50 months left to tackle climate change
1 October 2012
50 months to avoid climate disaster – and a change is in the air
At the halfway point to a climate gamble, 50 contributor ideas give just a taste of the creativity and innovation available to us
'"One or other of us will have to go," Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said on his deathbed to the hated wallpaper in his room. The perilous acceleration of Arctic ice loss, and the imminent threat of irreversible climate change poses a similar ultimatum to the economic system that is pushing us over the brink. For society's sake I hope this time we redecorate.Fortunately, many people are queuing up to propose better designs, rather than just cursing the interiors, as you can read about here.'
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/interactive/2012/oct/01/50-months-climate-interactive
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/sep/30/50-months-climate-change
'Remember the headlines that we have 10-15 years to save the planet? Six years ago Tony Blair warned that the world will reach "catastrophic tipping points" on climate change "within 15 years, unless serious action is taken to tackle global warming." The Guardian from 2006 quoted him saying "We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the ste
ps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points." This rhetoric was deployed in the run up to the climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009. After its failure it seemed to have been forgotten, almost an embarrassment. Mainstream politicians, keen to use the rhetoric before 2009, seemed to have ditched it afterwards.But the Guardian today picks up on the story and reminds us that we have reached "halfway point": we have only 50 months left from the original 100 (let's leave aside the arithmetic and starting points for such calculations). Various commentators make their point about possibilities for action (community engagement, entrepreneurship, personal behaviour change, active eco-state, etc). Major political players are absent. Is this a sign that this variant of catastrophism has moved into the margins of discursive space?'
https://klimazwiebel.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/halfway-point.html
2012 may well go down as a turning point in human history. As scientific research has continued to strengthen the case for APG, people can use their own senses to see the consequences of human-induced climate change – a record melt of ice in the Arctic, record temperatures in the US, crop failure, adverse weather. Remarkably, the worship of ‘the economy’, the cargo cult of governments and governed alike, has allowed climate change to all but disappear from the public realm. As George Monbiot argued in The Guardian, the debacle of the Rio Earth summit was a wave goodbye. This time, the politicians and officials gathered there could barely be bothered to go through the motions and pretend that the usual weak agreement was a good deal for all. The words ‘not bothered, don’t care’ could have been issued, and caused no great consternation. Only the scientists and the environmentalists are bothered and do care. Politicians, businessmen, but also the electorate and the world’s workforces clearly care only about putting ‘the economy’ back together.
Far from going away, climate change remains the greatest threat to human and planetary health and well-being.
Dealing with climate change also represents a massive economic opportunity. The old tools and mechanisms are clearly not working. The truth is that the capitalist economy hasn’t been working for a long time now. The debt, the speculation, the need to privatise public business and commodify nature since the 1980s all point to the flagging rate of profit in the private economy. Incredibly, despite the manifest economic failure, the social dislocation, and the ecological damage wrought by the corporate capture of the global economy, the greatest efforts are being made to bring a corpse back to life.
Even in the limited terms of economics, concerted attempts to tackle climate change make sense. There is plenty of economic benefit in substantial investment in the transition to the low-carbon economy, both in the short but most especially in the long term. Investment in renewable energy and in energy efficiency alone will generate employment, spread income and thus reflate the economy, as well as deliver more secure energy systems, benefiting the economy and the environment together. Social and environmental justice can be delivered as part of the same package.
It is the height of economic lunacy to waste substantial resources and precious time in an attempt to revive a manifestly outmoded economics. That economics has failed, and bankrupted nations and destroyed environments in the process. 2012 will be remembered as the height of political folly, as politicians and electorates unite in a desperate attempt to give us more of the same old clapped-out economics. It is a failure of the political will but more, a failure of intellect and imagination. The best that we can come up with in a crisis is an attempt to resurrect the very God that failed.
Time is running out before we transgress the critical climate threshold, beyond which it will no longer be "likely" that we will avoid a 2C temperature rise. That is the objective government set themselves, an agreement that was only possible since the target was felt to be the most realisable for all concerned. If we cannot meet even that target, it is difficult to see how the political will for continued climate action can be sustained. Already at Rio it seemed that governments have accepted that the situation is hopeless and that they can barely make the effort to even pretend anyway. George Monbiot thought that Rio was a wave goodbye to the planet. It should have been the occasion we waved goodbye to a moribund economy and bankrupt thinking.