The Nature of Our Environmental Crisis
In his masterful 1992 book Earth in the Balance, Al Gore put our challenges quite succinctly: we are "running the world like a business in liquidation," consuming the very future of our species - and many others - in the process of a single lifetime. And our willingness to let this continue amounts to a sin against the future of all life on earth. For this reason, “What lies ahead is a race against time.” (Gore, p.49)
According to Bill McKibben, said to be the greatest living nature writer, "The bottom-line argument is this”:
“the next fifty years are a special time. They will decide how strong and healthy the planet will be for centuries to come… So it's the task of those of us alive right now to deal with this special phase, to squeeze us through these next fifty years. That's not fair - any more than it was fair that earlier generations had to deal with the Second World War or the Civil War or the Revolution or the Depression or slavery. It's just reality. We need in these next fifty years to be working simultaneously on all parts of the equation, on our ways of life, on our technologies, and on our population. That's what makes this moment special, and what makes this moment hard."(Environmental Sociology, 1998)
And this is what makes the climate crisis primarily philosophical. As Gore puts it, “The more deeply I search for the roots of the global environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual."(p.12)
While evidence of unprecedented weather events surface daily, McKibben, author of “one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989,” has given us the terrifying diagnosis – the moral math - of the climate crisis we face.
In Rolling Stone magazine (not to be ignored by the generation sure to be hardest hit), McKibben calculates the dilemma we face, in a nutshell. Simply put, we can only ‘safely’ burn 565 gigatons more fossil fuels before we reach the 2 degree Celsius temperature increase the earth can (maybe, barely) afford, and we have 2,795 gigatons on reserve and ready to burn!
Do the math, he says - because apparently too few of us can (despite a persistent over-emphasis on the subject in our schools).
“The only thing about climate change the world has settled on,” in fact, is that two degrees is the absolute limit. And even then, “many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target.” “NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet’s most prominent climatologist,” says that even “two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster.”
“Since we’ve increased the Earth’s temperature by 0.8 degrees [Celcius] so far…[and] even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That means we’re already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.” In fact, “we may have waited too long…to keep us under temperature increases of two degrees,” setting our children up for “an essentially impossible future.”
565 gigatons is our ‘carbon budget,’ that is, “how much oil, coal and gas could still safely be burned” by 2050, and still leave us “some reasonable hope of staying below the two degree” increase. Meanwhile, “C02 emissions last year rose to 31.6 gigatons, up 3.2 percent from the year before.” “Study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year – and at that rate, we’ll blow through our 565 gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today’s preschoolers will be graduating from high school.” And that “trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees. That’s almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.”
With 2,795 gigatons in our reserves ready to burn, “We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books than climate scientists think is safe to burn.” Thus, the only “effective action would require actually keeping most of the carbon the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn safely in the soil.” “We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate."
Meanwhile, effects arrive these days in the form of violent storms, soaring temperatures, relentless wildfires, massive hurricanes, floods of biblical proportion, earth scorching draughts, rising food prices, and pending water shortages. As I write this, New Orleans is underwater again from hurricane Isaac, on the anniversary of hurricane Katrina, from which we apparently learned little (except to build higher levees). Last month, NASA reported that the entire snowmass of Greenland (half of which usually thaws in the course of a summer) had melted in only four days! Since it has long been predicted that so much fresh water pouring into the north Atlantic could very quickly bring the flow of ocean currents that govern world climate to a halt, the potential consequences we can only imagine in our worst nightmares.
But these effects do not come all at once, or all in one place, so neither we nor our grandchildren notice the changes…yet. But we will soon enough. And when they look back, what will they think about those who wasted so much time blaming the ill will of God, or the first missteps of the first humans, or that ever favorite demon - human nature?
In August 2010, “According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet [had] just come through the warmest decade, the warmest 12 months, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, May, and June on record.”(We’re Hot As Hell And We’re Not Going To Take It Anymore, Bill McKibben, August 2010)
Now, in August 2012, we’ve reached “the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe."
Meanwhile, the relentless search for more oil reserves goes on at a rate of “$100 million dollar a day.” And any dialogue about the hellish future we’re delivering our children into is drowned out by chants of “Drill, baby, drill!”
And “as terrifying as McKibben’s math is,” says John Atcheson, “it doesn’t even consider the increasingly likely horror of methane releases from permafrost and clathrates. Methane just happens to be 72 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide in the short term, and 25 times as strong over the long term.”(We Are Writing the Epilogue to the World We Knew, August 31, 2012 by Common Dreams).
Apparently oblivious to all of this, and in part because of it, world leaders go about behaving as if everything is business as usual. While the public is lulled, McKibben adds, into complete “denial about the peril that human civilization is in.” The “chilling effects of denialism” on any intelligent public dialogue are themselves undeniable, and can be traced to an education system that does not spend so much as an hours exercise on reasoning skills. And why would they, since if we understood what fallacies are, we’d be unlikely to buy the products we are fed through advertising, not to mention the candidates or religious salesmen who have mastered the art of empty rhetoric.
So it comes as no surprise that last month’s anniversary meeting of the massive 1992 environmental summit “accomplished nothing.” Ideological, theological and economic arguments divert attention from the seriousness of our predicament, with the result that, like the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, the Rio conference “failed spectacularly,” drafting a purely voluntary statement of good but half-hearted intentions.
The difficulty of building a movement against all this, environmentalists have learned, is that “Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil-fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself,” making most people “fundamentally ambivalent about going green.” “People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of C02.”
I learned this well working for Greenpeace during the Reagan years, when individual issues (baby seals, whales and dolphins, the Great Lakes, etc.) were still the center of our worry. I found reason for hope in the concerns most people still showed then, but no amount of activist’s efforts could override the power of technical innovation and effective advertising to shape people’s values and enflame their wants. All our best efforts and consumer’s best intentions have insured that “the iconic twisty light bulb has been installed by the millions…but so have a new generation of energy-sucking flatscreen TVs.”
The truth is, I am as enamored as the next person when it comes to the advance of technology, but we are all lulled into a false sense of security when it comes to using it wisely, understanding our limits.
And the terrors of climate projections are easily forgotten in the face of mind-numbing political advertising, such that, when it comes to the voting booth, too many cannot muster the political will to put any of this above other single issues that bug them(taxes, abortion, gay marriage, etc.). As the 2012 Republican convention convenes as I write this, Aug. 29, 2012, it is quite clear, says Wen Stephenson, “what the Romney campaign… is really about: the untrammeled freedom to extract wealth from the commons, whatever the costs to current and future generations.”(Through a green glass, darkly: How climate will reshape American History)
And even though two thirds of Americans tell polls that they would back an international agreement that cut carbon emissions, consensus among nations has proved practically impossible to achieve. The attitude among underdeveloped nations is understandably, as Deepak Chopra characterizes it, “You ate the whole banquet. Now you give us coffee and dessert, but tell us to pay for the entire meal.”(War of the Worldviews) And without international cooperation, few individuals are willing to make personal sacrifices while entire nations continue to benefit from reckless use of fossil-fuels.
But we cannot say it cannot be done. For instance, while “The planet’s emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar, especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the industries of the West,” at least one country, Germany, has shown what can be done. “On one sunny Saturday in late May, that northern latitude nation generated nearly half it’s power from solar panels,” demonstrating “that we have the technology to solve our problems.” We only “lack the will!”
McKibben recommends what may be the only solution, he says, and that is, divestment in the industry…the one process that has worked best in the last century (most notably to end apartheid, when student anger forced college campuses and industry to divest in companies that do business with South Africa). Our challenge now is to compel the same change by acting to “sever the ties with those who profit from climate change,” by way of “demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet.”
How ironic is it, after all, that so many ostensibly future-oriented funds (such as pension funds, the worlds largest investors, and college endowment portfolios) are invested so heavily in fossil-fuel stock, such that “educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their education,” or ultimately “enjoy their retirement” that pension is collected to fund.
In fact, recent polls show that, “Left to our own devices, citizens might decide to regulate carbon and stop short of the brink.” The problem is, “we aren’t left to our own devices.” Thanks to the size of the bankroll this industry brings to the influence of American elections, and the Supreme Court’s perversely-named Citizens United decision, which allows corporations unlimited contributions into political campaigns, McKibben says, “the fossil-fuel industry has far more free will than the rest of us.”
“These companies don’t simply exist in a world whose hungers they fulfill – they help create the boundaries of that world.” The Koch brothers alone (second only to Bill Gates in the list of richest Americans, having made most of their money in hydrocarbons) plan to pour $200 million into defeating Obama in this year’s elections. And the Chamber of Commerce (who give more than the Republican and Democratic National Committees, and more than 90% to the GOP), have actively lobbied the EPA to view the climate crisis as simply “an engineering problem” with “engineering solutions,” insisting that humanity can simply “acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations.”
“As radical goes,” McKibben comments, “demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.”
“Climate change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but it’s not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue.” “Its not an engineering problem,” McKibben concludes, “it’s a greed problem,” and not simply the greed of a generalize human nature, but the greed of only a few key players in one earth destroying industry. “This industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they’re planning to use it.”
“The cold mathematical truth [is that] the fossil-fuel industry [including “all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies”] is systematically undermining the planet’s physical systems.” “Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business,” as Naomi Klein, veteran anti-corporate leader, put it – “But…with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It’s what they do.”
Add to this that, ”Every hour so far in 2012, the five largest oil corporations (Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobile, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips) have recorded a $14, 400,000 profit. And every hour, they’ve received more than $270,000 in tax breaks. That adds up to $2.4 billion in subsidies every year…”In fact, “Big Oil profits more in one minute than what 96 percent of American family’s earn in one year.” All while “House Republicans want to double what the five companies receive in federal tax breaks…” (A Day in the Life of Big Oil, by Rebecca Leber and Adam Peck, Aug 1, 2012, thinkprogress.org)
As Deepak Chopra observes, “The standard solution for our present woes is all too familiar. Science will rescue us with new technology – for restoring the environment, replacing fossil fuels, curing [disease], and ending the threat of famine. Name your malady and there’s someone to tell you that a scientific solution is right around the corner. But isn’t science promising to rescue us from itself? And why is that a promise we should trust?”(War of the Worldviews)
The only upside of the unfolding urgency of the climate crisis will be if it increases awareness enough that it “weakens the fossil-fuel industry’s political standing” sufficiently to eliminate the special pollution breaks this industry alone enjoys. Only then will “The economic playing field…be a level one for nonpolluting energy sources.” After all, it was only when “Detroit came under severe financial pressure” that it became politically possible to compel them to “millage requirements for cars,” the single environmental achievement the Obama administration has been able to accomplish when it invested in the auto industry in its first term.
So crisis is opportunity, and if this is what it takes to see our “our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless” position and thus weaken the political power the industry has used to restrain legislators, those who have the power to regulate carbon, then we must make the most of this opportunity that our crisis presents.
John Kennedy once said that “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor” - who became an international symbol of bigotry when, as commissioner of public safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, he used fire hoses and attack dogs against peaceful demonstrators, including children, igniting an international support for the cause of desegregation in the US. “He helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.”
The fossil fuel industry is, McKibben argues, the Bull Connor of our environmental crisis.
“Putting a price on carbon… would enlist markets in the fight against global warming,” and effectively “reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry.” Yes, this would raise fuel prices, and thus reduce demand - ideally, “High enough to keep those carbon reserves that would take us past two degrees safely in the ground.” This carbon tax would force oil companies to “internalize their externalities,” that is, pay for their garbage [a responsibility they’ve been able to avoid because, unlike the garbage of an industry like restaurants, which would draw rats to the street if not collected, no one knew until 25 years ago that CO2 in the air was dangerous. So by way of this “historical accident,” the fossil-fuel industry is “Alone among business…[in being] allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free… But now that we understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, its price becomes the central issue.”
What’s more, this carbon tax could even be done in a way that actually benefits citizens. “A so-called ‘fee-and-dividend’ scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending everyone in the country a check each month for their share of the added costs of carbon.” And if, in the process, it encourages them to switch “to cleaner energy sources, most people would actually come out ahead.”
It’s easy and tempting to point fingers at others who aren’t doing their part for the health of the environment, and indeed, sometimes this is appropriate. As McKibben says, in a certain sense, we can see who the enemy is. The fossil fuel industry “has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.”
Fossil fuel companies? Yes. Greed? Certainly… But most critically – ignorance, which is the source of greed! For, as the ancients knew, no one who understands what their own greed costs them would choose to make this trade! For when it becomes clear that the things we seek in the name of happiness actually cost us the happiness we seek, no one would continue to seek them. “No one errs willingly,” Socrates famously said, and it’s worth making an effort to understand what this meant. For the willingness to ignore what we don’t want to see comes with the misunderstanding of what is truly good for us – our own true happiness - the kind all that money the Koch brothers are amassing can never buy them.
And this seems a good place to make note that the root verb of the noun ‘ignorance’ is ‘to ignore.’
The good news is, this kind of ignorance can be overcome – and it’s our children who can teach us! And this is what makes the environment an issue concerning education, not only of our young, but more urgently, that we reeducate ourselves!
Nature in crisis requires that we relearn much from nature that we thought we already knew about it, how it really works, so that our children might have half a chance of learning to live well too! Knowledge without humility could ultimately get us cast out of this paradise, once and for all
*
Wanona LaDuke puts it this way:
“Ojibwe prophecies speak of a time during the seventh fire when our people will have a choice between two paths. The first path is well-worn and scorched. The second path is new and green. It is our choice as communities and as individuals how we will proceed.”
Recognizing the need for a new path, indigenous peoples around the world are revisiting the wisdom teachings of their respective traditions as a guide to their survival in a world dominated by institutional forces that have long sought to wipe those teachings from our collective memory.
We, the peoples of modern Western societies, face the same choice referred to in the prophecy. Some among us are realizing that we, too, have much to learn from the traditional indigenous understanding of what Goldtooth referred to as “The Original Instructions.”[7]
Manitonquat, also known as Medicine Story, shares what he has learned from “many elders in many of the First Nations of Turtle Island,” what we call North America. Each of their ancestors “had different images, stories and prophecies, but the message was similar everywhere.”(OI, xvii)
As the elders told it:
“Everything has its instructions. Look at the grass. It knows how to grow just like that, how tall to be, how green. It doesn’t try to be a pine tree. That apple tree doesn’t try to grow cherries; it just keeps on appling because that’s its instructions… Creation taught them their instructions and they follow them. The mouse takes care of his mouse business and doesn’t long to be a rabbit; the eagle, the hawk, and the buzzard share the same sky and don’t decide to go south with the geese in the fall. Even the waters, the brooks and rivers, the lakes, the sea and the tides, follow their instructions… So do also the Earth, the moon, the sun and all the star nations.”(OI, p.7)
“Each functions and fulfills itself following its natural law, known to many Native people as the Original Instructions. These are the instructions that make the grass grass and be green…that make the apple tree blossom and make apples and not acorns or pine nuts, and make the geese fly south in winter while crow and blue jay watch them but stay behind.”(OI, xvii)
And “you have a place and a function” as well, “and you also are complete and perfect. Sacred.”(OI, xviii) “Like everything else you have a reason to be here. Your mind, your awareness may not yet have discovered that purpose, but it is in your being nevertheless. In your instructions.”(OI, p.14)
So why is it then, if we have this harmonic nature, that “human beings are stressed, confused, lonely, unhappy, angry and increasingly violent”?(OI, xvii) The answer the elders gave is that “human beings have forgotten their instructions,”(OI, xviii) the ancient wisdom “of how to be a true human being.”(OI, xx)
“Only man is confused and does not follow his instructions.”(OI, p.7) Why? Because he has received contradictory instructions, given by ancestors who misplaced the originals taught by nature, “or set them aside, no longer realizing their importance.”(OI, xviii).
“So now he is a problem to himself, and to all life on Earth.”(OI, p.7)
[1] (Gore, *)
[2] (Environmental Sociology, 1998)
[3] (Smith, 26)
[4] (Smith, p.56)
[5] (Smith, p.56)
[6] A&E Video, The Kama Sutra, quote from Deepak Chopra
[7] Launching a Green Economy for Brown People
[8] (Huston Smith, Illustrated World’s Religions, p.249)
[9] (McCarthy n.d.)
[10] (Environmental Sociology, 1998)
In his masterful 1992 book Earth in the Balance, Al Gore put our challenges quite succinctly: we are "running the world like a business in liquidation," consuming the very future of our species - and many others - in the process of a single lifetime. And our willingness to let this continue amounts to a sin against the future of all life on earth. For this reason, “What lies ahead is a race against time.” (Gore, p.49)
According to Bill McKibben, said to be the greatest living nature writer, "The bottom-line argument is this”:
“the next fifty years are a special time. They will decide how strong and healthy the planet will be for centuries to come… So it's the task of those of us alive right now to deal with this special phase, to squeeze us through these next fifty years. That's not fair - any more than it was fair that earlier generations had to deal with the Second World War or the Civil War or the Revolution or the Depression or slavery. It's just reality. We need in these next fifty years to be working simultaneously on all parts of the equation, on our ways of life, on our technologies, and on our population. That's what makes this moment special, and what makes this moment hard."(Environmental Sociology, 1998)
And this is what makes the climate crisis primarily philosophical. As Gore puts it, “The more deeply I search for the roots of the global environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual."(p.12)
While evidence of unprecedented weather events surface daily, McKibben, author of “one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989,” has given us the terrifying diagnosis – the moral math - of the climate crisis we face.
In Rolling Stone magazine (not to be ignored by the generation sure to be hardest hit), McKibben calculates the dilemma we face, in a nutshell. Simply put, we can only ‘safely’ burn 565 gigatons more fossil fuels before we reach the 2 degree Celsius temperature increase the earth can (maybe, barely) afford, and we have 2,795 gigatons on reserve and ready to burn!
Do the math, he says - because apparently too few of us can (despite a persistent over-emphasis on the subject in our schools).
“The only thing about climate change the world has settled on,” in fact, is that two degrees is the absolute limit. And even then, “many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target.” “NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet’s most prominent climatologist,” says that even “two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster.”
“Since we’ve increased the Earth’s temperature by 0.8 degrees [Celcius] so far…[and] even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That means we’re already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.” In fact, “we may have waited too long…to keep us under temperature increases of two degrees,” setting our children up for “an essentially impossible future.”
565 gigatons is our ‘carbon budget,’ that is, “how much oil, coal and gas could still safely be burned” by 2050, and still leave us “some reasonable hope of staying below the two degree” increase. Meanwhile, “C02 emissions last year rose to 31.6 gigatons, up 3.2 percent from the year before.” “Study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year – and at that rate, we’ll blow through our 565 gigaton allowance in 16 years, around the time today’s preschoolers will be graduating from high school.” And that “trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees. That’s almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.”
With 2,795 gigatons in our reserves ready to burn, “We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books than climate scientists think is safe to burn.” Thus, the only “effective action would require actually keeping most of the carbon the fossil-fuel industry wants to burn safely in the soil.” “We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate."
Meanwhile, effects arrive these days in the form of violent storms, soaring temperatures, relentless wildfires, massive hurricanes, floods of biblical proportion, earth scorching draughts, rising food prices, and pending water shortages. As I write this, New Orleans is underwater again from hurricane Isaac, on the anniversary of hurricane Katrina, from which we apparently learned little (except to build higher levees). Last month, NASA reported that the entire snowmass of Greenland (half of which usually thaws in the course of a summer) had melted in only four days! Since it has long been predicted that so much fresh water pouring into the north Atlantic could very quickly bring the flow of ocean currents that govern world climate to a halt, the potential consequences we can only imagine in our worst nightmares.
But these effects do not come all at once, or all in one place, so neither we nor our grandchildren notice the changes…yet. But we will soon enough. And when they look back, what will they think about those who wasted so much time blaming the ill will of God, or the first missteps of the first humans, or that ever favorite demon - human nature?
In August 2010, “According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet [had] just come through the warmest decade, the warmest 12 months, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, May, and June on record.”(We’re Hot As Hell And We’re Not Going To Take It Anymore, Bill McKibben, August 2010)
Now, in August 2012, we’ve reached “the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe."
Meanwhile, the relentless search for more oil reserves goes on at a rate of “$100 million dollar a day.” And any dialogue about the hellish future we’re delivering our children into is drowned out by chants of “Drill, baby, drill!”
And “as terrifying as McKibben’s math is,” says John Atcheson, “it doesn’t even consider the increasingly likely horror of methane releases from permafrost and clathrates. Methane just happens to be 72 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide in the short term, and 25 times as strong over the long term.”(We Are Writing the Epilogue to the World We Knew, August 31, 2012 by Common Dreams).
Apparently oblivious to all of this, and in part because of it, world leaders go about behaving as if everything is business as usual. While the public is lulled, McKibben adds, into complete “denial about the peril that human civilization is in.” The “chilling effects of denialism” on any intelligent public dialogue are themselves undeniable, and can be traced to an education system that does not spend so much as an hours exercise on reasoning skills. And why would they, since if we understood what fallacies are, we’d be unlikely to buy the products we are fed through advertising, not to mention the candidates or religious salesmen who have mastered the art of empty rhetoric.
So it comes as no surprise that last month’s anniversary meeting of the massive 1992 environmental summit “accomplished nothing.” Ideological, theological and economic arguments divert attention from the seriousness of our predicament, with the result that, like the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, the Rio conference “failed spectacularly,” drafting a purely voluntary statement of good but half-hearted intentions.
The difficulty of building a movement against all this, environmentalists have learned, is that “Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil-fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself,” making most people “fundamentally ambivalent about going green.” “People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of C02.”
I learned this well working for Greenpeace during the Reagan years, when individual issues (baby seals, whales and dolphins, the Great Lakes, etc.) were still the center of our worry. I found reason for hope in the concerns most people still showed then, but no amount of activist’s efforts could override the power of technical innovation and effective advertising to shape people’s values and enflame their wants. All our best efforts and consumer’s best intentions have insured that “the iconic twisty light bulb has been installed by the millions…but so have a new generation of energy-sucking flatscreen TVs.”
The truth is, I am as enamored as the next person when it comes to the advance of technology, but we are all lulled into a false sense of security when it comes to using it wisely, understanding our limits.
And the terrors of climate projections are easily forgotten in the face of mind-numbing political advertising, such that, when it comes to the voting booth, too many cannot muster the political will to put any of this above other single issues that bug them(taxes, abortion, gay marriage, etc.). As the 2012 Republican convention convenes as I write this, Aug. 29, 2012, it is quite clear, says Wen Stephenson, “what the Romney campaign… is really about: the untrammeled freedom to extract wealth from the commons, whatever the costs to current and future generations.”(Through a green glass, darkly: How climate will reshape American History)
And even though two thirds of Americans tell polls that they would back an international agreement that cut carbon emissions, consensus among nations has proved practically impossible to achieve. The attitude among underdeveloped nations is understandably, as Deepak Chopra characterizes it, “You ate the whole banquet. Now you give us coffee and dessert, but tell us to pay for the entire meal.”(War of the Worldviews) And without international cooperation, few individuals are willing to make personal sacrifices while entire nations continue to benefit from reckless use of fossil-fuels.
But we cannot say it cannot be done. For instance, while “The planet’s emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar, especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the industries of the West,” at least one country, Germany, has shown what can be done. “On one sunny Saturday in late May, that northern latitude nation generated nearly half it’s power from solar panels,” demonstrating “that we have the technology to solve our problems.” We only “lack the will!”
McKibben recommends what may be the only solution, he says, and that is, divestment in the industry…the one process that has worked best in the last century (most notably to end apartheid, when student anger forced college campuses and industry to divest in companies that do business with South Africa). Our challenge now is to compel the same change by acting to “sever the ties with those who profit from climate change,” by way of “demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet.”
How ironic is it, after all, that so many ostensibly future-oriented funds (such as pension funds, the worlds largest investors, and college endowment portfolios) are invested so heavily in fossil-fuel stock, such that “educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their education,” or ultimately “enjoy their retirement” that pension is collected to fund.
In fact, recent polls show that, “Left to our own devices, citizens might decide to regulate carbon and stop short of the brink.” The problem is, “we aren’t left to our own devices.” Thanks to the size of the bankroll this industry brings to the influence of American elections, and the Supreme Court’s perversely-named Citizens United decision, which allows corporations unlimited contributions into political campaigns, McKibben says, “the fossil-fuel industry has far more free will than the rest of us.”
“These companies don’t simply exist in a world whose hungers they fulfill – they help create the boundaries of that world.” The Koch brothers alone (second only to Bill Gates in the list of richest Americans, having made most of their money in hydrocarbons) plan to pour $200 million into defeating Obama in this year’s elections. And the Chamber of Commerce (who give more than the Republican and Democratic National Committees, and more than 90% to the GOP), have actively lobbied the EPA to view the climate crisis as simply “an engineering problem” with “engineering solutions,” insisting that humanity can simply “acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations.”
“As radical goes,” McKibben comments, “demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.”
“Climate change operates on a geological scale and time frame, but it’s not an impersonal force of nature; the more carefully you do the math, the more thoroughly you realize that this is, at bottom, a moral issue.” “Its not an engineering problem,” McKibben concludes, “it’s a greed problem,” and not simply the greed of a generalize human nature, but the greed of only a few key players in one earth destroying industry. “This industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they’re planning to use it.”
“The cold mathematical truth [is that] the fossil-fuel industry [including “all the sovereign nations that, in effect, act as fossil-fuel companies”] is systematically undermining the planet’s physical systems.” “Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business,” as Naomi Klein, veteran anti-corporate leader, put it – “But…with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It’s what they do.”
Add to this that, ”Every hour so far in 2012, the five largest oil corporations (Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobile, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips) have recorded a $14, 400,000 profit. And every hour, they’ve received more than $270,000 in tax breaks. That adds up to $2.4 billion in subsidies every year…”In fact, “Big Oil profits more in one minute than what 96 percent of American family’s earn in one year.” All while “House Republicans want to double what the five companies receive in federal tax breaks…” (A Day in the Life of Big Oil, by Rebecca Leber and Adam Peck, Aug 1, 2012, thinkprogress.org)
As Deepak Chopra observes, “The standard solution for our present woes is all too familiar. Science will rescue us with new technology – for restoring the environment, replacing fossil fuels, curing [disease], and ending the threat of famine. Name your malady and there’s someone to tell you that a scientific solution is right around the corner. But isn’t science promising to rescue us from itself? And why is that a promise we should trust?”(War of the Worldviews)
The only upside of the unfolding urgency of the climate crisis will be if it increases awareness enough that it “weakens the fossil-fuel industry’s political standing” sufficiently to eliminate the special pollution breaks this industry alone enjoys. Only then will “The economic playing field…be a level one for nonpolluting energy sources.” After all, it was only when “Detroit came under severe financial pressure” that it became politically possible to compel them to “millage requirements for cars,” the single environmental achievement the Obama administration has been able to accomplish when it invested in the auto industry in its first term.
So crisis is opportunity, and if this is what it takes to see our “our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless” position and thus weaken the political power the industry has used to restrain legislators, those who have the power to regulate carbon, then we must make the most of this opportunity that our crisis presents.
John Kennedy once said that “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor” - who became an international symbol of bigotry when, as commissioner of public safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, he used fire hoses and attack dogs against peaceful demonstrators, including children, igniting an international support for the cause of desegregation in the US. “He helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.”
The fossil fuel industry is, McKibben argues, the Bull Connor of our environmental crisis.
“Putting a price on carbon… would enlist markets in the fight against global warming,” and effectively “reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry.” Yes, this would raise fuel prices, and thus reduce demand - ideally, “High enough to keep those carbon reserves that would take us past two degrees safely in the ground.” This carbon tax would force oil companies to “internalize their externalities,” that is, pay for their garbage [a responsibility they’ve been able to avoid because, unlike the garbage of an industry like restaurants, which would draw rats to the street if not collected, no one knew until 25 years ago that CO2 in the air was dangerous. So by way of this “historical accident,” the fossil-fuel industry is “Alone among business…[in being] allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free… But now that we understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, its price becomes the central issue.”
What’s more, this carbon tax could even be done in a way that actually benefits citizens. “A so-called ‘fee-and-dividend’ scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending everyone in the country a check each month for their share of the added costs of carbon.” And if, in the process, it encourages them to switch “to cleaner energy sources, most people would actually come out ahead.”
It’s easy and tempting to point fingers at others who aren’t doing their part for the health of the environment, and indeed, sometimes this is appropriate. As McKibben says, in a certain sense, we can see who the enemy is. The fossil fuel industry “has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.”
Fossil fuel companies? Yes. Greed? Certainly… But most critically – ignorance, which is the source of greed! For, as the ancients knew, no one who understands what their own greed costs them would choose to make this trade! For when it becomes clear that the things we seek in the name of happiness actually cost us the happiness we seek, no one would continue to seek them. “No one errs willingly,” Socrates famously said, and it’s worth making an effort to understand what this meant. For the willingness to ignore what we don’t want to see comes with the misunderstanding of what is truly good for us – our own true happiness - the kind all that money the Koch brothers are amassing can never buy them.
And this seems a good place to make note that the root verb of the noun ‘ignorance’ is ‘to ignore.’
The good news is, this kind of ignorance can be overcome – and it’s our children who can teach us! And this is what makes the environment an issue concerning education, not only of our young, but more urgently, that we reeducate ourselves!
Nature in crisis requires that we relearn much from nature that we thought we already knew about it, how it really works, so that our children might have half a chance of learning to live well too! Knowledge without humility could ultimately get us cast out of this paradise, once and for all
*
Wanona LaDuke puts it this way:
“Ojibwe prophecies speak of a time during the seventh fire when our people will have a choice between two paths. The first path is well-worn and scorched. The second path is new and green. It is our choice as communities and as individuals how we will proceed.”
Recognizing the need for a new path, indigenous peoples around the world are revisiting the wisdom teachings of their respective traditions as a guide to their survival in a world dominated by institutional forces that have long sought to wipe those teachings from our collective memory.
We, the peoples of modern Western societies, face the same choice referred to in the prophecy. Some among us are realizing that we, too, have much to learn from the traditional indigenous understanding of what Goldtooth referred to as “The Original Instructions.”[7]
Manitonquat, also known as Medicine Story, shares what he has learned from “many elders in many of the First Nations of Turtle Island,” what we call North America. Each of their ancestors “had different images, stories and prophecies, but the message was similar everywhere.”(OI, xvii)
As the elders told it:
“Everything has its instructions. Look at the grass. It knows how to grow just like that, how tall to be, how green. It doesn’t try to be a pine tree. That apple tree doesn’t try to grow cherries; it just keeps on appling because that’s its instructions… Creation taught them their instructions and they follow them. The mouse takes care of his mouse business and doesn’t long to be a rabbit; the eagle, the hawk, and the buzzard share the same sky and don’t decide to go south with the geese in the fall. Even the waters, the brooks and rivers, the lakes, the sea and the tides, follow their instructions… So do also the Earth, the moon, the sun and all the star nations.”(OI, p.7)
“Each functions and fulfills itself following its natural law, known to many Native people as the Original Instructions. These are the instructions that make the grass grass and be green…that make the apple tree blossom and make apples and not acorns or pine nuts, and make the geese fly south in winter while crow and blue jay watch them but stay behind.”(OI, xvii)
And “you have a place and a function” as well, “and you also are complete and perfect. Sacred.”(OI, xviii) “Like everything else you have a reason to be here. Your mind, your awareness may not yet have discovered that purpose, but it is in your being nevertheless. In your instructions.”(OI, p.14)
So why is it then, if we have this harmonic nature, that “human beings are stressed, confused, lonely, unhappy, angry and increasingly violent”?(OI, xvii) The answer the elders gave is that “human beings have forgotten their instructions,”(OI, xviii) the ancient wisdom “of how to be a true human being.”(OI, xx)
“Only man is confused and does not follow his instructions.”(OI, p.7) Why? Because he has received contradictory instructions, given by ancestors who misplaced the originals taught by nature, “or set them aside, no longer realizing their importance.”(OI, xviii).
“So now he is a problem to himself, and to all life on Earth.”(OI, p.7)
[1] (Gore, *)
[2] (Environmental Sociology, 1998)
[3] (Smith, 26)
[4] (Smith, p.56)
[5] (Smith, p.56)
[6] A&E Video, The Kama Sutra, quote from Deepak Chopra
[7] Launching a Green Economy for Brown People
[8] (Huston Smith, Illustrated World’s Religions, p.249)
[9] (McCarthy n.d.)
[10] (Environmental Sociology, 1998)