This is Zero Hour: Why We Need to Move Beyond Our “Carbon Footprint” to Collective Action
On March 15, I’ll be joining the Greta Thunberg inspired, student-led #FridaysForFuture. This Global Climate Strike will be “skipping school but… not failing school. Adults are both skipping the planet and failing their future and ours.” These students may help us save ourselves and our planet’s future, as we are in an unfolding global threat: climate change, or more accurately, a climate catastrophe.
Scientists have detailed the required levels of action, and the requirement of immediacy. Business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions are forecast to be truly globally catastrophic: the melting of frozen regions causing a positive feedback loop of exposing darker land and ocean that absorbs more heat; ocean acidification occurring in a rate unseen in 252 million years — when this last occurred 96% of marine life went extinct; further massive habitat loss both in marine and land ecosystems; sea-level rise to where over 20 million Americans live, and, globally, where 470 to 760 million people live.
Credit: © irabel8 | Shutterstock.com
Not only is it an unfolding environmental catastrophe, climate change will case property loss in the U.S. alone at the scale of $1 trillion dollars due to sea level rise. Unchecked climate change also has implications to U.S. national security since climate change stresses increase the likelihood of international or civil conflict, state failure, mass migration and instability in regions of strategic interest, as recently reported by U.S. military leaders. Over 15,000 scientists have signed a warning to humanity about climate change and habitat loss. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists places climate change at just below nuclear war as a global existential threat.
We truly are out of time. Action on averting these threats must be taken immediately, since emissions continue going up and our greenhouse gas budget to stay under warming goals is quickly being consumed. Given this threat to our planet, action on climate cannot be further delayed.
In a course I teach on energy and the environment at the University of California, Irvine, I walk my students through a calculation that shows that individual action is commendable, but not nearly sufficient for averting climate change: Let us suppose that you are personally so horrified of the threats posed by climate change that you give up a 15 mpg SUV that you drive to work 2,000 miles each month. Instead, you bike to work instead, for a full year. (This eliminates about 16 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.) You are so excited about this that you start a campaign via your social networks and social media that gets 1,000 friends to do the same thing. This eliminates 16,000 tons of CO2. Unfortunately, the scales are brutal: That year of extraordinary “carbon footprint reduction” effort by 1,001 people offsets only 14 seconds of global carbon emissions.
Clearly, national to global policy change is the only way to achieve the significant reduction of carbon emission to avert the threats our planet faces. There is precedent, which started right in my hometown of Irvine: averting the global ozone-hole threat with the international Montreal Protocols via the elimination of CFC production and use.
The kids are right! “And what is the point of learning facts when the most important facts clearly means nothing to our society? What use is education when our governments are not listening to the educated?”
This is Zero Hour. Our greatest impact is by taking part in action to enact national- and international-level plans to eliminate carbon from our energy stream. With carbon-emitting sources still 80% of America’s energy, it will take a Manhattan-Project-like effort to do rid us of it. That is why I and so many climate action advocates support the Green New Deal: we must invest in a large-scale realignment of our energy sector, while lifting up working families to help make that happen.
Credit: © Land Rover Our Planet | Flickr.com
An excellent approach to rapid carbon emission reduction is a carbon fee and dividend, or a revenue-neutral carbon tax: H.R. 763 has been introduced in Congress and is the first bipartisan climate legislation in a decade. It aims to account for the hidden costs of carbon-based energy, and spur decarbonization investments in the private sector. Please contact your Congressional Representative by phone, in writing or by tweet to support H.R. 763.
To eliminate carbon emissions at the rate necessary to avert climate catastrophe, it will take public and private efforts: a combination of private carbon pricing and public investments of the scale of the Green New Deal. So, please, join the youth-led March 15th Global Climate Strike For Future to demand adults take large-scale mobilization on climate action. I’ll be there!
