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Eaarth by Bill McKibben (Review)
Phil England, The Ecologist
… Now, in the wake of the failure of Copenhagen, McKibben challenges us to take the blinkers off.
McKibben was the first author to write a book about climate change for a general audience (The End of Nature in 1989, after James Hansen had first raised this issue in Congress in 1988). Twenty years later, his principle message is that climate change is no longer just a nebulous threat to our grandchildren or to our children; it’s a real and present danger, here and now.
McKibben takes us by the hand and leads us through the profound, and in some cases largely irreversible, effects of the 1C rise in global average temperatures that we have experienced already:
… If you survive this ghost-of-climate-present survey of our ‘new’ planet and make it to the second half of the book, you’ll find that in order for us to survive, McKibben advocates a new mindset that jettisons ideas of growth, consumer lifestyles, bigness and complexity.
… His solutions are mainly community-based and focused on meeting our top-line needs: food, energy and, surprisingly perhaps, the internet. He is fantastic on food, highlighting both the impressive upswing of initiatives across the US as well as inspirational solutions for food security in poor countries. Here it is clear that we need to relocalise and go small not because, as Mckibben puts it, ‘mammals get smaller in the heat and so should governments’, but because our current system of industrialised agriculture is vulnerable to peak oil, threatens food security in poorer nations and is responsible for a large proportion of greenhouse gases. Small, smart, labour-intensive, natural systems are undoubtedly the way to go.
He is less convincing on energy, dismissing national projects in favour of domestic solar and wind (perhaps he needs to have a chat with George Monbiot about that). McKibben rounds off by arguing that we should make every effort to save the internet – a boredom-saving, information sharing, transport bypassing, low-energy device that facilitates low-carbon services (such as car sharing and Freecycle). It’s also a window on a liberal culture that might otherwise be stifled in a small community, and has enabled the amazing, local-yet-global campaigns (Step It Up and 350.org) that he has spearheaded and fronted.
Phil England is a freelance journalist
(6 April 2010)
Find out more about the book here
Copenhagen Three Months Later
Kevin Drum, Mother Jones
Is Copenhagen working? Not the city — which is working just fine, I assume — but the Copenhagen Accord reached last December. At the time, it seemed like a bust: the initial hope had been to get a legally binding global agreement to seriously cut greenhouse gases, but as time went by hopes diminished until, finally, in a chaotic last minute scramble that featured various world leaders wandering from room to room while the Danish hosts desperately tried to get something in writing in the face of opposition from just about every corner, the exhausted conference made only a “decision to note” a short document that was mostly a blank numbered list. Those blanks were intended to be filled in later with pledges for GHG reductions.
At the time, all those blanks seemed emblematic of a historic failure. But now that the dust has settled and some of them have been filled in, how are we doing? There have been a flurry of reports recently about this, but no firm conclusion. First up is Kevin Parker of Deutsche Bank, who released a report last week saying that the Copenhagen conference, far from being a failure, had produced “the highest number of new government initiatives ever recorded […] in a four-month period.”
Fine. But how does that translate into GHG reductions?
… Obviously this gets us closer to our goal of preventing a catastrophic rise in temperature over the next several decades. But not a lot closer. And even these numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt. The United States, in particular, is a wild card, since our “pledge” is meaningless unless Congress adopts it and then passes legislation designed to enforce it.
… In other words, Copenhagen still doesn’t look very successful to me.
(5 April 2010)
We all want to change the world
The Economist print edition
N 1975 scientists expert in a new and potentially world-changing technology, genetic engineering, gathered at Asilomar, on the Monterey peninsula in California, to ponder the ethics and safety of the course they were embarking on. The year before, they had imposed on themselves a voluntary moratorium on experiments which involved the transfer of genes from one species to another, amid concerns about the risk to human health and to the environment which such “transgenic” creations might pose. That decision gave the wider world confidence that the emerging field of biotechnology was taking its responsibilities seriously, which meant that the Asilomar conference was able to help shape a safety regime that allowed the moratorium to be lifted. That, in turn, paved the way for the subsequent boom in molecular biology and biotechnology.
Another bunch of researchers, accompanied by policy experts, social scientists and journalists, gathered in Asilomar between March 22nd and 26th, hoped for a similar outcome to their deliberations. This time the topic under discussion was not genetic engineering but geoengineering—deliberately rather than accidentally changing the world’s environment.
Geoengineering is an umbrella term for large-scale actions intended to combat the climate-changing effects of greenhouse-gas emissions without actually curbing those emissions. Like genetic engineering was in the 1970s, the very idea of geoengineering is controversial. Most of those who fear climate change would prefer to stop it by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Geoengineers argue that this may prove insufficient and that ways of tinkering directly with the atmosphere and the oceans need to be studied. Some would like to carry out preliminary experiments, and wish to do so in a clear regulatory framework so that they know what is allowed and what is not.
Ruled in or ruled out?
Like the biotechnology of the 1970s, geoengineering cannot be treated just as science-as-usual. There are, however, important differences between the subjects. One is that in the 1970s it was clear that the ability to move genes between creatures was going to bring about a huge change in the practice of science itself, and biologists were eager for that to happen. Modern climate scientists, by contrast, usually see geoengineering research as niche, if not fringe, stuff. Many wish it would go away completely. Another difference is that in the 1970s there was a worry that DNA experiments could in themselves present dangers. With geoengineering the dangers are more likely to be caused by large-scale deployment than by any individual scientific experiment.
There are two broad approaches to geoengineering. One is to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight that the planet absorbs. The other is to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put it somewhere else. The second of these approaches is not particularly in need of new regulation. Whether the carbon dioxide is captured by real trees, as some would like, or by artificial devices, environmental problems caused by the process would be local ones at the site of the sucking. Underground storage of the captured carbon would be regulated in the same way that carbon dioxide sequestered from power stations might be—again, for the most part, a local matter. Even the most potentially disturbing suggestion, which involves fertilising the oceans with iron in order to promote the growth of planktonic algae (in the hope that they would sink to the seabed, taking their carbon with them), can be covered by the London Convention on marine pollution, which regulates dumping at sea, and has already addressed itself to research in the area.
In retrospect, the Asilomar meeting may come to be seen as a step towards that respectable system, but probably only a small one. The participants did not produce clear recommendations, but they generally endorsed a set of five overarching principles for the regulation of the field that were presented recently to the British Parliament by Steve Rayner, a professor at the Saïd Business School, in Oxford.
The “Oxford principles”, as they are known, hold that geoengineering should be regulated as a public good, in that, since people cannot opt out, the whole proceeding has to be in a well-defined public interest; that decisions defining the extent of that interest should be made with public participation; that all attempts at geoengineering research should be made public and their results disseminated openly; that there should be an independent assessment of the impacts of any geoengineering research proposal; and that governing arrangements be made clear prior to any actual use of the technologies.
The conference’s organising committee is now working on a further statement of principles, to be released later. Meanwhile Britain’s main scientific academy, the Royal Society, and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, which has members from around 90 countries, are planning further discussions that will culminate at a meeting to be held this November…
(31 Mar 2010)
