Carbon Crisis
This is a post from the old blog written in the later Summer of ’07 out in Khon Kaen province in Thailand’s North East.
As I walk down a country road to the small village in which I go for alms each morning, I’m met with a sight which, for me, encapsulates nicely the mentality behind our relationship with our planet: garbaaaage (emphasised with a guttural French accent) … and plenty of it. From little plastic bags (the bane of my almsrounds) to snack packets and juice cartons, all the way down to beer bottles (the smashed and splintered variety, of course) and the occasional electrical appliance (although these are usually quickly picked up and sold by scrap merchants) – its almost as if the lush and verdant edges of the road, covered in beautiful, leafy green weeds of every shape and size, gently try to hide this mess away from my prying eyes, with their myriad vines and delicate blossoms. It’s all about using and abusing here … and someone else can clear it up too.
This month’s National Geographic includes a rather sobering and yet not entirely unhopeful article, ‘The Climate Crisis’ with a two page spread of ‘How to Cut Emissions’ – after reading it I come to the rather frank conclusion that unless there is some kind of worldwide miracle and people actually start to realise the depth and seriousness of the problem … we’re screwed … and so are our kids … and their kids … (well, ok, I know I don’t have any – but you get the idea). We need drastic change – and it needs to come now.
The problem itself is so complex and so delicate that it really is going to take some kind of lightning bolt from the sky to put things into perspective for many of us. The amount of crap we’re putting up into the sky these days is reckoned at 8 billion metric tonnes per year (and that’s just the carbon!). Think of what one tonne of carbon looks like … a big black cube … ok … now times that by 8 billion and try to visualise what we’re doing to ourselves. The US belches out one quarter of the world’s carbon emissions (that’s one quarter, in case you missed that), although both China and India are both catching up rather quickly, what with their huge populations. And although there doesn’t seem to be any real shouting down of the fact that there really is a crisis – It seems that the only people actually taking any initiatives at the moment are the Europeans and Japanese (although certain individual cities and states within the US have also begun curbing emissions themselves), and even they aren’t reaching the modest quotas that they are setting for themselves.
Everyone involved knows what the basic outlines of a deal that could avert catastrophe would look like: rapid, sustained, and dramatic cuts in emissions by the technologically advanced countries, coupled with large-scale technology transfer to China, India and the rest of the developing world so that they can power up their emerging economies without burning up their coal. Everyone knows the big questions, too: Are such rapid cuts even possible? Do we have the political will to make them and to extend them overseas?
All in all the outlook is rather bleak – and while hope remains to at least slow and reduce the effects of the ‘messing up’ of out little blue and green orb we are already looking at serious changes taking place, which we now have no means of stopping – one of which is namely, that we’re overheating and so is the ice. More or less every last glacial fortress in the world is beginning or already showing signs (in many cases, pretty serious signs) of melting. More meltwater means higher sea levels – yada yada yada … you know the drill. There’s a lot more to ice than simply rising sea levels but in any case, none of it is good.
However, there are plans and the people we pay to think for us are doing their jobs well – not the case, unfortunately, with those we pay to act and pass resolutions for us. One of these rather cunning plans was thought up by three Princeton chaps and is known as the ‘stabilization wedges’. It involves 15 ‘wedges’ in which each wedge is made up of cuts to emissions which can feasibly bring down our current levels further and further, in the hopes that we can at least hold where we are and stop it getting any worse. The three possible paths outlined in this plan are:
1) Either we carry on at our current rate and in the next 50 years bring our emissions up to 800 ppm (parts per million) – 16 billion tons per year – warming the planet by another 9° F (it may not look like it, but that’s a huge amount).
2) We hold as we are at 8 billion tons per year (525 ppm), which itself would require the successful application of 8 of these wedges.
3) We reduce things down as far as we can go (450ppm) and then wait for further technological advances to begin cutting even further back in the future. This would require the successful application of all 15 wedges plus implementation of new technology as and when it comes.
Each of these wedges would require a significant and global effort consisting of the effecting of things like the stopping of all deforestation, reducing individual car mileage and improving fuel economy, investing in nuclear power and low carbon fuels, and increasing wind generated power to 25 times what it is now … to name but a few.
Realistically, these changes are huge and would need unilateral support from all regions of the world, even from us everyday Joes and Josephines. Unfortunately for both us and our lonely little citadel of life in the solar system, its going to need to be a long hard battle which unless we start fighting as a coherent whole … as humans … as sentient beings which share the world with all kinds of other wonderful creations … we haven’t a hope to win.
Well, is there anything we can do, to reduce, as they say, our own personal carbon footprints? Why yes there is! And although we’re all going to need to start doing them together to effect even a tiny change in where we’re going, it’s a much better plan than doing nothing at all.
and if you ain’t an eco-friendly Buddhist … well … ya should be!
A Drifting Cloud 