NEWSLETTER EDITION EACH 3 MONTHS

1st EDITION ON  AUGUST 31, 2015

The news about climate, oceans, species, and all of the collateral human consequences will get a great deal worse for a long time before it gets better.

The reasons for authentic hope are on a farther horizon, centuries ahead when we have managed to stabilize the carbon cycle and reduce carbon levels close to their pre-industrial levels, stopped the hemorrhaging of life on Earth, restored the chemical balance of the oceans, and created governments and economies calibrated to the realities of the biosphere and to the diminished ecologies of the post carbon world.

The change in our perspective from the nearer to the longer term is, (I think), the most difficult challenge we will face. We have become a culture predicated on fast results, quick payoffs, and instant gratification. But now we will have to summon the fortitude necessary to undertake a longer and more arduous journey. Rather like the builders of the great cathedrals of Europe, we will need stamina and faith to work knowing that we will not live to see the results.

We begin by assuming the most optimistic outcome possible that, by a combination of advanced technology and wise policy choices, the world will quickly act to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases and reduce emissions to a level below that which would lead to runaway climate change.

Nonetheless, barring some quite unexpected technological breakthrough, the consequences of what we have already “bought” will still cause great hardship everywhere.

Glib talk about “climate solutions” misleads by conveying the impression that climate is merely a problem that can be quickly solved by technological fixes without addressing the larger structure of ideas, philosophies, assumptions, and paradigms that have brought us to the brink of irreversible disaster. The point is the same as one that has been attributed to Einstein: “significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them”.

There are certainly better technologies to be deployed, and far better ones soon to come. But the climate is not likely to be re-stabilized by any known technical fi x quickly, easily, or painlessly. Rather, as geophysicist David Archer puts it:

The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge. Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of civilization so far…[it] will persist for hundreds of thousands of years into the future.