Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

If getting the reality of global warming and climate change into the consciousness of this society is a reason for hope, then we are certainly making progress. No fewer than 5 articles in the NY Times today covered one aspect or another.

The most poignant, perhaps, is the one that is most local. It is easy to be overwhelmed to the point of powerlessness sometimes with the scope of the problem, the enormous amount of information, the scary potential disasters, the crazy weather that already stretches some of our coping capacities (like the droughts in the US Southwest and Southeast), and the magnitude of the changes required to address the human contribution to warming.

Given all that, the story of a local impact on a local community brings the heart back to the conversation.

And so this article, As the Climate Changes, Bits of England’s Coast Crumbles.

A good way to put it, a story being repeated in many places in our world — bits of coast crumbling — or a bit more ocean-rising up the shores of island nations, or another polar bear stranded on an ice flow in the arctic.

On a somewhat larger scale is Thomas Friedman’s column, The Aussie ‘Big Dry’ (because the Times makes you pay to view this article, I have pasted it in at the end of this post). It’s about the history-making 6-year drought in Australia that has the prime minister calling on the country to pray for rain. John Howard is a global warming skeptic now trying to figure out policies to deal with it.

From there, we move on to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which is finishing up it’s third report this year on global climate change — the first describing the scientific consensus on what’s happening, the second looking at regional impact, and now this one dealing with what to do about it — certainly the most contentious issue since it directly impacts economic, international, and national policies. Being hammered out here at the last minute is what the international community needs to do to cut greenhouse gas emissions. If 192 member nations can agree on a vigorous and aggressive regimen to do that, this would be progress indeed.

The article, Climate Panel Reaches Consensus on the Need to Reduce Harmful Emissions.

Next we have an article on the debate in Congress regarding whether or not funds should be budgeted to intelligence agencies to study the extent to which the impacts of global warming could be threats to national security. Republicans say ‘no,’ but Democrats cite the fact that the Pentagon has already been looking at this, on how changing climate could destabilize already weak states, create huge populations of environmental refugees, and more.

I, for one, shudder thinking about how the US military and intelligence agencies might view the way to deal with these threats — through international negotiations on how to share responsibility for the crises in an equitable way, or by defending US ‘interests’ around the world?

Finally, there is this article which questions whether or not wind farms will do much to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Now I’m not citing all these articles to advertise for the NY Times. It’s to make this other point — a year ago, articles on global warming and climate change were far fewer and far between in the NY Times. I cite today’s issue as evidence of how much has changed in the consiousness of the media and the public.

Now the question is whether or not this will turn into meaningful policy. No society has added more in greenhouse gases to this atmosphere than the US (still contributing 25% of annual emissions), and therefore no one has greater responsibility to do something pretty substantial to reduce those emissions.

If hope truly resides in all this public information, it will only be if the one makes the other happen — and soon.

[tags] Beccles England, crumbling British coast, Australia drought, inter-governmental panel on climate change, climate change as security issue, wind turbines, Thomas Friedman[/tags]

May 4, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Aussie ‘Big Dry’
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
SYDNEY, Australia

Almost everywhere you travel these days, people are talking about their weather — and how it has changed. Nowhere have I found this more true, though, than in Australia, where “the big dry,” a six-year record drought, has parched the Aussie breadbasket so severely that on April 19, Prime Minister John Howard actually asked the whole country to pray for rain. “I told people you have to pray for rain,” Mr. Howard remarked to me, adding, “I said it without a hint of irony.”

And here’s what’s really funny: It actually started to rain! But not enough, which is one reason Australia is about to have its first election in which climate change will be a top issue. In just 12 months, climate change has gone from being a nonissue here to being one that could tip the vote.

In the process, Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative now in his 11th year in office, has moved from being a climate skeptic to what he calls a “climate realist,” who knows that he must offer programs to reduce global-warming greenhouse gas emissions in Australia, but wants to do it without economic pain or imposed targets, like Kyoto’s. He is proposing emissions trading and nuclear power.

The Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd, proposes a hard target — a 60 percent reduction in Australian CO2 emissions from 2000 levels by 2050 — and subsidies for Aussies to retrofit their homes with energy-saving systems. The whole issue has come from the bottom up, and it has come on so quickly that neither party can be sure it has its finger on the public’s pulse.

“What was considered left a year ago is now center, and in six months it will be conservative — that is how quickly the debate about climate change is moving here,” said Michael Roux, chairman of RI Capital, a Melbourne investment firm. “It is being led by young people around the dinner table with their parents, and the C.E.O.’s and politicians are all playing catch-up.”

I asked Mr. Howard how it had happened. “It was a perfect storm,” he said. First came a warning from Nicholas Stern of Britain, who said climate change was not only real but could be economically devastating for Australia. Then the prolonged drought forced Mr. Howard to declare last month that “if it doesn’t rain in sufficient volume over the next six to eight weeks, there will be no water allocations for irrigation purposes” until May 2008 for crops and cattle in the Murray-Darling river basin, which accounts for 41 percent of Australian agriculture.

It was as if the pharaoh had banned irrigation from the Nile. Australians were shocked. Then the traditional Australian bush fires, which usually come in January, started in October because everything was so dry. Finally, in the middle of all this, Al Gore came to Australia and showed his film, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“The coincidence of all those things … shifted the whole debate,” Mr. Howard said. While he tends to focus on the economic costs of acting too aggressively on climate change, his challenger, Mr. Rudd, has been focusing on the costs of not acting. Today, Mr. Rudd said, Australian businesses are demanding that the politicians “get a regulatory environment settled” on carbon emissions trading so companies know what framework they will have to operate in — because they know change is coming.

When you look at the climate debate around the world, remarked Peter Garrett, the former lead singer for the Australian band Midnight Oil, who now heads the Labor Party’s climate efforts, there are two kinds of conservatives. The ones like George Bush and John Howard, he said, deep down remain very skeptical about environmentalism and climate change “because they have been someone else’s agenda for so long,” but they also know they must now offer policies to at least defuse this issue politically.

And then there are conservatives like Arnold Schwarzenegger and David Cameron, the Tory Party leader in London, who understand that climate is becoming a huge defining issue and actually want to take it away from liberals by being more forward-leaning than they are.

In short, climate change is the first issue in a long time that could really scramble Western politics. Traditional conservatives can now build bridges to green liberals; traditional liberals can make common cause with green businesses; young climate voters are newly up for grabs. And while coal-mining unions oppose global warming restrictions, service unions, which serve coastal tourist hotels, need to embrace them. You can see all of this and more in Australia today.

Politics gets interesting when it stops raining.