Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

A few days ago, Katherine Ellison, in an op-ed for the NY Times, said something that has been bugging me for some time now.  If our global warming/climate change scenario is so scary, how come the proposals for addressing it are so meek?

From Al Gore’s new film to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to thousands of scientists and at least some environmental groups, we keep hearing over and over again:  “Dire situation!!”  “We’re running out of time!”  “We are past the tipping point!!”  “Peak oil!!”   “Urgent! Urgent! Urgent!”

And, as Ellison notes, here’s the most radical response from US lawmakers – the McCain/Lieberman “Climate Stewardship Act” (what a stupid name – we’re going to be “stewards of the climate,” for crying out loud?!  For one thing, I think they have this backwards). This legislation would do the following (if it ever became law):  it would cut US emissions in the US to 2000 levels by the year 2010.

That’s it folks, the best Congress can do – and it has failed twice to pass the Senate.

Now, the web site for An Inconvenient Truth, www.climatecrisis.net, has some very interesting suggestions for how to reduce our personal carbon emissions, by changing some of our consumption habits.  It includes a calculator that estimates your level of annual emissions, and I found it quite sobering.

Of course, we all know that what is required is more than changes in personal habits – since our society is organized around the use of fossil fuels for our mobility, the transit of consumer goods, and our home environments.  And we also know that it will take massive and mandatory changes in the whole corporate, urban, suburban, way of life – and quickly – for us to reduce carbon emissions to the levels considered necessary to save us – to reduce human-caused carbon emissions by 70 percent immediately.

Letters to the Editors responding to the Ellison article are interesting in terms of how people greet this information.  Ellison also mentions the initiative called Clean Energy Transition being proposed by ecologist Ross Gelbspan.  You can find a good description of this at this link.

So, change your personal consumption patterns now, yes.  Reduce your carbon emissions drastically, absolutely.  Then get busy shaking up this policy debate.  Let’s support initiatives commensurate with the reality we face.