Part 5 (2/2)

PART THREE.

The Climate.

Emergency.

'The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.'

Winston Churchill, November 1936.

CHAPTER 15.

This Is An Emergency.

On 13 April 1970, some 321,000 kilometres from Earth, the Apollo 13 s.p.a.cecraft was. .h.i.t by an explosion that resulted in a loss of oxygen, potable water, and most electrical power. The access panel covering the oxygen tanks and fuel cells, which extended the entire length of the main craft's body, had been blown off. Apollo commander Jim Lovell's laconic message, 'Houston, we have a problem,' signalled a technological failure so great that mission objectives were abandoned. The moon landing was aborted.

The priority of the astronauts...o...b..ard the craft was survival at any cost. Life-support systems were at risk, and energy use had to be cut to a minimum, since little power was available. The crew s.h.i.+fted to their tiny lunar module - an emergency procedure than had been simulated during training - and abandoned the main craft, to which the module remained attached. But the lunar module was equipped only to sustain two people for two days; now, with insufficient capacity to keep the air clean or to heat the module to a habitable temperature, it needed to sustain three people for four days. There was no precedent, no manual, and no set of pre-tested solutions; but there was a driving imperative that was reinforced by mission control in Houston: 'Failure is not an option!'

A sequestration filter was invented on the run while carbon dioxide rose to dangerous levels. With inadequate mechanical control, the astronauts had to negotiate course alterations while engineers on the ground calculated the best way to use auxiliary motors to position the craft for the return journey.

Under this level of pressure, the on-the-run problem-solving required ingenuity and intense teamwork. The outcome was in doubt up to the last moment, but the crew made it and survived. The mission was deemed 'a successful failure'. Careful planning and training (including allowing for the possibility of having to jettison the main craft), strong cooperation between all involved, creative off-the-wall solutions, and a great measure of good fortune had combined to save the day.

Today, Earth faces a similar degree of peril, and its message can only be: 'People of the world, we have a problem.' Our planet's health and its capacity to function for the journey through time are now deeply imperilled. We stand on the brink of climate catastrophe.

Like Apollo 13, we have only one option: to abandon our life-as-normal project, hit the emergency b.u.t.ton, and plan with all our ingenuity how to survive and build a path for a return to a safe-climate Earth. We have to act with great speed, determination, and ingenuity. Our life-support systems - food, water, and stable temperatures - are at risk, and our consumption of fossil fuels is unsustainable. Energy use must be cut. The voyage will be perilous, and will require intense and innovative teamwork to find and mobilise technological and social answers to as-yet-unidentified problems. Putting aside mantras about high costs, our collective actions need to be driven, instead, by the imperative: 'Failure is not an option!' If we do not succeed, we will lose most of the life on this planet.

Lacking its main motors and with uncertain technological control functions, Apollo 13 had only one chance to position itself in exactly the right trajectory so that the moon's gravitational force would pull it back to Earth safely. We, too, have only one chance to get global warming under control and to guide the planet back to the safe-climate zone. If we do the wrong things, or we set our approach incorrectly and don't do enough, there will be no time for a second chance.

We have already entered an era of dangerous climate change. If left unchecked, the dynamics and inertia of our social and economic systems will sweep us on to ever more dangerous change and then, most likely within a decade, to an era of catastrophic climate change.

If the response to global warming continues to be contained within the current all-too-narrow parameters, it will guarantee disaster. Given the lessons from the Arctic summer of 2007 - let alone all the other early-earning signs that climate scientists are noting increasingly- allowing warming to reach even 2 degrees, let alone the increasingly advocated 3 degrees, is reckless.

This is our emergency.

CHAPTER 16.

A Systemic Breakdown.

The Apollo 13 emergency put just three lives at risk. Large emergencies triggered by flood, fire, famine, earthquake, or disease may affect millions. Across such diverse circ.u.mstances, the usual approach is to direct all available resources towards resolving the immediate crisis and to relegate non-essential concerns to the back burner.

Today, there is a practical argument that we should focus all our attention exclusively on the climate crisis, because it will take a huge effort to solve; but we need to ask whether there are other issues that will be seen, in retrospect, to have caused major problems if they were to be ignored, either because they are of great moral significance or because they seem more compelling in the short term.

The unambiguous answer is that there are several key concerns that must be resolved together with the climate crisis. There are those - such as peak oil, severe economic downturn, warfare, and pandemics - that cannot be ignored because their impacts on all people are so great. There are also ethical problems we should not ignore, such as poverty (including the adequacy of food supply at an affordable price) and the need for biodiversity protection.

The intertwined problem of climate and dwindling oil reserves is a good example. The continuing discovery of geological reserves of cheap conventional oil cannot keep pace with growing world demand, and the crisis point for oil production and consumption, commonly referred to as 'peak oil', is a reality. Its emergence is reflected, in part, in rising oil prices and in the expectation that they will continue to increase as the gap between supply and demand increases in coming years. In Australia, the 2007 Queensland state government's task-force report Queensland's Vulnerability to Rising Oil Prices found 'overwhelming evidence' that world oil production would reach an absolute peak in the next ten years; at the same time, the US Department of Energy predicts that demand for this declining resource will have increased by 24 per cent by 2020.

Clearly, we cannot resolve the global-warming threat before peak oil demands our attention in a very practical way. Nor can we delay resolving the climate issue: the restructuring needed to solve the peak-oil problem will take at least ten to 20 years, yet the climate solution demands major economic changes in the same time-period. The two problems must be considered together with integrated solutions.

At the same time, we must find appropriate solutions that also address other challenges. To achieve a safe climate and eliminate human greenhouse-gas emissions, we need to apply many resources simultaneously; we need to take large amounts of excess carbon dioxide out of the air, and we need to actively cool the Earth; at the same time, we need to maintain adequate supplies of affordable food, and secure survival of the world's biodiversity.

The production of fuel subst.i.tutes as a solution to peak oil is an example of the sort of challenge we are encountering in trying to achieve integrated solutions. Faced with increasing dependence on imported oil (which is continually rising in price), the US government, among others, is actively encouraging the diversion of food crops to the production of ethanol, a petrol subst.i.tute. Together with climate-related food-production problems, the ethanol 'solution' has contributed to global food shortages and sharply rising prices, and has particularly affected the poor and malnourished.

For transport, the alternative to focusing on the replacement of one organic fuel source (petrol) with another (ethanol) is to actively reduce the demand for energy - for example, by replacing current cars with vehicles designed for ultra-efficiency (such as electric vehicles charged from renewable sources), or by creating infrastructure that enables people to switch from car travel to public transport, walking, or cycling. The need for mobility could also be reduced by improving urban planning, or by making use of electronic 'virtual travel' such as video-conferencing. So far, these demand-reduction strategies have not been given political prominence.

The connection between climate, rising oil and food prices, the financial crisis, and economic recession is another example of the interplay between critical issues. Since the 1987 Wall Street crash, monetary authorities have used credit expansion - and condoned the development of a whole new range of dubious financial services and practices - as a tool to promote consumption and to stop the economy spiralling into recession. But now strong inflationary pressures are being driven by rising oil and food prices, and by expansionary war expenditure for Iraq and Afghanistan - itself motivated in part by oil - and these are being financed by large deficits. The consequence has been financial crisis, but monetary authorities are now not as free to use credit expansion to increase demand, and this slowdown may have its own negative impacts on climate: if a recession is allowed to run its course, there could be less money available to invest in responses to the climate and peak-oil crises. On the other hand, if governments invest in traditional public infrastructure areas in order to 'prime the economic pump', the result may be more roads and freeways, which will exacerbate climate and peak-oil problems. Only if pump-priming investment is framed with the climate and peak-oil problems in mind will the response to recession produce a beneficial cycle of change.

A systemic crisis often arises when many problems come to bear on one key issue. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was concern about the likelihood of future large-scale food shortages, because population was growing rapidly and there was a fear that food production would fail to keep pace. Overall, populations did not continue to grow as fast as expected, and food supply expanded more rapidly - a result of the 'green revolution', which utilised new strains of higher-yield crops and increased inputs of water and fertiliser. This worked in the short term, but required more water per unit of agricultural output, and increased the use of nitrogen-based fertilisers, which release global-warming nitrogen oxides.

Now, a whole series of problems are driving a wedge between potential demand and actual supply for water. In many areas, and especially in the heavily populated developing countries of Asia, extra water was made available through tube wells, or bores. This worked for decades, but groundwater stocks are now running out, and in some places the water is naturally contaminated with a.r.s.enic, causing serious health problems. Global warming has also affected rainfall, so that there is less usable water available at the same time as urban demand for water is increasing.

An increase in unpredictable weather events and changing climates - for example, unusual monsoon patterns - are making it harder to maintain food supplies. Most available high-value land with agricultural potential has been utilised, so there is, increasingly, less opportunity to expand agricultural areas and to replace land that has been damaged by erosion and salinity. The UN's 2007 report Global Environment Outlook: environment for development found that total arable land has reached a plateau at 14 million square kilometres, while the area under cereal crops dropped from 7.2 to 6.6 million square kilometres between 1982 and 2002.

The continuing growth of the global population - and of incomes for many people in industrialising countries - is increasing demand for food, just as food crops are being diverted to biofuel production. As a result, the prices of many food staples have been rising sharply. Between 1974 and 2005, world food prices fell by three-quarters, in real terms. Since then, that trend has reversed, with the price of wheat almost doubling in 2007, and the prices of maize, milk, and oilseeds reaching near-record highs. In 2007, the food-price index, published by The Economist, increased by 75 per cent.

It seems that the price of food - or the supply of affordable food - is becoming a key indicator of a new phenomenon: a multi-issue crisis of sustainability that incorporates food, water, peak oil, and global warming.

At the same time, the natural physical infrastructure on which all living things depend is being put under more and more stress. Marine ecosystems are increasingly breaking down due to over-fis.h.i.+ng, while forests in many parts of the world are being cleared on a vast scale. Where they're not fully cleared, forests often are being broken up into isolated islands that have a greater chance of being invaded by pest species and less capacity for native species to move between areas in response to fire and drought.

An overwhelming case has been put forward which says that we should not focus on climate change exclusively. If we ignore the many issues that could undermine life and wellbeing, we may, if we are lucky, solve the climate crisis only to find we have crashed the planet's life-support systems in some other way.

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we have failed to build and maintain a system that has enabled modern society to ensure its own sustainability and that of other living species. Now, we have a sustainability crisis with a mult.i.tude of serious symptoms. An effective governance system would antic.i.p.ate and prevent threats to sustainability, and would also have the capacity to restore the Earth and society to its safe zone as soon as possible.

CHAPTER 17.

When 'Reasonable' Is Not Enough.

In November 2007, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon told the world that global warming is an emergency, and 'for emergency situations we need emergency action'. Why, then, has climate politics moved in such a painfully slow manner? How can the impa.s.se be resolved between urgent action, based on the science, and action that seems 'reasonable' in the current political environment?

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