Obama Leadership On Climate Health
By Bill Henderson
14 July, 2009
Countercurrents.org
Your doctor tells you that you have a serious medical problem, a serious heart condition. He advises a radical change of lifestyle or else there will be building health problems over time along with (he estimates) a twenty-five percent or so chance of a life threatening heart attack or stroke, with that probability increasing if you don't change your ways.
Now if you respond that you will cut back on your smoking or cut out desserts on weekdays and not party hearty with the boys quite so hard every weekend, the Doc is going to cast you a wan, sorry, knowing look. You're still in denial and not really serious. You haven't grasped just how serious this health problem is.
If you did actually understand the life and death necessity of making major systemic lifestyle change you wouldn't be lying to yourself trying to shoehorn the risk of becoming an invalid or dying of a jammer into continuing BAU.
Change or get worse or even die suddenly. And you're not considering your wife and kids and their future. If you grasped the seriousness of your condition and your obligations you would be considering doing a Betty Ford or a sabbatical from work to get your health back or, like St. Paul on the way to Damascus, a completely new life to live.
Good metaphor for our climate change plight?
Burning fossil fuels has raised the amount of gases that provide a greenhouse effect in the atmosphere (and the level of carbon generally in the Earth's carbon cycle system) so that climate change is now a serious risk to the global civilization we are a part of and to some increasing degree of probability, a serious threat to humanity's very existence and to a large percentage of the species with which we now share creation too.
Climate change is happening. It is caused by putting carbon stored underground for hundreds of millions of years up into the atmosphere. The cumulative increase of these greenhouse gases will effect global climate for centuries, maybe longer. There are local effects right now and long term effects for our grandkids at the end of the century.
And increasingly the science studying the past in ice cores or modeling the future in elaborate scientific computer programming warns of feedback loops and abrupt switches from one climate regime to another. There is an increasing possibility of runaway, uncontrollable climate change or of an abrupt shifting of large scale weather patterns which has happened before but would be unprecedented in the eight thousand years of human civilization and profoundly humanity threatening.
Climate change is analogous to a heart disease problem where if we don't make systemic changes in our lifestyles our planetary health will continue to worsen with building practical problems over time and where the probability of sudden death through latent carbon bombs or other critical climate forcing significantly increases. If we continue to do nothing.
But isn't it apparent to anyone aware of the climate change science and the clear diagnosis of danger to our health that the actions of our leaders and our government's are woefully inadequate and, in fact, criminally in denial at this late date, in what is now an emergency situation, precisely because they will not contemplate any course but strict continuing political and economic BAU?
A weak and leaky cap and trade or puny carbon tax is just like lying to yourself about cutting back on smokes as effective lifestyle change. We are going to lie to ourselves that we're going to put a price on carbon and do hundreds of reps as we watch the baseball game and that we're going to beat this thing Doc, I've still got my fitness machine out in my garage.
Can you cure an obese carbon footprint by continuing to live the same lifestyle? ( Rich people in the developed countries burn many times the amount of carbon as the other six billion people who individually contribute very little of the cholesterol closing our arteries to extend the metaphor.) Won't you still be obese if you're doing the same job, travel, eating, recreating, etc. but only maybe shopping different for 'green' products, changing light bulbs and recycling? Isn't this just denial?
You'd think a guy would learn from two decades of denial, procrastinating and outright doing nothing but telling tall tales about how he was going to get serious about climate change, and then you realize that Copenhagen is already a failure because President Obama is leading yes, but only in trying to get a treaty at Copenhagen that he can get ratified by Congress. Denial - not nearly good enough. The Obama Admin remains far more focused upon the economy and even domestic healthcare reform and that all important second term then on real climate change leadership.
Like steering Waxman-Markey through Congress, it's not about what the Doc tells you is necessary but what's practical within continuing BAU. Not the exercise and weight loss necessary, but a fudge so that you can keep on living the bad life but pretend that someday in the distant future you're gonna be fit and healthy.
And so instead of focusing the world's attention on the imperative of getting back under 350 fast before the Arctic ice cap melts irrevocably, the US position is that climate change is real; we have to prevent a 2 degree rise in temperature by 2050 and we need a BAU deal at Copenhagen.
Is Obama drawing attention to Lord Stern's gamechanger or new Princeton technology for getting an agreement at Copenhagen between the developed world which caused the humanity threatening problem and those developing nations that are becoming the major emitters for the future? Is he leading in actually confronting our climate emergency with an equitable and practically effective emission reduction mitigation strategy when he's still talking 2 degrees and 2050 and the need for China to cut their emissions?
Is Obama proposing legislation to schedule as quick a cessation of the production and use of coal in America as is possible without anyone freezing to death as an example of developed world commitment to necessary emission reduction? I mean, given the diagnosis, shouldn't you just give up smoking and drinking cold turkey because they really aren't that important when everything else is considered.
Is Obama initiating strict carbon rationing that could do something effective to actually reduce emissions (and maybe catalyze a lifestyle change that would leave many Americans feeling better and happier then they have in years)? Is he using his presidency to wake up Americans to their denial, to the life and death scientific diagnosis, and the imperative of deep emission cuts NOW, at least a 30-40% reduction by 2020, emission reduction that must require serious lifestyle change and massive systemic change in America first and then globally?
Without US leadership in recognizing the gravity of the situation and leadership in formulating an effective global deal for major systemic change - so that emission reduction of a scale needed becomes possible - our failing health and the risk of sudden death will only get worse.
Bill (at) pacificfringe.net
