The
World at 350
A Last
Chance for Civilization
By Bill McKibben
Even for
Americans, 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 sends the
price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three
continents. It's that everything is so inextricably 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 (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A few
weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to
Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued --
and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- "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. Apparently, 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; or, 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 Kyoto Accord. When December 2009 rolls
around, heads of state are supposed to converge on
If we did
everything right, says Hansen, 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 we made them turn
out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an
absolute priority and planes a taboo.
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.
That's
possible -- we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we could do it again, this
time in relation to carbon. But in a month when the President has, once more,
urged us to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring phrase "gas tax
holiday" has danced into our vocabulary, it's hard to see (though it was
encouraging to see that
Still, as
long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try. In fact, it's about the
most obvious duty humans have ever faced.
A few of
us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org.
Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months,
via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push
those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.
After
all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one light bulb at
a time. And if this 350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well, sometimes those
passes get caught.
We do
have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you
to imagine something like a grassroots 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, this side of 350. That's the limit we face.
Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at
Copyright
2008 Bill McKibben