Everything Is Negotiable, Except With Nature

[GLT]

Everything Is Negotiable, Except With Nature: You Can't Bargain About
Global Warming With Chemistry and Physics


The UN’s big climate conference ended Saturday in Cancún, with claims
of modest victory. "The UN climate talks are off the life-support
machine," said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “Not as rancorous as last year’s
train wreck in Copenhagen,” wrote the Guardian. Patricia Espinosa, the
Mexican foreign minister who brokered the final compromise, described
it as "the best we could achieve at this point in a long
process."

The conference did indeed make progress on a few important issues: the
outlines of financial aid for developing countries to help them deal
with climate change, and some ideas on how to monitor greenhouse gas
emissions in China and India. But it basically ignored the two crucial
questions: How much carbon will we cut, and how fast?

On those topics, one voice spoke more eloquently than all the 9,000
delegates, reporters, and activists gathered in Cancún.

And he wasn’t even there. And he wasn’t even talking about climate.

Barack Obama was in Washington, holding a press conference to discuss
the liberal insurgency against his taxation agreement with the
Republicans. He said he’d fought hard for a deal and resented the
criticism. He harked back to the health-care fight when what his press
secretary had called the “professional left” (and Rahm Emanuel had
called “retards”) scorned him for not winning a “public option.” They
were worse than wrong, he said; they were contemptible, people who
wanted to “be able to feel good about ourselves, and sanctimonious
about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are.” Consider
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he continued: when he started Social
Security it only covered widows and orphans. Medicare, at its start,
only helped a relative few. Sanctimonious purists would have
considered them “betrayals of some abstract ideal.” And yet they grew.

It was powerful and interesting stuff, especially coming from a man
who ran on abstract ideals. (I have t-shirts on which are printed
nothing but his name and abstract ideals.) I don’t know enough about
health-care policy or tax policy to be sure whether he’s making a good
call or not, though after listening to much of Bernie Sanders's nearly
nine-hour near-filibuster I have my doubts.

I do know the one place where the president’s reasonable compromises
simply won’t work -- a place where we have absolutely no choice but to
steer by abstract ideals. That place is the climate.

The terms of the climate-change conundrum aren’t set by contending
ideologies, whose adherents can argue till the end of time about
whether tax cuts create jobs or kill them. In the case of global
warming, chemistry rules, which means there are lines, hard and fast.
Those of you who remember your periodic table will recall how neat
that can be. There’s no shading between one element and the next.
It’s either gallium or it’s zinc. There’s no zallium, no ginc. You
might say that the elements are, in that sense, abstract ideals.

So are the molecules those elements combine to form. Take carbon
dioxide (CO2), the most politically-charged molecule on Earth. As the
encyclopedia says: “At standard pressure and temperature the density
of carbon dioxide is around 1.98 kg/m3, about 1.5 times that of air.
The carbon dioxide molecule (O=C=O) contains two double bonds and has
a linear shape.” Oh, and that particular molecular structure traps
heat near the planet that would otherwise radiate back out into space,
giving rise to what we call the greenhouse effect.

As of January 2008, our best climatologists gave us a number for how
much carbon in the atmosphere is too much. At concentrations above 350
parts per million (ppm), a NASA team insisted, we can’t have a planet
“similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life
on earth is adapted.” We’re already past that; we’re at 390 ppm. Which
is why 2010 will be the warmest year on record, almost a degree
Celsius above the planet’s natural average, according to federal
researchers. Which is why the Arctic melted again this summer, and
Russia caught fire, and Pakistan drowned.

So here’s the thing: Just as in Copenhagen, Obama’s delegation in
Cancún has been arguing for an agreement that would limit atmospheric
concentrations of CO2 to 450 parts per million, and the cuts they’ve
been proposing might actually produce a world of about 550 parts per
million.

Why have they been defying the science? The answer isn’t complicated:
because it’s politically difficult. As chief negotiator Todd Stern
said last year in Copenhagen, “We’re very, very mindful of the
importance of our domestic legislation. That’s a core principle for me
and everyone else working on this. You can’t jeopardize that.”

In other words, if we push too hard the Senate will say no, and the
oil companies will be really, really pissed. So we’ll take the easy
way. We’ll negotiate with nature, and with the rest of the world, the
same way we negotiate with the Republicans.

It’s completely understandable; in fact, it’s even more understandable
now that the GOP has increased its muscle in Congress. In that
context, even the tepid text drafted in Cancún goes too far. Four
Republican Senators sent Obama a letter earlier this month telling him
to stop using any foreign-aid funds to tackle climate change. If I
were Obama I’d want to make some kind of deal, and consider any deal
as the start down a path to better things.

The problem, again, is the chemistry and the physics. They don’t give
us much time, and they’re bad at haggling. If we let this planet warm
much longer, scientists tell us that we’ll lose forever the chance of
getting back to 350. That means we’ll lose forever the basic
architecture of our planet with its frozen poles. Already the ocean is
turning steadily more acidic; already the atmosphere is growing
steadily wetter, which means desertifying evaporation in arid areas
and downpour and deluge elsewhere.

Political reality is hard to change, harder than ever since the
Supreme Court delivered its Citizens United decision and loosed floods
of more money into our political world. But physics and chemistry are
downright impossible to shift. Physics and chemistry don’t bargain.
So the president, and all the rest of us, had really better try a
little harder. The movement we’ve launched at 350.org has spread
around the world, but it needs to get much stronger. Because this one
time, in the usually messy conduct of human affairs, reaching an
abstract ideal is our only hope.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College
and founder of 350.org. His latest book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a
Tough New Planet. He recently was awarded the prestigious Puffin
Prize. To listen to a TomCast audio interview in which McKibben
discusses various kinds of global-warming denial, click here or, to
download it to your iPod, here.