This guest post comes from the thoughtful, passionate, and eloquent Sara Robinson, who blogs at Campaign for America’s Future. Sara lays out passionately and strongly why we must seize the moment to tackle our carbon addiction.
George W. Bush — who knew a thing or two about addiction — was right about one thing: America is addicted to fossil fuels.
And that addiction is coming to a swift end, one way or another. Gaia, and our neighbors have all had enough. Look at the headlines. Look at their faces. They mean it: they’re staging an intervention.
The line of truth that runs through all these recent disasters is thin, bright, and uncompromising. Our insane addiction to carbon-based fuels is literally killing America. It’s not abstract. It’s not some fate that awaits us in the future if we don’t mend our ways. The devastation is happening here and now, shouting at us from every new headline in the papers, forcing us to take serious stock of what our addiction has cost us already, and will continue to cost us every day we don’t reckon with it.
Some of our best people — strong and competent soldiers and workers — are dying, every day, to feed our addiction to coal and oil.
Vast areas of our land and water are being destroyed, every day, to feed our addiction to coal and oil.
An enormous cartel of carbon-based industries has taken over our government, corrupting our democratic processes and raising an army of would-be brownshirts, to feed our addiction to coal and oil.
We have indebted ourselves to the world’s worst tyrants and empowered our biggest economic competitors to feed our addiction to coal and oil.
We have put ourselves at the mercy of terrorists to feed our addiction to coal and oil.
We have sold off the greatest democracy in modern times, forfeited our most noble principles, and shredded the most astonishing political document in history to feed our addiction to coal and oil.
We are willfully mutilating the breathtaking beauty of this continent to feed our addiction to coal and oil.
Look, people: we are doing precisely what addicts do. They wantonly, thoughtlessly annihilate their marriages, their children, their finances, their careers, and their communities — in fact, pretty much everything they touch — out of their single-minded focus on feeding their addictions. As a nation, we are behaving exactly the same way — not caring who we hurt or what we destroy, as long as we get to mindlessly suck down our next barrel or carload of the black stuff. In the end, like all addicts, we will also destroy ourselves.
This run of recent news is a massive intervention — history’s way of sitting us down and letting us know, beyond doubt, that the bottom is now coming up fast and hard upon us; and we’d better fracking pay attention, because the party is over. The price of our irresponsibility is suddenly going way, way up — and that rise is just getting started. Because, increasingly, our enablers are refusing outright to enable, excuse, or support our self-destructive behavior any more.
The only solution left, if we’re ready to get real about this, is to take that first, hardest step: admit that we’re addicted, and confess that the way we’ve been is no longer acceptable to us. And we need to do it right now, right here, not next year or in 2020 or when the last fish dies or the last beach is gone. We’re the last ones in the world to see what everybody around us already knows, which is that our addiction is out of control. From here, there’s only one way this goes — unless we commit ourselves, right now, to restoring true sanity and balance to our national relationship to energy.
Recovery means we’re going to be struggling with the decades of cumulative consequences of our addiction moment by moment, day by day, for a long while. It also means that we’re going to have to take our eyes off the barrel, and keep them fixed firmly on the better carbon-free future ahead. [Read more →]
Our combined energy and climate challenges and opportunities are incredibly complex and interrelated issues. Throw in other resource challenges, economic challenges, and a myriad of other factors and, well, the complexity can overwhelm any and all.
Clarity of targets matter. Ever more experts are endorsing the call to create a path to return the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to 350 parts per million or less.
Three numbers to encapsulate so many things about the need to reduce emissions, determine paths to (naturally) sequester carbon, …
One of the problems of the Waxman-Markey ACES and other climate bills, the incredibly complexity of their structures and uncertain relationships between the bill’s “targets” and scientific understanding of our problems.
In the face of Deepwater Horizon, the political obstacles to climate legislation, etc …, perhaps it is time to look for a straightforward statement as to how we should move forward to address our energy and climate challenges while improving our economic and security systems … Perhaps it is time to turn to
The Five Percent Solution
… a path toward energy security, economic prosperity, and climate change mitigation.
Very simply, The Five Percent Solution calls on the United States to embrace quite achievable and straightforward objectives for each and every year …:
Cut oil use five percent.
Cut coal-fired electricity by five percent of 2010 levels.
There are many additional “five percents” potentially worth including to add to or enable achieving these targets. Increasing America’s urban farms by 5% per year (Victory Gardens in the fight to triumph over Peak Oil and ‘defeat’ Climate Change?). Energy Audits and efficiency retrofits for at least five percent of America’s homes and buildings. Increase CAFE standards five percent per year. Etc …
Targets with meaning are achievable …
To the extent that Congress is discussing (battling) over carbon emissions reductions, the numbers being discussed are in the range of 15-20% reductions … from 2005 levels. These sound so significant … even as they fall far short of the (outdated and likely not strong enough) scientifically-based target of 25-40% below 1990 levels.
When looking to the commonly discussed use of 2005 as the target year, 2009 is already over 10 percent below 2005 levels (down to 5405 million metric tons carbon dioxide from 5973 mmt.) and more than half-the-way to below 1990 levels (5020 million metric tons).
Shaving five percent per year from Co2 emissions levels, assuming that 2010 matches 2009, would drive emissions from 5405 mmt in 2010 to under 3100 mmt (or nearly 40% below 1990 levels of 5020 mmt) by 2020 and to just over 1800 mmt in 2030 …
Very simply
Via the 5% solution, by 2030 the United States will:
End, 100%, oil imports.
End, 100%, the burning of coal for electricity
Reduce climate emissions by 60+ percent from 1990 levels
Improve the US trade balance by five percent of gross domestic product (due to eliminating oil imports)
Cut health care impacts from fossil fuel use by 50%
Improve productivity, per decade, by at least 5% above ‘business as usual’
Cut employment below 5% by 2015 and maintain unemployment levels below 5% through 2030.
And … well … additional benefits.
Five Percent Per Year … achievable, beneficial, necessary … let’s get to it …
Update: for an excellent, parrallel, overlapping discussion, see Sara Robinson’s typically brilliant and passionate America’s Carbon Addiction: this is an Intervention. Sara derives much from the Apollo experience and concludes her post as follows:
Stepping up to that the five percent solution in a positive and inspiring way will have some immediate practical and political benefits, too. For one thing, it will put a fast end to the pseudo-populist whining from the right, embarrass resistant corporatists into getting on board, and rally the country around a truly positive and inclusive vision of its own future. For another, it would put progressives, once and for all, on the moral offensive as the guardians of the true American vision.
What — are you against American greatness? Are you not willing to sacrifice for a stronger, more secure, more independent, more resilient nation? Are you one of those small-minded, stingy whiners who don’t believe in your country, and aren’t willing to invest in great things?
If so: shame on you. Also: please shut up.
This kind of turnaround is well within the reach of any truly visionary leader. President Obama could do it tomorrow — and would, if he was willing to live up to even half his promise. It would, absolutely, be his defining JFK moment — the moment that we foreswore our addictions, reclaimed our national soul, seized this day and our entire future, and put ourselves back on the path to greatness.
We should want the second line in those 3010 history books to read: “Forty years later, the Americans were the foresighted visionaries who led the world off carbon-based fuels and put a stop to global warming, thus saving civilization.” Today could easily be the first day of the rest of that marvelous history. But that will only happen if get our heads out of the barrel, reclaim our greatness, and become the country we once were — and still have it within us to be again.
No matter the word put against it, humanity is driving change in climate and other aspects of our living space. For decades, scientists, scholars, and public opinion pollsters have sought to place a name against the phenomena.
Paul Krugman’s Drilling, Disaster, Denial is both a great OPED piece to see in the traditional media and, well, a troubling read. Great because of its focus on how one of environmentalism greatest problems might, in fact, have been its successes which could have helped lead to complacency in the public, undermining efforts to build public momentum for action on climate change (among other issues). In this vein, he points to polling showing a lowering public understanding of the urgency and severity of the climate crisis.
On the other hand, this is a troubling read due to Krugman’s:
AENN’s correspondent Rei reports from AE New Orleans about a disastrous event in the AE Gulf of Mexico.
AE Lousiana residents are bracing today for the arrival of an electricity slick spreading across the Alternate Gulf of Mexico after efforts to hold it at bay proved largely unsuccessful.
We have to wonder what it might take to get American society to recognize how damaging our addiction to oil is at some fundamental level.
Our addiction weakens us financially, puts our economy’s health at the whim of foreign actors, helps fund those threatening us, shortens our lives due to health impacts, threatens our future security due to the risks of catastrophic climate change, and leaves us vulnerable to significant disruption due to any single point failure like that we’re seeing in the Gulf of Mexico with the Deepwater Horizon’s explosion and resulting massive amount of oil flooding into the sea.
We have to wonder whether the painful reality of lost fisheries and unemployed (for generations) fishermen, massive bird and wildlife kills, destruction of tourism on the Gulf, and other heart breaking damage to come will be enough to get through our collective psyche.
One idea that came across the electrons: set a goal of cutting oil and coal use 2 percent per year, indefinitely, which would leave us at about a 50% reduction in both by 2047.
My reaction: 2% forever might sound’ great but falls incredibly short of what is required and very far short of what is possible without revolutionary stretch goals. [Read more →]
a path toward energy security, economic prosperity, and climate change mitigation.
humanity is driving change in climate and other aspects of our living space. For decades, scientists, scholars, and public opinion pollsters have sought to place a name against the phenomena.
get American society to recognize how damaging our addiction to oil is at some fundamental level.