to its strategy papers, the purpose of the campaign was to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” The same document indicates the campaign was designed to target “older, less-educated men...[and] young, low-income women” in districts which receive their electricity from coal and, preferably, have a representative on the House Energy Committee.

The coal industry followed this effort with a $250,000 video – which got very wide distribution. But they changed the argument. First time around, they contended global warming wasn't happening. Then they said it was good for us. The video argued that as we get more warming in the far north, we can grow more food to help feed an expanding population. Unfortunately, the video overlooks two factors. The first is the bugs. Of all natural systems, one of the most sensitive to even slightest temperature change is insects; even a slight warming will trigger an explosion of crop-destroying, disease-spreading insects. Plant biologists point out an even more unconscionable omission. While enhanced CO2 may temporarily increase yields in the northern latitudes, it will decimate food crop growth in the tropical regions where the majority of the world’s poorest and hungriest people live. A half-degree increase in the average temperature will cause a substantial decline in rice yields in Southeast Asia—and a drop-off of 20 percent of the wheat crop in India—a country where a third of the population live in extreme poverty.

This manufactured denial is by far the biggest obstacle facing all of us at work on this issue. It is the predictable outcome of as campaign of disinformation which was launched a decade ago by the coal industry -- which paid three would-be scientists more than a million dollars in a three year period to publicly deny this reality. More recently it has been carried forward by ExxonMobil which has spent more than $13 million in the last five years to bankroll these skeptics.

We had some fun with the most visible of these skeptics, Fred Singer. A couple of years ago. Singer declared in The Washington Post that he had not received any money from the oil industry for 20 years. Shortly thereafter, we published the fact that he had received thousands of dollars from ExxonMobil in 1998. The documentation was on the ExxonMobil website.

But this is far more serious than a cheap thrill of “gotcha” journalism.

In the early 1990s, it, with the science still uncertain, this deception could be excused as predictable, business-as-usual response.

But since the science has become so robust and the impacts so visible, I have come to regard it as a crime against humanity.

To me as a journalist, this whole campaign goes way beyond traditional public relations spin. To me, this effort basically amounts to the privatization of truth.

The industry-sponsored “skeptics” are fond of pointing out uncertainties in the science. They have made a living off of scientific uncertainty. But they have used it in a very selective and misleading way.

Here is what I think is the truth about uncertainty. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere 100 years. If we could magically stop all our coal and oil burning tomorrow, we would still be subject to a long spell of costly and traumatic disruptive weather. Moreover new research indicates that prehistoric climate changes have happened as abrupt shifts rather than gradual transitions, and that very small changes in a very delicately balanced atmosphere have produced very large outcomes. Not only are we gambling with our future. We are gambling with our eyes blindfolded. We can’t really read the cards we’ve been dealt.

Here is some good news. Outside the U.S., there is virtually no debate in any other country in the world about what is happening to the climate. All the debates in the other countries are on the policy side -- how do we change our energy diet without wrecking our economies. One proof is that, even as the US has been dragging its heels, a number of European countries are staking out goals that are consistent with the science.

Holland is now implementing a plan to cut its emissions 80 percent in the next 40 years. Tony Blair has announced Britain will cut its emissions by 60 percent cuts in the next 50 years. Germany has committed to cuts of 50 percent in 50 years. Last year, French President Jacques Chirac called on the entire industrial nations to cut emissions by 75 percent in the next 45 years.

So it’s important to remember that the confusion about climate change stops at the boundaries of the United States.

I also think it’s important to understand that climate change is no longer the exclusive franchise of environmentalists. For people who work on this issue, I would urge them to join with groups focusing on international relief and development (like Oxfam) , campaign finance reform (because we're not going to get clean energy without clean elections) , public health, corporate accountability, labor, human rights and environmental justice.

There are very aspects of the climate issue for each of these constituencies. Let me just speak for just a minute to the issue of justice. Climate change is nothing if not an issue of environmental justice and human rights. Secure shelter, food and the tools for basic sustenance are embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – and we are already seeing them disrupted almost on a monthly basis by an increasingly unstable climate.

Several years ago, Hurricane Mitch killed 11,000 people in Central America . No hurricane in the U.S. has ever taken that kind of toll.

Two years ago, the worst flooding in memory left some half million people homeless in Sri Lanka .

Rising sea levels are forcing the evacuation of whole island nations. Not long ago, the president of Tuvalu , a small island nation in the Pacific, called climate change "a form of slow death."

There is a connection between the impending evacuation of Tuvalu , compromised immune systems in Beijing and rising levels of asthma in inner-city Boston , where I come from.

There is also a connection on the solutions side. By blocking a transition to clean energy, big coal and big oil are withholding from the rest of us a huge surge in jobs and economic growth.

At the corporate level, we have seen some voluntary progress. Ford has joined Daimler-Chrysler in an $1 billion venture to produce hydrogen fuel-cell powered autos. British Petroleum is now one of the world’s biggest producers of solar systems. Shell has created a $1 billion core company in renewable technologies.

But without a strong regime of mandatory regulation by the world’s governments, many of these initiatives will fail – and several oil executives have said as much off the record. Without a binding structure of regulation to level the corporate playing field, competing energy companies like ExxonMobil will undercut these voluntary initiatives by selling artificially cheaper oil and coal. The solar, wind and hydrogen investments by BP, Shell and others will become money losers. And the continuing succession of droughts, storms, epidemics and insurance losses will tear holes in the global economic fabric.

There is no doubt that the current goals of the Kyoto Protocol are too low -- and its timetable too long -- to effectively address the climate crisis. But the Kyoto Framework was designed to accommodate a much more aggressive approach.

With that in mind, I would like briefly to reference three interactive policy strategies which form the centerpiece of the last chapter of my book, Boiling Point, and could easily be accommodated within the Kyoto framework. In fact, I believe they represent the an example of the general direction that a vibrant Protocol must take -- provided the U.S. allows it to survive.

The include a change in subsidy policies, the creation of a large fund to transfer clean energy to poor countries, and a binding, mandatory regulatory mechanism for every country to increase its fossil fuel efficiency by five percent a year.

Just a few words about each of these policies:

· The US spends $25 billion a year subsidizing coal and oil. That figure is $200 billion a year in the entire industrial world. If those subsidies were removed from fossil fuels and put behind renewables, the oil companies would follow the money and become aggressive developers of fuel cells, solar panels and windmills. That subsidy shift would also bring out of the woodwork an army of energy engineers and entrepreneurs in an explosion of creativity that would rival the dot.com revolution of the 1990s.

· The creation of a large fund, of about $300 billion a year for about a decade to jumpstart renewable energy infrastructures in developing countries; this could be funded by carbon taxes in the north, a tax on international airline travel or (our preferred mechanism) a tax on international currency transactions (known as a Tobin Tax, after its creator, the Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin). A small tax of a quarter of a penny on a dollar would net out to about $300 billion -- in essence, a tiny tax on global commerce to address a threat to minimize the coming damage to the global environment; and,

· the adoption within the Kyoto framework of a binding, progressively more stringent Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard that rises by 5 percent per year.

Under this plan, every country would start at its current baseline to increase its Fossil Fuel energy efficiency by 5 percent every year until the global 70 percent reduction is attained. That means a country would produce the same amount as the previous year with five percent less carbon fuel. Alternatively, it would produce five percent more goods with the same carbon fuel use as the previous year.

Since no economy grows at five percent for long, emissions reductions would outpace long-term economic growth.

For the first few years of this progressive efficiency standard, most countries would meet their goals by implementing low-cost or even profitable efficiencies – the “low-hanging fruit” -- in their current energy systems. After a few years, as those efficiencies became more expensive to capture, countries would meet the 5 percent goal by drawing more and more energy from renewable sources – most of which are 100 percent efficient by a Fossil Fuel standard.

And that would create the mass markets and economies of scale for renewables that would bring down their prices and make them competitive with coal and oil.

Several oil executives have said in private that they can, in an orderly fashion, decarbonize their energy supplies. But they need the governments of the world to regulate them so all companies can make the transition in lockstep without losing market share to competitors. A progressive Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard would, I think, provide that type of regulation.

What I’m talking about in terms of the global fund is not a traditional North-South giveaway. The fund represents the transfer of resources from the finance sector -- in the form of speculative, non-productive transactions -- to the industrial sector in the form of intensely productive, wealth-generating job-creating investments.

What I am talking about is a critical investment in our own national security. The global climate envelops us all. What is needed is the kind of thinking that gave rise to the Marshall Plan after World War II. So that today, instead of a collection of impoverished and dependent allies in Europe , we have robust trading partners. We believe a plan of this magnitude -- regardless of the details -- would have a similarly enriching effect on the world’s developing economies. It would create millions of jobs. It would raise living standards abroad without compromising ours. It would allow developing countries to grow without regard to atmospheric limits – and without the budgetary burden of imported oil. And in a very short time, it would jump the renewable energy industry into a central, driving engine of growth of the global economy.

The real economic issue involved in a global transition to clean energy is not cost. The real economic issue is whether the world has a large enough labor force to accomplish the task in time to meet nature’s deadline.

What I've been talking about is an energy transition which could, hopefully, allow the climate to restabilize. But it ignores many other areas of our rapidly deteriorating biosphere. Some environmentalists worry that a plan whose appeal lies in increasing wealth and commerce may be the undoing of other planetary and ecological systems whose vitality is already at risk.

My personal hunch is that changes in values frequently follow changes in technology. I believe that the very act of addressing the true proportions of the climate crisis would bring home to everyone the fact that we are living on a planet with limits – and that we are now bumping up against those limits.

Ultimately I believe a worldwide crash program to rewire the world with clean energy would yield far more than a global fuel switch. I think it would lead, almost inevitably, to closed-loop industrial processes, “smart-growth” planning, the adoption of “environmental accounting” in calculating national GDPs, and, ultimately, a whole new ethic of sustainability that would transform our institutions and practices and dynamics in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

Back here on earth, the reality is dismal.

The White House has become the East Coast branch office of ExxonMobil and Peabody coal – and climate change has become the pre-eminent case study of the contamination of our political system by money.

Four years ago, the President reneged on his campaign promise to cap emissions from coal-powered plants.

The Administration then announced the first draft of its energy plan – which is basically a fast track to climate hell.

In a truly Orwellian stroke, the White House removed all references to the dangers of climate change from the EPA's website.

Soon after taking office, the President appointed an official of the American Petroleum Industry to head up the White House climate office. That official, Phil Cooney, altered a major scientific report last year by rewriting and removing references to coming climate impacts in the U.S. The outcry that followed that disclosure forced him to resign from the Bush Administration. Within a week, he was given a new job by ExxonMobil.

More recently, one of the country's most prominent climate scientists, NASA's Jim Hansen, learned he was being censored when the agency ordered him to get prior approval for any papers, lectures and media interviews.

(One of Hansen's censors, parenthetically, was a White House appointee who had to resign when it was revealed he was a resume fraud, claiming to have gotten a B.A. from a university from which he was unable to graduate.)

(Another public affairs involved in trying to muzzle Hansen came to his NASA job from the Southern Company, a large, Atlanta-based coal company that funded and helped launch the Western Fuels disinformation campaign I mentioned earlier.)

Shortly thereafter, it was disclosed that researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could not take part in any press interviews without an agency "minder" present to decide what the researchers are allowed to say.

(This is very ominous -- especially to a journalist. The reason I was able to write my two books as hard as I did was because of what the scientists said to me off the record. On the record, they spoke in terms of trends and estimates and probabilities -- in very conservative scientific language. Off the record, they told me this stuff is scary as hell. It gave me a context and perspective for my own understanding that I would never have gotten with a "minder" sitting in on the conversations).

As Jerry Mahlman, a world class researcher who headed up a major climate lab at Princeton , recently told one reporter, "Many scientists at NOAA have become too intimidated to go public with their findings. I know a lot of people who would love to talk to you but they don't dare. They are worried about getting fired."

What we are seeing here is not political conservatism. What we are seeing is corruption disguised as conservatism.

Finally, of course, the president withdrew the US from the Kyoto talks on the ground that it was unfair to the US since it exempts the developing countries from the first round of cuts.

At some point, the president might stumble across the fact that it was his father who approved the exemption of developing countries and for good reason:

We in the north have created the problem. We in the north have the resources to begin to address it. We in the north need to take the lead and the rest of the world will come along.

The real truth is that if we in the north don't get this right, we will suffer severe economic and environmental damage whether or not we impose energy restrictions on developing countries.

As one Argentina climate negotiator said: "We are all in the same boat and there's no way half the boat is going to sink."

But despite what's going on in Washington, political conditions have changed significantly in the past two years.

A number of political conservatives are now embracing this issue. William F. Buckley has warned readers that this is “not an Al Gore issue” – that we are producing too many greenhouse gases for the planet to accommodate. A few years ago, Jim Woolsey, former head of the CIA and Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana wrote about the urgency of the issue in Foreign Affairs. Paul O’Neill, the former Treasury Secretary, has likened the coming impacts of climate change to a nuclear holocaust. And conservative Senator John McCain is taking the lead in the Congress in beginning to address with this issue.

On the ground today, many activist groups are now taking up climate as their central issue. The religious community has become involved with the climate issue in a very big way. And growing numbers of cities and states and universities are beginning to implement their own emissions-reductions programs.

But far beyond reducing emissions, I think, the climate crisis provides a small window of opportunity to make even larger changes in some very destructive dynamics that characterize our political and economic environment today.

I do not believe we can truly address the climate crisis within the parameters of our current economic system. What is needed is a new and permanent democratization of the global economy.

People who follow the progress of climate change tend to view it with extreme defensiveness. The coming impacts are truly unnerving. They will be extremely destructive.

But what is missing from this view is an appreciation of the transformative potential embedded in the climate crisis. I mentioned earlier the implications for terrorism, economic growth and, more importantly, for a much more equitable global economy.

Perhaps the most important transformative potential lies in the fact that a solution which is appropriate in scale and magnitude to the crisis would also provide a pilot project to begin to put democratically-determined boundaries around the operations of the multi-national corporations starting with big coal and big oil.

So, despite the current political situation, I do believe for a whole host of reasons the time is right for a major political offensive on the climate crisis. We have as allies most of the nations of the world. We have growing numbers of corporations. Most importantly, we have nature. Climate change will only get worse.

But the time for action is very short. The deep oceans are warming; the tundra is thawing; the glaciers are melting; infectious diseases are spreading; violent weather is increasing and the timing of the seasons has changed. And all that has resulted from one degree of warming. By contrast, the earth will warm from 4 to 10 degrees later in this century.

Our civilization is standing at an extraordinary crosspoint. And while a positive prognosis may be overly visionary, the alternative – given the escalating instability of the climate and the intensifying desperation of global poverty – is truly horrible to contemplate.

Our modern history has been marked by the totalitarianism of command-and-control economies and the opulence and brutality of unregulated markets and runaway globalization.

index of papers