A Newer World: Politics, Money, Technology, and What’s Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis

Introduction

xv There is a perception by many informed and concerned observers that we are losing the battle against climate change. We are told that global warming ’s momentum is unstoppable, that the greenhouse gases that have been accumulating will inexorably poison the oceans and push the climate system irrevocably out of balance. What’s worse is that the public doesn’t care, the politics are intractable, the smart money is still on the old ways of doing business, and the science is uncertain. What follows in this book is evidence that this is manifestly not the case. We have been making, in fact, astonishing progress on a number of fronts: from clean tech to sustainable development and even on the politics and policy. There is, however, no sugar coating on the evidence that climate change is real, dangerous, and going to be around in our lives for, unfortunately, generations to come. We have been wreaking havoc on the planet with our deforestation and the degradation of our agricultural lands and marine environments . We have been heedlessly pumping carbon dioxide by the billions of tons annually into our atmosphere for well over a hundred years. The latest figure for the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is 389 parts per million (ppm),* according to the United Nations. This is a 39 percent increase from the value of 280 ppm before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century.1 This does not take into account the other major greenhouse gases, which have also been steadily on the rise. The impacts from the climate changes that we have been experiencing are virtually everywhere in evidence: sea-level rise, the melting of glaciers and introduction tURning the coRneR on the cliMate cRisis * This indicates the number of molecules of the gas per million molecules of dry air. introduction xvi polar ice, droughts in many areas and catastrophic storms in other areas, devastation of forests from insect infestations and fires, dramatic changes in ocean chemistry and temperature that are severely distressing marine life, as well as habitat loss and other pressures for many terrestrial species of both flora and fauna. Economies suffer as a consequence, not only in the vulnerable developing world but also in the high-income societies of the developed world. As we shall see, though, even amid all the often-stark news, there have been hugely positive developments.· In the fall of 2009, for instance, a “scandal” broke that wasn’t a scandal . But the mainstream media, unimaginatively calling it “Climategate ,” embraced it. The bottom line on climate science, however, is that it is extraordinarily deep, wide, and thorough. The media too, for that matter, has been getting the story right much more often than it has been getting it wrong.· Similarly, the story of how fossil fuels have been steadily thickening the blanket of our atmosphere, holding in more and more heat, is, in a word, depressing. What is not widely known is that we find ourselves now in the midst of a startling revolution in clean, renewable power production.· For well over a hundred years, we have relied on a central power plant model that is enormously wasteful. But we are developing decentralized energy options, “smart grids,” breakthroughs in green building and energy efficiency, and other clean tech that promise to radically change how we use energy and other resources.· We witnessed extraordinary events at the un climate conference in Copenhagen in December of 2009, with world leaders apparently flailing purposelessly in secret meetings while tens of thousands demonstrated in the streets outside. The real story of Copenhagen , though, was that there was excellent progress on effecting programs to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Meanwhile, we have been seeing tangible progress on the environment and energy around the world since before the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 at the multilateral, bilateral, and national levels. Many of the Obama administration’s initiatives, on both the international and domestic introduction xvii stages, have been pushing the edge of the envelope, to use the old test pilots’ expression.· A flexible and proven system for managing greenhouse gases downward came out of the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2009, but died an ignominious death in the Senate thereafter, the victim of special interests and political ideology. International business and finance have nevertheless been moving vigorously forward to minimize risks from climate change, find new...