ATHENS — You would think that the news of May 9 that, for the first time in human history, climate warming greenhouse gas had reached 400 parts per million (ppm), would command much greater attention than being relegated to the Environment section of The New York Times, and the back page of the weekend edition of the Brattleboro Reformer.
While admittedly symbolic, and only minutely worse than we were at 399 ppm the day before, it's nevertheless a number that should give us pause.
As The Guardian pointed out, “The last time so much greenhouse gas was in the air was several million years ago, when the Arctic was ice-free, savannah spread across the Sahara desert and sea level was up to 40 meters higher than today.”
During the 8,000 years of human civilization, carbon dioxide levels were generally stable at 280 ppm. But with the Industrial Revolution and the burning of fossil fuels, there has been a 42-percent increase.
As a consequence, scientists fear that our species might be precipitating a return to “a prehistoric climate in which human societies will face huge and potentially catastrophic risks,” as Bob Ward, director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, put it.
What makes this news especially unsettling is that it underscores that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising faster than in the past.
When measurements of carbon dioxide first began in 1958, it was gauged at 315 ppm. The average amount is growing about 2 ppm per year, which is 100 times faster than at the end of the last Ice Age.
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Obviously, despite the nearly unanimous scientific evidence about climate change, human causality, and the potential disaster this threshold represents for the world, we've yet to seriously commit to the substantial reduction of carbon emissions that is required.
Professor Bob Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UK government's chief scientific adviser, commented, “Passing 400 ppm is indeed a landmark, and the rate of increase shows no sign of abating due to a lack of political commitment.”
The world's governments have agreed to keep the rise in global temperature (which has already risen by over 1 degree Centigrade), to 2 degrees, the level beyond which catastrophic warming is thought to become unstoppable.
But despite that agreement, Watson noted that “the world is now most likely committed to an increase in surface temperature of 3C-5C compared to pre-industrial times.”
As Ralph Keeling, who runs the monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, summed up, “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds.”
Are we beginning to feel our shoulder blades pressing up against the wall?
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More to the point, will this grim milestone of 400 ppm serve as a wake-up call to focus us, not only on how we're going to adapt to the world we've created and no longer have a choice about living in, but also on how we can rapidly curtail the further burning of coal, gas, and oil so that there's still a world within which to live?
For this is the effort we need to commit ourselves to so we can build sustainable, resilient, livable communities for ourselves.
A successful transition to our new world will require both adaptation and resistance.
We have no choice but to adapt to a world that is already here, and becoming more so. But we can choose when we will act to seriously pursue this task.
Do we make a commitment now, in the early stages, when we're really not yet hurting that badly? Or later, when we're overwhelmed by our circumstances and no longer have any choice?
Typically, we as a species don't respond with foresight or alacrity to situations involving change until we have no choice but to do so.
It's true, at times, that we have demonstrated our potential for coming together to work through crises selflessly and courageously. We'll need to draw upon this capacity in the years ahead if we are to survive.
But unfortunately, doing so will not be enough. As we've seen already, the world of climate change is unpredictable, exponential, chaotic, and very destructive. The period of long emergencies we might face will require a level of social welfare that is beyond the stamina of one individual's spontaneity or an institutional good will to provide.
We need to be coming together now, as families, neighborhoods, communities, towns, and regions, to make adaptation to a climate changing world both a priority and regular habit of our personal and public lives.
We need to learn to make the business of taking care of ourselves and one another a part of our daily routine, especially in those ways that we now depend upon the corporation or government to do for us.
For a post-oil age, sustainable and resilient communities are also intentional communities. They are consciously created with the understanding that while we're entering uncharted waters, we can nevertheless do things now on the basis of what we do know.
However tentative, imperfect, and always-subject-to-change such a process is, intentional efforts are the best way to respond, because we're actively involved with our lives in the real world.
By being collaborative with one another now, we build the community infrastructure - the social glue - that will allow us to meet the basic needs of ourselves and each other in a post-petroleum world.
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But we must do more. We must adapt, for sure, and we must become increasingly self- and community-sufficient. We must also resist the burning of fossil fuels at the same time.
It has become increasingly clear that it is not enough to build resilient, collaborative, socially just communities if, at the same time, we're not also addressing Big Oil, the corporate state, and the energy policy these two entities pursue - policy that threatens to drive humanity over the climate cliff.
On the same day that scientists were announcing that the Earth was now warming 50 times faster than it ever had, and that carbon dioxide levels had set a new record, Exxon's $100,000-a-day CEO, Rex Tillerson, was bragging that he expected renewables would account for just 1 percent of our energy in 2040, and that “My philosophy is to make money.”
To have any reasonable chance of living in sustainable communities, we need to resist this insanity.
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Likewise, we have to resist the politics of fossil fuel that serves as the basis of President Obama's “all of the above” energy policy, where oil and gas are as welcome as solar and wind.
To have any future worth living for our children and grandchildren, we need to resist the unwillingness of Big Oil to walk away from trillions of dollars of profits in Alberta's tar sands, North Dakota's shale, and the Arctic's waters.
We must accept the fact that what is needed is the “massive intervention” that Bill McKibben calls for in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, one that he describes as already developing.
From blocking the Keystone XL pipeline and fracking wells around the country, and closing dozens of new coal plants, to fighting for fossil-fuel divestment on some 323 campuses (as well as in several city governments and religious denominations-even the Vermont legislature has been considering such a measure!), there's a growing movement of citizens who are saying, “No, we can't afford to burn the stuff.”
That is the only way. Just as we all need to be part of the effort to create resilient communities, so, too, do we need to be active in this grassroots resistance to Big Oil and its threat to our existence and stop the madness that dominates our body politic.