by Frank Lowenstein, via Planet Change
The economic crash of 2008 motivated many of us to pay closer attention to our finances, and we are beginning to see the benefits: Americans’ savings rates have increased roughly four-fold since the record low of 2005; debt-to-income ratios are down 22 percent since late 2007. This makes good common sense. None of us want to join the wave of millions of Americans who have had to file for bankruptcy as their personal finances collapsed in the face of unexpected stresses – loss of a job, collapse of a home’s value, decline in stock prices. Sometimes bankruptcy came when stresses piled on, as when the loss of a job deprived a family of health insurance and then a medical emergency hit.
The financial crisis took most of us by surprise, even though economists and experts in the banking industry had been warning of looming disaster for months or even years. And it was not a pleasant surprise; those bankruptcy statistics translate into homelessness, suffering, and anxiety.
Just as unsustainable debts, freewheeling lending practices and ignored financial warnings led up to the economic melt-down of 2008, so as a nation we have ignored warnings of climate change’s impacts. But this latest season of heat and drought, is driving home to many of us, that in order to protect our families from needless impacts, we need to take steps to avoid looming climate bankruptcy.
Much as people spent freely from savings and allowed their personal debt to climb in the early 2000s, as a society we are rapidly depleting carbon stored in our forests and in deposits of coal and other fossil fuels underground. By releasing too much carbon dioxide into the air, we are tipping the atmosphere’s balance sheets into the red — causing our air, lands and waters to heat up. July was the hottest month ever in U.S. history; triple-digit temperatures have been common across the West and the Southeast.
And that heat is more than just uncomfortable — it threatens the lands and waters we depend on and disrupts our economy and our lives.
Last month, the Des Moines River in Iowa hit 97 degrees and tens of thousands of fish died. Temperatures in a 2,500-acre lake that cools a nuclear power plant in Illinois surpassed 100 degrees, threatening the ability of the plant to keep operating. Corn and soy yields are down and food prices likely headed up as excessive heat has baked the soils of the Midwest. Barges are grinding to a halt on rivers too low to move them. Extraordinary forest fires in the American West have been blazing since June. And high school football players in Georgia are finding their practices curtailed — it’s just too hot to play safely.
This is what climate bankruptcy looks like: charred homes from fires in Colorado; suffering in stifling, power-less homes across the East; barren fields in the parched, baked breadbasket of the Midwest. And new research from NASA scientists documents what most Americans already realize: that climate change is the only credible explanation for the extreme, destructive heat waves we have experienced around the world over the past decade.
And as we see the impacts of excessive heat on of power production, food and water, it becomes increasingly clear that the more CO2 we pump into the atmosphere, the more changes we’ll need to make in our lives to stave off disaster and discomfort.
So what should we do to keep ourselves out of climate bankruptcy?
First, we need to reduce our personal and national carbon emissions. We are making progress: Carbon emissions in the United States are down 7% from 2007 to 2011 as utilities shift from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas, consumers buy more efficient cars and businesses realize that saving energy saves money. But we can and must do much more, starting with putting a price on carbon and pursuing other societal incentives (such as new fuel efficiency standards) to reduce carbon pollution from all sectors of our economies. California has led the way, with laws that sharply drive down that state’s carbon emissions through 2050, and analyses published in Science showed that the economic costs of those policies will be modest.
Individual actions can also make a difference. You can get ideas to address your own carbon habits and contribute to collective belt-tightening, by visiting The Nature Conservancy’s Carbon Footprint Calculator.
Beyond that, our cities and communities need to be prepared for the “new normals” we are already experiencing. To that end, many large cities — Chicago, Boston and New York, for example — have developed climate adaptation plans. Get in touch with your municipal officials to find out what they are doing to plan, and how you can help.
And then there’s making your own plans to adapt. As Sarene Marshall suggested in a recent blog, climate change may require us to adjust the timing of family activities —whether that’s to consider a September vacation instead of one in July, or swapping your lunchtime tennis game for a night-time one under the lights.
As the recent heat and the latest science both make clear, we need to move quickly to adjust our use of carbon. Otherwise, the adjustments we’ll need to make in our lives and our economy to cope with climate bankruptcy will make those needed to prevent it look trivial.
Frank Lowenstein is Climate Adaptation Strategy Leader for The Nature Conservancy. This piece was originally published at Planet Change and was reprinted with permission.
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
The problem is, our personal salaries aren’t usually directly tied in to the health of the environment. Exception: for many of us, our home insurance bills have doubled.
One way to jigger us all toward taking care of earth’s atmosphere is for our company to put simple actions into our paychecks, for our company to prefer to deal with other companies that do the same, for our state and nation to do the same, and for the entire world to tend to avoid dealing with polluting countries. Set up third-party verification because there are plenty of tinhorns and greenwashing companies wanting to verify themselves.
Go Green, Resistance is Fatal… However compliance is rewarding on many fronts. Hell, we might even survive as a species.
A blog post by Jonathan Koomey, http://www.koomey.com/post/29130849206
has enhancements of Hansen’s plots of the actual distributions over the last 6 decades.
They show clearly that the reality is even worse than the “idealized” plot shown above. Quote from this post: “The interesting thing about these results is that the distribution not only shifts to the right, but it also flattens out and spreads over a broader area.”
I think part of the problem is that we’ve become innured to calls for action – save the whales, save the pandas, save the whatever – this has been going on for many years to the point where we no longer pay attention. Those of us who have donated to such causes seldom hear back if anything’s been saved or not, and it’s human nature to tune it all out after awhile. It gets too depressing.
Don’t get me wrong – if we’d been more serious and had a concerted effort (and I mean politically also) from the get go about saving other species and their habitats, we wouldn’t be where we are now. The human mind likes success stories, and the more we hear, the more we’re inclined to action. And we go on day after day just like before, even when the whales and such haven’t been saved, so it’s natural to assume the urgency isn’t really that serious.
Except when it is…but then we just tune the global warming stuff out with the rest. Save the humans. Too bad cause it’s going to have drastic consequences.
I think “Save Yourselves” might appeal to those too selfish to worry about whales and sucn. So there’ll be broader support?
Good point. I like it. :)
The Right has no intention of ‘saving the humans’. They would be very happy if billions of ‘useless eaters’ disappeared, and are taking numerous active steps to ensure that it happens.
As I mentioned in another recent post, Extremely Hot Summers have increased 50X to 100X (5000%~10,000%) in the past 50 years (not 10X as the article states). They increased from 0.1%~0.2% to 10% of area in that time, as Dr. Hansen’s paper states.
Also, Dr. Hansen’s study shows that the “Future Climate Shift” shown in the figure has already happened (and will continue).
I was reading Hansen’s full PNAS paper last night, and came across this section, referring to the rightward shift and broadening of temperature distributions:
“How will loading of the climate dice continue to change in the future? Fig. 4 provides a clear, sobering, indication. The temperature anomaly distribution shifts to the right and broadens with global warming, the broadening presumably the expected effect of global warming on the water cycle, as discussed below. The hot tail of the temperature anomaly distribution shifted by more than 1σ in response to the global warming of about 0.5 °C over the past three decades. Additional global warming in the next 50 y, if business-as-usual fossil fuel emissions continue, is expected to be
at least 1 °C. In that case, the further shifting of the anomaly distribution will make 3σ anomalies the norm and 5σ anomalies will be common.”
While everyone should do their part, going to the Nature Conservancy’s site to reduce your carbon footprint will not solve the problem anymore than individually sending a check to government will reduce the national debt (it will reduce the debt but it will not be of the scale needed).
The only thing that will address the climate problem at scale is collective action such as putting a fee on carbon. Voluntary personal action is a good thing, but will not come close to addressing the crisis.
Getting the people to adopt a carbon price is a “Voluntary personal action” that should be a no brainer. People everywhere have a garbage fee, waste water fee, I even have a “rainwater run off” fee. How come Corpro/People get to trash the commons for free and still collect unimaginable profits? In fact get tax subsidies! All while “We the People” pick up the tab for mitigation. The GOP do not fund abortion. Fine. A precedent. Why must progressives subsidize the ecocide of the Planet?
Mr. Lowenstein, What would it take to get all the BIG GREENS, Nature Conservancy, EDF, Sierra Club, NRDC, WWF etc. to coalesce on a single climate change, global warming message and advocate for GHG taxes or fees and elimination of negative externalities? After all, “Saving the Last Great Places Won’t Save Us from Climate Change”, nor will saving the pandas.
Targets slipping away
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/McInnes+Emissions+targets+slip+away+governments+underachieve/7079870/story.html
Priorities? 300,000 people show up for Seattle Hempfest.
“Seattle Hempfest began, in the words of sponsors, as a “humble gathering of stoners”, but has blossomed into the largest marijuana-centered gathering in North America: At least 300,000 people are expected to crowd Myrtle Edwards Park on Friday through Sunday as Hempfest celebrates its 21st birthday.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/connelly/article/Hempfest-at-21-Marijuana-goes-mainstream-3793382.php
People the world over have no resistance to the scientific fact that changing a patch of South Pacific from warm to cool by only a couple of degrees C and the resulting comparatively narrow El Nino/La Nina current across the Equatorial Pacific to South America can have a profound effect on the weather not only here in the United Stats but to a lesser degree Europe and Africa.
On the other hand, transforming a much closer, (boarders in many cases), patch of earth from way bellow freezing to open water above freezing, a difference of 10′s of degrees C and an area that is larger than the states of Alaska and Texas combined is just going to be “Ho Hum”! Get real. I am telling you, Science is telling you, and the on the ground reality is telling you sh*t is hitting the fan big time here. Of course vested interests are spending big bucks trotting out “red herrings” as fast as they can. Perhaps that must be factored into the attitudes of the masses, you think?
A recent Congressional Reaserch Service study found the total procurement costs for all US wars was just just less than $7 trillion.
Presumably these trillions were and are being spent for the expressed purpose of preserving a way of life and standard of living that are at mortal risk due to climate change.
It is a real threat as opposed the straw men that have been used in many cases to promote military expenditures.
Here’s the link for that figure, which was created by the Southwest Climate Change Network, based on an earlier graph in one of the IPCC reports: http://www.southwestclimatechange.org/figures/temperature-shift
I link some data in Hansen’s recent article (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_17/) to this way of looking at the problem (eg using distributions rather than averages) to show why small shifts in average temperatures can cause big shifts in the number and severity of extreme weather events: http://www.koomey.com/post/29130849206
It has been estimated that the cost to the GDP of the transformation from chamber pot window dump to indoor plumbing is about the same as transformation to a Green Awakening Economy! Can any deniers argue that black water transformation is not good in the long run? That it could have happened without Government intervention? That the subsequent GDP gain did not benefit all?
Go Green,- Resistance is Fatal… Compliance is rewarding.
Time to Toast the GOP; Not the Kidders!
If only we had a government that would listen to what scientists had to say.
I think the problem is under education. For years we have trained everyone to be industrial thinkers. However, in todays world of global comm..,we need new thinkers. The more educated climate personal we can produce will only start process of need thinking.
Being a earth ranger (one who educates on environmental problems and solutions ) I think a new service or united earth workers could really start the green thinkers movement.