Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

The front page of the NY Times today was rather striking, disturbing, enraging. No less than three articles on the issues we care about. But two of them provide one of those windows on our reality that clarifies the problem.

The maple suger industry in Vermont is in serious trouble. ‘Warm winters upset rhythms of maple sugar,’ reads the headline. New England has been warming, affecting the timing of the rising of the sap. Most agree that global warming is to blame.

Also mentioned are the predictions of climate scientists that by the end of the century New England may have no more sugar maples at all, as they migrate north across the Canadian border.

On the same front page above the fold is this article: ‘US predicting steady increase for emissions.’ This is very bad news for the sugar maple industry in Vermont. This is very bad news for all of us.

The news comes from a much-delayed report due to the United Nations under the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change. It was supposed to be finished and delivered in 2005, but, considering the findings, one can understand why the Bush administration might be reluctant to release it.

As Andrew Revkin writes, over the next decade, US greenhouse gas emissions will rise as rapidly as in the past decade.

This group running the government is not going to change course at all, not in the near-term when it can really matter, when we can actually do things that might stave off the worst of the warming and climate change predicted by scientists precisely if we do what this report says we are going to do!

They just don’t get it, or don’t want to get it.

When NASA’s James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Science in NY, said last year that we have ten years, ten years, to do what we need to do to slow the emissions that cause global warming, he did not mean wait ten years and then do something. He meant that we must make the changes within those ten years. He meant that we need to start now, or rather, then — that was a year ago. We’ve lost still another year.
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I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change … no longer than a decade, at the most

By the way, the only reason we know about this report is that a draft was given by an anonymous someone to the NY Times.

Drafts of the report were provided to The New York Times by a government employee at the request of a reporter. The employee did not say why this was done, but other officials involved with producing it said they have been frustrated with the slow pace of its preparation. It was due more than one year ago.

Your tax dollars at work.

God bless the anonymous government whistle-blowers. There are still decent people in that bureacracy, trying to do the right thing — or at least expose the wrong thing.

Apparently the report describes some of the deleterious impacts that will spread across the US over the coming decades as a result of climate change, including, according to the Times:

growing risks to water supplies, coasts and ecosystems around the United States from the anticipated temperature and precipitation changes driven by the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

Yet, says Kristen Hellmer, who has the unenviable position of speaking for the White House on matters of the environment, our president ‘remained satisfied with voluntary measures to slow emissions.’

As he remains satisfied with his Iraq policy, and his health and education policies, and his economic policies, and his response to Hurricane Katrina, and his tax-cuts-for-the-rich policies, and on and on. He is just so very pleased with himself.

Which helps explain approval ratings that, according to the NY Times yesterday, have now slipped down to 29%, one of the lowest in the history of the United States. Sixty-eight percent of folks polled say the country is headed in the wrong direction!

It is, folks, and especially on this issue, this dangerous, dangerous reality of global warming and climate change.

I want to make note of a couple of other things in the Times, because it was amazingly full of interesting stuff today. Also on the front page is this very interesting article about the US and Brazil teaming up to promote sugar ethanol for Latin America. Will comment on this more another time.

And in the business section, an interesting interview with the chairman and CEO of Chevron, David O’Reilly. As you know, big oil is making big profits right now. But what’s interesting here is how O’Reilly acknowledges that we are running out of cheap and available oil, that oil will become harder to find and more expensive to produce. Sounds a bit like what the ‘peak oil‘ folks have been predicting, despite the air of public denial among oil companies and their boosters. He also stresses the need for much greater efficiency and the need to use a whole mix of energy sources to meet future demand. He says we need to look at our energy challenges ‘holistically.’ Imagine that!

I don’t mean to be a big NYT booster today, but I was just very intrigued by all these articles ending up in one issue (too bad on a Saturday, the least read issue — maybe they were saving them up just for that reason, to dump them where fewer people read them. I hope not.). For years, one had to search the Internet for a lot of this information, alternative media, books, etc. Now we can be overwhelmed with all this news. And this is progress.

So, why not give the last word today to the NY Times? Because they did one more thing - an editorial on the changing climate of the southwest and the reality of persistent drought that undermines all those plans for increased development. The editorial points out that predictions for available water on which water policy has been based were made in 1922, during a relatively wet period in the southwest. Turned out that that ‘normal’ was not normal at all.

As population grows out there, human life — not just what is planned, but what is already there — is not sustainable. Not sustainable. Millions upon millions of people, their over-developed real estate, and a large portion of our agricultural production — not sustainable. And climate change is going to make this situation far worse.

The last word? It’s a lot like the theme we harp on here over and over again:

The fundamental challenge for us all is to change the way we live as well.

[tags] global warming, climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, Vermont maple sugar industry, US emissions rise, Bush environmemtal policy[/tags]