A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
May 12, 2008
3. Watersheds -
Civilization's last chance
The planet is nearing a tipping point on climate change, and it gets much worse, fast.
Backers say it gives new life to the proposed Foothill South extension. But fish and game officials say further permits are needed, and environmentalists call the accord insignificant.
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Civilization's last chance
The planet is nearing a tipping point on climate change, and it gets much worse, fast.
By Bill McKibben - Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author, most recently, of "The Bill McKibben Reader," is the co-founder of Project 350 ( www.350.org), devoted to reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.
Even for Americans -- who are constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start -- even for us, the world looks a little terminal right now.
It's not just the economy: We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it helps send the price of a loaf of bread shooting upward and helps ignite food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the "limits to growth" suddenly seem ... how best to put it, right.
All of a sudden it isn't morning in
There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."
Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.
So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right away, you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.
In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard. Instead of slowing down, we're pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year -- two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.
And suddenly the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. It appears that we've managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost, and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.
And don't forget:
Here's the thing. Hansen didn't just say that if we didn't act, there was trouble coming. He didn't just say that if we didn't yet know what was best for us, we'd certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
His phrase was: "if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever-more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of
We're the ones who kicked the warming off; now the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun's heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.
And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them -- to reverse course. Here's the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."
In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the
If we did everything right, Hansen says, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out, we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.
More likely, though, we're the coyote -- because "doing everything right" means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way
It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.
It's possible. The
Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try to push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality. In fact, it's about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.
After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one lightbulb at a time.
We do have one thing going for us -- the Web -- which at least allows you to imagine something like a grass-roots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that "350" stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.
Hansen's words were well-chosen: "a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not.
Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won't exist, at least not for long, as long as we remain on the wrong side of 350. That's the limit we face.
Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and the author, most recently, of "The Bill McKibben Reader," is the co-founder of Project 350 ( www.350.org), devoted to reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. A longer version of this article appears at Tomdispatch.com.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-mckibben11-2008may11,0,4443965.story
Backers say it gives new life to the proposed Foothill South extension. But fish and game officials say further permits are needed, and environmentalists call the accord insignificant.
By David Reyes,
An agreement to protect wildlife was announced Friday between the toll road agency and a state agency on the proposed extension of an
Proponents said the agreement helps breathe new life into the proposed toll road extension, which has divided politicians, environmentalists and transportation planners for years. Opponents dismissed it as insignificant.
Although the Foothill South project was rejected by the state Coastal Commission after a clamorous public hearing in February, the toll road agency views the agreement as a substantial victory. The agency has appealed the commission's decision.
Lance MacLean, chairman of the board that oversees the county's toll roads, called it a major step toward satisfying environmental requirements for the 16-mile proposed road that will cut through San Onofre State Beach.
The agreement calls for creating, enhancing or restoring 57 acres near creeks as a mitigation measure because 23 acres along the proposed route would be permanently affected, said Marilyn Fluharty, a senior environmental scientist for the California Department of Fish and Game.
She said the toll road agency would need additional permits because the agreement is limited to stream beds and bird habitat along several creeks in the area, but not for the entire route. About 14 acres would be temporarily disturbed during construction, Fluharty said.
The Transportation Corridor Agencies -- which operates most of the tollways in Orange County -- has restored, created and preserved more than 100 acres under previous agreements with the state Department of Fish and Game for prior road projects, transportation agency officials said.
Despite the Coastal Commission's decision, tollway proponents have earned several victories in recent months concerning the road's potential effect on wildlife.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determined last year that steelhead trout would not be affected by the road, and last week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the project complies with the Endangered Species Act.
Opponents say that the thoroughfare would ruin the environment and compromise the state park and the famed Trestles surf spot, which has been celebrated in songs and movies.
Dan Silver, executive director of the Endangered Habitats League, called the state agreement a technical approval that lacked regulatory teeth because it's "procedural and routine."
"Basically, it is a notification requirement where the applicant tells the department what they are doing, what the impacts are and these are the mitigations," Silver said. "It doesn't evaluate the need for the project nor does it look at alternatives of the project to protect resources."
In contrast, the Coastal Commission has absolute protections for wildlife under the state's Coastal Act, an "entirely different standard," Silver said.
MacLean sees it otherwise.
"We feel no species will be jeopardized by this work," MacLean said. "We're going to be good stewards with the environment."
Foothill-Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency board member and Lake Forest Councilman Peter Herzog said last week's opinion by the federal wildlife service was significant, especially in view of the project's criticism by coastal commissioners and opponents.
"The new opinion was obviously an extensive review and some of the opponents tried to dismiss our own biological staff as if we were going to take out habitat," Herzog said.
The issue has been sensitive for the Transportation Corridor Agencies which has continued planning for the project hoping the federal government will overturn the Coastal Commission's decision.
The U.S. Department of Commerce has the final say on the appeal.
At the commission's February meeting, Commissioner Sara Wan of
She said that toll road officials had used "faulty science."
This week Herzog pushed back.
"We have the wildlife service saying our project doesn't jeopardize wildlife. That's not the TCA talking, that's from the federal wildlife service."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-tollroad10-2008may10,1,7575762.story
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