Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [114]
In essence, Bolivia is attempting to confront the catastrophic convergence by addressing the problems through which climate change articulates itself. If there is to be more progress on an international agreement that mitigates emissions and funds adaptation, it will be in large part by thanks to the brave example of impoverished and landlocked little Bolivia. That a country so poor, so underdeveloped, economically marginalized, fettered by widespread illiteracy, disease, and hunger, its politics for so long stunted by racism, exploitation, and dictatorship, could organize itself, avoid civil war, proceed toward a new path of mixed economic development, begin to take environmental issues seriously, and then to bring all of this to the international stage with dignity, is a feat of absolutely heroic and epic proportions.
Mitigation Now
A burdensome, if obvious, realization hit me while writing this book. Peaceful, progressive adaptation versus bad, violent adaptation is a difficult choice, but it is a struggle that is itself predicated on robust mitigation. Without mitigation, we run the very real risk of unleashing a process of self-fueling, runaway climate change to which there can be little successful adaptation.
As discussed earlier, scientists believe that stabilizing the climate system requires that we return to an atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration of less than 350 parts per million. The extremely bad news—we are now at 390 parts per million. The World Meteorological Organization has determined 2010 to have been one of the hottest ever recorded. And all year, extreme weather battered the Northern Hemisphere. Add to this the steady drip of new scientific reports on the degraded state of the world’s oceans, ice packs, and forests. The IPCC says rich countries like the United States must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and thereafter make precipitous cuts to almost zero emissions.
If we don’t act now, average global temperatures will likely increase by much more than 2 degrees Celsius and that will likely trigger a set of dangerous positive-feedback loops that will unleash self-compounding, runaway climate change. For example, if the permafrost of the arctic keeps melting, and the massive stores of methane (CH4) contained beneath it are released, global warming will accelerate radically because methane “is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.”27 At the moment, these vast stores of methane remain locked up under ice, beneath the tundra and ocean floor. But this frozen lid of mud is melting, threatening a rapid warming with attendant rises in sea levels, devastated agriculture, and social chaos.
As this book goes to press in 2011, very little mitigation is under way. The core problem in the international effort to cut emissions is fundamentally the intransigence of the United States: it failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and has played an obstructionist role at subsequent negotiations. Domestically, progress has been just as frustratingly slow despite wide public support for environmental protections. As of this writing, no climate legislation has been passed in the United States. We have no price on carbon, nor any program of robust investment in clean technology. Even the minimal production tax credit for clean energy generated by solar, wind, and hydro power has not been locked in as a long-term commitment. As a result, private investment in clean tech moves forward only in fits and starts.
China, on the other hand, now the world’s second-largest economy and largest greenhouse gas polluter, is moving ahead with a robust and fast-growing clean-tech industry—that is to say, with mitigation. The Chinese wind sector has grown steadily since 2001. In 2009, the sector grew by 113 percent, according to the World Wind Energy Report. This growth is the result, in part,