Bali conference: moral responsibility - a challenge from the islands
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Posted on December 5, 2007
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
We learn this as children — we are responsible for our actions. When they have bad consequences, conscience tells us that we must take responsibility for that.
And then there are the rich nations of the world…
There are countries that have benefited from pollution, and we are paying the price. How should they respond?
So said Anote Tong, president of the island nation of Kiribati, quoted in an AP article today, Victims of global warming, Pacific islanders seek aid at UN climate talks. (For heartbreaking photos: Ministry of Environment, Land and Agricultural Development, Climate Change Unit, Government of Kiribati.)
We, this nation, Europe, Canada, other industrialized nations, we are the reason their island will soon be inundated by the sea and therefore no longer exist. It doesn’t matter whether or not we intended this, it is the result of our unbridled industrial growth that made possible our carbon-emitting consumption and wealth.
I find the voices from these islands always to be so compelling, poignant, disturbing. What they are losing is something we cannot even imagine — a way of life, a culture, community, traditions that provide frameworks of meaning and powerful social bonds.
Pacific islands are disappearing as the ocean encroaches, as sea levels rise because of global warming. Will we really continue on with this way of life even in the face of the death and disappearance of nations, peoples, cultures? Is our choice of vehicle, our endless mobility, our car-dependent suburban and exurban sprawl really more important — morally and ethically — than what these people are facing?
We must, on moral grounds, not only change our lives, but we must provide from our wealth (not from poor people here either, but from wealth) what peoples around the world need to either protect themselves from climate change or adapt to it.
Because the lesson we learned as children is still true.
And just to bring this back home — the deluges and floods in the northwest, a fitting backdrop for this article in the NY Times based on yet another study about the deleterious impacts of climate change, Precipitation across U.S. intensifies over 50 years. I’ll bet you can guess what part of the country is on the list of places with an increase of 50 or more percent. Yup, the state of Washington.
The upper Midwest, the gulf coast, the northeast, too — this isn’t just about more precipitation but also how it falls — in deluges, in torrents. Why? In part, a large part, because warmer air holds more moisture. It’s as simple as that.
In addition, with warming, less of it will fall as snow and more as rain. That is bad news for areas that depend on the winter snow melt for water. It is also bad news for our soils, because more rain, and more rain falling in torrents, means more erosion.
It is one of the reasons why Lake Superior is receding — warmer water means more evaporation; warmer winters mean less snow pack for the spring melt.
Here’s another scary quote from the 2nd NYT article:
If you warm the air, the air can hold more moisture. And the amount it increases is not linear; it goes up exponentially.
That was David Easterling of the National Climatic Data Center. I always hate that part of the science, that the impacts of warming increase exponentially, which means things could get a lot worse very quickly.
The report cited in the article was done by Environment America. You can find it here.
Now I don’t want to go all negative with this, with what looks like progress (I mean, it is progress politically), but the energy bill working its way through Congress, while heralded as real progress, may be less than it seems. According to this analysis in the Times, despite increasing fuel mileage for all vehicles to an average 35 mpg by 2020, carbon dioxide emissions will increase because we will more than make up for it with the expected increase in the number of vehicles on the road and the miles traveled.
See, what we really need is to get less addicted to our cars and to mobility in general. But who wants that?
Well, the people of Kiribati for one.
Here in southeastern Wisconsin, folks just can’t get their minds around proposals for light rail to connect suburbs and cities from Milwaukee west to Madison and south to Chicago. This is nuts, but my people are largely nuts. They just want more roads, more lanes, more powerful cars, more suburban homes with cathedral ceilings — and lower taxes!
My people are nuts. People like this live in a fantasy world.
They are also selfish.
They are also killing the nation of Kiribati.
Sorry for the strong language. It’s how I feel today having gone through the day’s news.
Keep praying for those folks in Bali — that they can overcome the selfishness and denial of my people, that they can be stronger than those forces of individualism, our peculiar US American mental disease.
I posted again today because I won’t be able to for a couple of days. Will be back with you on the weekend. Thanks for visiting and for caring.
Technorati Tags: Kiribati, Anote Tong, industrialized nations responsible for carbon emissions, car mileage standards, car addiction, Bali climate conference, American individualism
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4 Responses to “Bali conference: moral responsibility - a challenge from the islands”
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If we keep overpopulating Earth; if we keep conspicuously overconsuming limited resources; and if we keep endlessly expanding big-business activities and polluting our relatively small, evidently finite, noticeably frangible planet as we keep doing now, then a good enough future for our children cannot be assured, can it?
Dear Mr Steven Earl Salmony,
No it can not. We have to take drastic and effective measures to reduce the pollution of the environment. Can everybody follow this. I do not think so, people have become more and more comfortable with their materialistic aspects. In this chase of unethical immoral atmosphere I do not think so the reduction in pollution can be so reduced to bare minimum. Let us hope thst the so called world leaders get this environ-mental problems into their minds.
don’t forget the ‘c’ word…capitalism a petrol addicted form of economic management that works only if we consumer more and more at ever increasing rates
also have a look at the dangers of biofuel cutting through the forests, killing the orang utans to keep the SUVs in juice
http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2007/12/its-about-enclosure-its-about-world.html
Global capitalism requires ever expanding markets and ever increasing consumption and in a world with finite resources it must eventually implode. The current state of climate change has been reached with around 1000 million consumers in the developed countries in Europe, North America, Australasia, soem parts of the middle east, etc. These are the current high per capita grenhouse gas emmitters. Increasing consumption is now spreading across India and China as these countries develop. I fear that when the 2400 million people of China and India raise their consumption and start buy more air conditioning units, cars fridge freezers, etc. we will never be able to halt climate change. We first need to address the problem of capitalism’s need for continual growth.