Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Although the effects of climate change seem to be near to apocalyptic over the long term, over the
short term taking signficant action to cut emissions also appears to be a tremendous challenge.
The fact that climate change is mostly caused by the rich and yet the poorest, who have done least to cause it and have the least resources to respond, will be hit most seriously by the damaging impacts – is uncomfortable. But it is important.
What the death of ancient trees are now telling us about climate change, concludes Beresford-Kroeger, is that we must “make a daisy chain of people willing to improve our lot.”
In British Columbia alone, wildfires released between 150 and 200 megatonnes of carbon dioxide in 2017. That’s more than twice the volume created by human activities in the province.
Quite suddenly, in the wake of the recent IPCC report, it’s become commonplace to talk about a global climate emergency. Al Gore told PBS on 12 October: “We have a global emergency. You use a phrase like that and some people immediately say, ‘okay calm down, it can’t be that bad.’ But it it is.”
Rather than sharing the distractions now capturing the attention of other drivers, we must each retrain ourselves to pay attention to the instrument panel and the road ahead of us. Abandoning old habits and making new ones requires effort. But some habits are so unwise that changing them is a life-or-death affair.
The latest report from the IPCC is the first to abandon the measured tone of its previous ones and foretell what it considers a climate catastrophe for human civilization unless the world makes an abrupt U-turn and begins dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions almost immediately.
And yet, even this forecast is probably too conservative in its pronouncements.
The World Bank predicts we may see 140 million climate migrants before long, and given the chaos that even a million people fleeing the (partially drought-fueled) crisis in Syria created, we better come to grips.
At least 23 people have died in North and South Carolina so far during the historic storm. Around half a million people in the region are without power, with more damage expected as Florence continues to rage.
“I think the most important motivation as an artist is to use what James Baldwin has described as extracting the question that is buried within the answer,” Chin has said. “If the answer is ‘The world will be inundated and destroyed by our own doings,’ then what is the question that we have to ask now? This project is about now.”
Several climate change deniers in the Texas political establishment aren’t deniers after all. They just don’t want the industry which got them elected (and could get them defeated just as easily) to pay anything to protect itself from the very dangers to which the use of the industry’s products exposes the entire globe.
Total global coal capacity continues to inch up, but a peak is on the horizon. In the first half of 2018, retired capacity has nearly matched newly operating plants and the global pipeline for proposed coal is quickly eroding.
