Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Growing demand for energy in fast-growth economies is adding significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, the leading factor dooming our world to unprecedented and destructive human-caused global warming.

Buried in the world news summaries in the New York Times today is this little tidbit:  according to the World Bank, India’s greenhouse gas emissions “grew by 57 percent over the past decade, while China’s increased by a third,” contributing exponentially to the major driver behind global warming.  Not to fear: the US is still the world’s superpower when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, contributing nearly 25 percent of the total.

Curious about this tantalizing bit of info buried in a one-paragraph story, all the space the Times had available, apparently, to mark the release of this important report, I went to visit the source, the World Bank’s Little Green Data Book 2006, launched just yesterday, May 9, in conjunction with the 14th session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. 

A brief excerpt from the WB report cited in the Times:  “CO2 emissions worldwide have now topped 24 billion metric tons (the most recent comprehensive data are for 2002), an increase of 15 percent compared to the 1992 levels… The rapidly expanding economies of China and India are showing a swift increase in CO2 emissions.  China, which is already the second largest polluter, has increased its emissions by 33 percent between 1992 and 2002, while India’s emissions have grown 57 percent in the same period.  This trend will likely continue as economic activity grows…”

The report reminds us that 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are the result of combustion of fossil fuels – oil, natural gas, and coal – while the remainder stems from agriculture, or, more correctly, the way in which agriculture is done.  It reminds us once again that all of us will suffer from the resulting climate change, but the poorest countries will suffer most of all. “Energy use per capita is highest in rich countries, which consume on average 11 times more energy per person than low income countries. High income countries in total use 51 percent of the world’s energy production…”While oil is the largest energy factor in our economy, in lower income countries it is notoriously dirty coal.  Seventy-nine percent of China’s electricity was generated by coal in 2003, 68 percent in India.  For 2 billion people in the poorest countries, wood fuels are the main energy source, which has negative implications in terms of human illness and environmental degradation.It would be wrong, even morally repugnant, for those of us in rich countries to respond to this dilemma by telling the less-rich and the poor that they must limit development for environmental reasons, or not raise living standards, so that we can continue to enjoy economic growth with all its benefits for the wealthy, pyrrhic benefits as we move towards catastrophe for all of us.  If we do not show willingness to sharply curtail our use of fossil fuels, we cannot expect poorer countries to cooperate in the important effort to respond globally to the threat of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.We must start imagining a different way out of this, one that liberates us from the myopia of our western capitalist individualist way of life and begins to see this struggle ahead as a bond among human beings — the struggle to create a wholly different way of life on this planet that is sustainable, one that promises a future, altered though the earth may be, for our children and our children's children.