-"...there is a binding treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, which almost all nations, including the US, have signed. It obliges nations to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that avoids a dangerous human interference with the climate system. Many conferences of course now debate where climate change starts to be "dangerous", e.g., the conference "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" that Tony Blair called in Exeter last year.
We're now moving outside the natural science topics we discuss on our site, but allow me to add that economists and energy experts have worked out detailed scenarios how these emission reductions can be achieved with minimal impact on the economy..."
-Stefan Rahmstorf of Real Climate
interview at Daily Kos
Real Climate's consistently holding the line against the deceit and duplicity of whoever or whatever it is that has hold of the American public's news outlets. But there isn't anything in their self-designated job description that provides, or is intended to provide, anything more than a solution for the immediate problem, a kind of slow reduction of the actual chemicals and processes that seem to be causing what's been called global warming.
I respect them for the work they do, and the courage it takes.
But it's another example of cognitive dissonance, or it creates one in me anyway, to suggest that the world can ramp down emissions without something like a violent revolution.
Because of the presence under it of large oil reserves the Middle East is teetering on the brink of nuclear war, the US military is over-extended and its soldiers are dying there; the single largest killer of children in America is car crashes; oil and automobiles are the two biggest industries in the US - we're talking about a public willing to accept these things, to accept them in return for the comfort and illusionary safety of big gaudy vehicles running on what's still, even at $4* a gallon, relatively cheap fuel.
That gullible complacent public, "led" by servile politicians who obey the powers that created and were created by this nightmare, is what hinders any move toward a more sensible energy policy - not lack of information, however reasonable and clear.
The intellectual machismo that rejects Lovelock's urgency won't penetrate that complacency until something tangible, something unavoidably real, paves the way. And the possibility of that tangible real evidence being a warning sign vanishing in the rearview mirror is what Lovelock's talking about.
It's the same status-quo preservation that wants to insist the Democrats should replace the Republicans as soon as possible in Congress and the White House. It's true nostalgia, that world is gone.
Adjusting the emissions levels of an economy, really an economic way of being, the way of being in the world that has produced this dilemma, is like - what? Methadone? Synthetic crack? These aren't solutions to a problem, they're treatments for its symptoms. Good effective treatments maybe, but treating symptoms isn't the real work.
The scorn of the public for a convicted drug-lord who's made a fortune selling illegal drugs, who then asks to be allowed to keep his money and cars and real estate if he completes his sentence, would be immediate and passionate.
Right back at ya, there.
You drove us to the edge of a cliff, and now you're driving us over the cliff, and the suggestion from the more moderate crowd is that we should allow you to keep driving, but somehow get you to switch to hydrogen or electricity.
Some of us think you should have your keys taken away.
*$4 a gallon is very cheap for gasoline considering what it does. Try moving a ton of steel 20 miles without using petrochemical combustion. Even factoring in the road costs and manufacturing costs and purchasing costs it's cheap. Until you start factoring in the costs of consequence.
