Страховка пари до ₽1500 от БК GGBet.ru

Промокод: BR1500

Get a bonus

Users' Choice

Climate activists issue call to action for Trump times

Alastair Bland, Special to WiG

If President-elect Donald Trump really is concerned about immigration, perhaps he should be talking about ways to slow global warming.

Rising sea levels, caused by the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps, will probably displace tens of millions of people in the decades ahead, and many may come to North America as refugees.

Climate change, arguably the most pressing issue of our time, will cause a suite of other problems for future generations.

Just over a year ago, world leaders gathered in Paris to discuss strategies for curbing greenhouse gas emissions as scientists around the globe confirmed that humans are facing a crisis.

But that crisis is being ignored or denied by too many Americans and by the many right-wing politicians they elect — including Trump.

He has threatened to reverse any commitments the United States agreed to in Paris.

Trump even selected a well-known skeptic of climate change, Myron Ebell, to head his Environmental Protection Agency transition team.

“We are in this bizarre political state in which most of the Republican Party still thinks it has to pretend that climate change is not real,” said Jonathan F.P. Rose, a New York City developer and author of The Well-Tempered City.

Rose said progress cannot be made in drafting effective climate strategies until national leaders agree there’s an issue.

“We have such strong scientific evidence,” he said. “We can disagree on how we’re going to solve the problems, but I would hope we could move toward an agreement on the basic facts.”

That such a serious planetwide crisis has caused a political divide “is a tragedy” to earth scientist Peter Kalmus.

“CO2 molecules and infrared photons don’t give a crap about politics, whether you’re liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat or anything else,” Kalmus said.

Steve Valk, communications director for the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, said the results of the presidential election are a discouraging setback in the campaign to slow emissions and global warming.

“There’s no doubt that the steep hill we’ve been climbing just became a sheer cliff,” he said. “But cliffs are scalable.”

Facing reality

There is no question the Earth is warming rapidly and already this upward temperature trend is having impacts.

climate change
The melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps threatens to displace and kill wildlife and is causing rising sea levels that will probably displace tens of millions of people in the decades ahead.

The planet has warmed by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880 and it’s getting hotter. Even with advances made in Paris, the world remains on track to be 6.1 degrees warmer by 2100 than it was in pre-industrial times, according to a recent United Nations emissions report. The authors of another paper published last January in the journal Nature predicted temperatures will rise as much as 10 degrees.

Warming is already taking its toll. It’s disrupting agriculture. Glacial water sources are vanishing. Storms and droughts are becoming more severe. Altered winds and ocean currents are impacting marine ecosystems. So is ocean acidification, another outcome of carbon dioxide emissions. The sea is rising and eventually will swamp large coastal regions and islands. As many as 200 million people could be displaced by 2050.

For several years in a row, each year has been warmer than any year prior in recorded temperature records. By 2100, it may be too hot for people to permanently live in the Persian Gulf.

World leaders and climate activists made groundbreaking progress against climate change in Paris, where representatives of 195 countries drafted a plan of action to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and steer the planet off its predicted course of warming.

The pact, which addresses energy, transportation, industries and agriculture — and which asks leaders to regularly upgrade their climate policies — is intended to keep the planet from warming by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit between pre-industrial years and the end of this century. Scientists have forecast that an average global increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit will have devastating consequences for humanity.

The United States pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent from 2005 levels within a decade. China, Japan and the nations of the European Union made similar promises.

More recently, almost 200 nations agreed to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, extremely potent but short-lived greenhouse gases emitted by refrigerators and air conditioners and reduce the emissions from the shipping and aviation industries.

Short-term goals, profits

In the wake of such promising international progress and as 2016 was drawing to a close as the third record-warm year in a row, many climate activists were disconcerted by the outcome of the presidential election.

Mark Sabbatini, editor of the newspaper Icepeople in Svalbard, Norway, believes shortsighted political scheming has pushed climate change action to the back burner. He wants to see politicians start listening to scientists.

“But industry folks donate money and scientists get shoved aside in the interest of profits and re-election,” said Sabbatini, who recently had to evacuate his apartment as unprecedented temperatures thawed out the entire region’s permafrost, threatening to collapse buildings.

Short-term goals and immediate financial concerns distract leaders from making meaningful policy advances on climate.

climate change Trump
Donald Trump drives his golf buggy during the second day of the Women’s British Open golf championship on the Turnberry golf course in Turnberry, Scotland. Trump wants to build more than one huge wall. Though he calls climate change a hoax, he wants a wall to keep out the rising seas threatening to swamp his luxury golf resort in Ireland. In a permit application filed in County Clare, the Trump International Golf Links and Hotel sought permission to build a 2-mile-long stone wall between it and the Atlantic Ocean. (AP Photo/Scott Heppell, File)

“In Congress, they look two years ahead,” Sabbatini said. “In the Senate, they look six years ahead. In the White House, they look four years ahead.”

Perhaps a solution can emerge from local efforts instead.

Social engineering through carbon fees

The 300 nationwide chapters of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby are calling on local governments and chambers of commerce across the United States to voice support for a revenue-neutral carbon fee, thereby building pressure on Congress to act.

The carbon fee would impose a charge on producers of oil, natural gas and coal. As a direct result, products and services that depend on or directly utilize those fossil fuels would cost more for consumers, who would thereby be incentivized to buy less.

Food shipped in from far away would cost more than locally grown alternatives.

Gas for heating, electricity generated by oil and coal and driving a car would become more expensive.

“Bicycling would become more attractive and so would electric cars and home appliances that use less energy,” said Kalmus, an advocate of the revenue-neutral carbon fee.

Promoting this fee system is essentially the Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s entire focus.

“This would be the most important step we take toward addressing climate change,” Valk said.

In a carbon fee system, the revenue from fossil fuel producers would be evenly distributed by the collecting agencies among the public, perhaps via a tax credit. Recycling the dividends back into society would make it a fair system, Valk explained, since poorer people — who tend to use less energy than wealthier people and are therefore less to blame for climate change — would come out ahead.

The system also would place a tariff on incoming goods from nations without a carbon fee. This could keep American industries from moving overseas and maybe even prompt other nations to set their own price on carbon.

But there’s a problem with the revenue-neutral carbon fee, according to other climate activists: It doesn’t support social programs that may be aimed at reducing society’s carbon footprint.

“It will put no money into programs that serve disadvantaged communities who, for example, might not be able to afford weatherizing their home and lowering their energy bill, or afford an electric vehicle or a solar panel,” said Renata Brillinger, executive director of the California Climate and Agriculture Network. “It doesn’t give anything to public schools for making the buildings more energy efficient and it wouldn’t give any money to farmers’ incentive programs for soil building.”

climate change Kerry
Secretary of State John Kerry and other world leaders made groundbreaking progress against climate change in Paris, where representatives of 195 countries drafted a plan of action to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and steer the planet off its predicted course of warming.

But Valk counters that establishing a carbon pricing system must take into account the notorious reluctance of conservatives in Congress.

“You aren’t going to get a single Republican in Congress to support legislation unless it’s revenue-neutral,” he said. “Any policy is useless if you can’t pass it in Congress.”

Agricultural solutions

In Washington, D.C., climate change activists wish national leaders would be thinking more about soil.

That’s because stopping greenhouse gas emissions alone will not stop climate change. The carbon dioxide emitted through centuries of industrial activity will continue to drive warming unless it is removed from the air.

“There are only three places carbon can go,” Brillinger said. “It can go into the atmosphere, where we don’t want it, into the ocean, where we also don’t want it because it causes acidification, or into soil and woody plants where we do want it. Carbon is the backbone of all forests and is a critical nutrient of soil.”

Researchers have estimated that unsustainable farming practices have caused as much as 80 percent of the world’s soil carbon to turn into carbon dioxide, which then enters the air.

In the 1700s, the Earth’s atmosphere contained less than 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide, according to scientists.

Now, we are at more than 400 and counting. Climate experts generally agree that the atmospheric carbon level must be reduced to 350 or less if we are to keep at bay the most disastrous possible impacts of warming.

This is why farmers and the soil they work will be so important in mitigating climate change. By employing certain practices and abandoning other ones, farmers and ranchers can turn acreage into valuable “carbon sinks” — a general agricultural approach often referred to as “carbon farming.”

Conventional agriculture practices tend to emit carbon dioxide. Regular tilling of the soil, for example, causes soil carbon to bond with oxygen and float away as carbon dioxide.

Tilling also causes erosion, as do deforestation and overgrazing. With erosion, soil carbon enters waterways, creating carbonic acid — the direct culprit of ocean acidification.

By carbon farming, those who produce the world’s food can simultaneously turn their land into precious carbon sinks. The basic tenets of carbon farming include growing trees as windbreaks and focusing on perennial crops, like fruit trees and certain specialty grain varieties, which demand less tilling and disturbance of the soil.

Eric Toensmeier — a senior fellow with the climate advocacy group Project Drawdown and the author of The Carbon Farming Solution — said many other countries are far ahead of the United States. They both recognize the importance of soil as a place to store carbon and fund programs that help conventional farmers shift toward carbon-farming practices.

France, for instance, initiated a sophisticated program in 2011 that calls for increasing soil carbon worldwide by 0.4 percent every year. Healthy soil can contain 10 percent carbon or more, and France’s program has the potential over time to decelerate the increase in atmospheric carbon levels.

Still, Toensmeier is optimistic about some steps being taken in the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture funds programs that support environmentally friendly farming practices that protect watersheds or enhance wildlife habitat, largely through planting perennial grasses and trees.

“And it turns out a lot of the practices they’re paying farmers to do to protect water quality or slow erosion also happen to sequester carbon,” Toensmeier said.

Urban and individual actions

In light of the scientific consensus on the role of carbon in climate change, conservatives’ denial of reality change looks childish at best and dangerous at worst.

In low-lying Florida, so vulnerable to the rising sea, an unofficial policy from its Republican leadership has effectively muzzled state employees from even mentioning “climate change” and “global warming” in official reports and communications.

Most frightening is the incoming president’s stance on the matter: Trump said in a 2012 tweet that global warming is a Chinese hoax. In January 2014, during a brief spell of cold weather, he asked via Twitter, “Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?”

The Trump-Pence website vows to “unleash America’s $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil and natural gas reserves, plus hundreds of years in clean coal reserves.”

His webpage concerning energy goals only mentions reducing emissions once and it makes no mention of climate change or renewable energy.

A CALL TO ACTION:
Priorities for the planet …
• Impose a price on carbon.
• Encourage carbon farming.
• Redesign cities.
• Shift to renewable energy.
• Strive for low to zero-emission transportation.
• Make homes more efficient.

While meaningful action at the federal level is probably years away, at the local level, progress is coming — even in communities led by Republicans, according to developer and author Rose. That, he said, is because local politicians face a level of accountability from which national leaders are often shielded.

“At the city level, mayors have to deliver real results,” Rose said. “They have to protect their residents and make wise investments on behalf of their residents. The residents see what they’re doing and hold them accountable.”

Restructuring and modifying our cities, which are responsible for about half of America’s carbon footprint, “will be critical toward dealing with climate change,” Rose said.

“On the coast we’ll have sea level rise,” he said. “Inland, we’ll have flooding and heat waves. Heat waves cause more deaths than hurricanes.”

Simply integrating nature into city infrastructure is a very low-cost but effective means for countering the changes that are coming, Rose said.

Many cities, for example, are planting thousands of street trees. Trees draw in atmospheric carbon as they grow and, through shade and evaporative cooling effects, can significantly reduce surface temperatures by as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit in some circumstances, Rose said.

Laws and policies that take aim at reduced emissions targets can be very efficient tools for generating change across entire communities.

However, earth scientist Kalmus believes it’s important that individuals, too, reduce their own emissions through voluntary behavior changes, rather than simply waiting for change to come from leaders and lawmakers.

“If you care about climate change, it will make you happier,” he said. “It makes you feel like you’re pioneering a new way to live. For others, you’re the person who is showing the path and making them realize it’s not as crazy as it seems.”

Kalmus, who lives in Altadena, California, with his wife and two sons, has overhauled his lifestyle to reduce his carbon footprint. Since 2010, he has cut his own emissions by a factor of 10 — from 20 tons per year to just two, by his own estimates. This personal transformation is the subject of his forthcoming book, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution, due out in 2017.

Kalmus rides a bike most places, eats mostly locally grown food including what he grows in his own yard, has stopped eating meat, and — one of the most important changes — has all but quit flying places.

He hopes to serve as a model and help spark a transition to an economy that does not depend on constant growth, as ours currently does. One day, he believes, it will be socially unacceptable to burn fossil fuel, just as it’s become shunned to waste water in drought-dried California. The oil industry will eventually become obsolete.

“We need to transition to an economy that doesn’t depend on unending growth,” Kalmus said.

Unless we slow our carbon emissions and our population growth now, depletion of resources, he warns, will catch up with us.

“We need to shift to a steady-state economy and a steady-state population,” he said. “Fossil-fueled civilization cannot continue forever.”

Though Americans will soon have as president a man who is essentially advocating for climate change, Valk, at the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, expects time — and warming — to shift voter perspectives.

“As more and more people are personally affected by climate change, like those recently flooded out in Louisiana and North Carolina, people of all political persuasions will see that acting on climate change is not a matter of partisan preferences, but a matter of survival,” he said.

 A Letters to the Future project, published in a partnership with the Alternative Association of News Media and the  Sacramento News & Review.

The website you are trying to access is not one of our trusted partners.
You will be forwarded to the website
Visit site