Inconvenient Countdown: 6 Days

GO-Team '08

In conjunction with his publicity tour for An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore was part of a forum at New York City's Town Hall, hosted by Wired magazine. World Changing has extensive coverage of it, but here are some of tidbits that jump out at me the most:

Gore summarized the situation with 5 points:

* global warming is real
* humans are principally responsible
* it is not both good and bad: the bad far outweighs the good
* we need to fix it
* it is not too late, we have time

"This is by far the most dangerous crisis we have ever faced; and it has the capacity to bring civilization itself to a halt. Scientist James Lovell has a dark vision of where we are headed. But I know something about the political system that some people in science don't know. The political system is nonlinear - it can appear to move at a snail's pace, but then it can cross a tipping point and shift into a completely new path." Gore sees a solution to the climate crisis in the potential for a major political change as the American people respond to the challenge.

[...]

James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan gave a short presentation: "I'm not speaking as a government employee" he started. He outline the inevitable warming consequences of the current state of things, and his view that we have one more decade of "business as usual" before we start to reach a point of irreversible changes, a "climate tipping point", that will take us beyond anything Earth has experienced since the first proto-humans evolved three million years ago.

Hansen talked about the impact on animals and plants: on average they are moving northward at about 4 miles per decade, but the climate zones are moving northward at 35 miles per decade, and with "business as usual" that rate will increase to 70 miles per decade later this century. 50% of plant and animal species on Earth are expected to die out. This is a profound moral issue (Hansen mentioned Noah's commandment to save all the species), if we ourselves manage to survive.

Hansen reviewed again the dangers from glacier melting in Greenland and West Antarctica; direct measurements of their mass showed the mass of Greenland decreased by 50 cubic miles of ice in 2005, and the mass of West Antarctica by a similar amount. 5 degrees (Fahrenheit) of temperature increase will lead to cataclysmic problems and the 100 million refugees Gore mentioned, or perhaps as many as half a billion refugees, with a 25 meter sea level rise.

And Hansen compared the "Ozone success story" to the disaster we have had with global warming; with ozone, scientists, the media, government, and even industry eventually joined in working out the solution and making it happen. With global warming, just about everybody has fallen down on the job - but Hansen particularly blamed "special interests" or industry for the lack of progress.

But - there is still hope for an alternative scenario, with the right political and technological leadership in the United States. General discussion followed, appropriately focused on Gore and Hansen. Gore talked about changing your individual life, becoming part of the solution, and being emboldened to speak up.
That it was still even for him, knowing about the problem for over 30 years, a challenge to fully internalize the gravity of the situation. And that, "If you believe what Dr. Hansen said, if you accept that reality, we may have less than 10 years before we cross a "point of no return". So - what else matters?"

"We who are alive today are at a point in history with a burden of action almost unimaginable in the context of human history." But Gore stated that we have everything we need: we have technologies to get us started, others that we know we can focus on to develop to meet the need. What we're really missing is political will - but from his experience, "that is a renewable resource" (applause!)

Gore also echoed Hansen's points about the great contrast between the ozone problem - the Montreal protocol was signed by Ronald Reagan - and global warming: now the government is aligning with the worst and least responsible of the polluters. And the news media is acting like a referee at a pro-wrestling match!

On what we need to be doing, Hansen pointed out that with cfc's for ozone, once we thought there was a problem we didn't build any more infrastructure, and we then eliminated that infrastructure over a period of years after signing the protocol. We need to do the same here: quit increasing emissions (still rising at a rate of about 2%/year) - in particular the US, China and India have plans for many new coal-fired power plants, and the number of transportation vehicles keeps increasing relentlessly.

Hansen believes we can stop this increase in CO2 emissions now through efficiency improvements that would last us 10-20 years, by which time we may have the technology to actually replace fossil generators and take us down a different path. To reduce the need for new power plants we need to promote end use efficiency: appliances, lighting, etc. Individuals can do some of this, but we have got to have government leadership.

Gore also commented on the potential for government leadership in enforcing standards - that in his view it had to start with a change in the political environment: we need an informed citizenry, as our founders intended. As long as we do not have an informed citizenry, it doesn't matter what the other three branches of government do.

There are things that can be done but they are definitely difficult, and entrenched special interests will fight them to the death. We need the informed citizenry to rise up and oppose those special interests and do what's right.

Vice President Gore might still have a bit of glass-half-full faith in political change, but it's gonna be a tough road, and Walter Shapiro over at Salon takes a more pessimistic view--though he makes the point that some serious sleeve rolling is required and that he's not excusing himself from that.

There are those who paint the beguiling portrait that, with the correct government incentives, transforming American energy policies will be virtually painless, with no more than minimal financial cost for typical voters. But, as most serious environmental theorists admit, that's poppycock. Transitions -- especially ones as wrenching as lessening our dependence on coal for electricity and oil for gasoline – inevitably involve costs and trade-offs. Free trade and globalization, to use an analogy, lift incomes worldwide. But try telling that to Maytag workers in Newton, Iowa, who just watched their union jobs disappear overseas.

Americans, in case you haven't noticed, have short attention spans. It is hard to remember that the millennium began with electricity-starved Californians facing brownouts and rolling blackouts. In an interview, the CEO of a major power company warned that by the end of the decade, those who live in parts of the eastern United States might be facing the same kind of shortfall.

"Reasonable people, if they had their druthers, don't want their lights to go out," said the energy executive, who did not want his company identified. "But it isn't that simple." He pointed out that the quickest solution to the problem would be build more coal-powered plants (the kind that release the most greenhouse gases) or to construct huge landscape-blighting transmission towers that would shift excess electricity-generating capacity from Ohio and western Pennsylvania. And, yes, that excess Ohio electricity comes from coal.

I tried out this theory on Rafe Pomerance, a former Clinton administration official who is the chairman of the Climate Policy Center. "It is possible," he conceded. "When you have momentary crises, long-term issues like global warming end up being taken off the table. Look at 9/11. Millions of priorities changed. That's politics."

The decades-long battle against global warming will test our political will far more than any other problem we have faced as a nation since, perhaps, the Great Depression. This crisis plays to all the weaknesses in our national decision making. There is a long time line, a need for societal sacrifice, and no easily identifiable villains, other than all of us who took the good times for granted.

So it is great that, thanks to Gore and many others, we have finally acknowledged global warming. But -- to trot out a favorite news-magazine cover-story headline -- "Now for the Hard Part."

Speaking of which, make sure this isn't the kind of sleeve rolling you're engaged in: