[GNC] End Times Upon Us: The Great Disaster's Here (Action Needed NOW)

[Owen Broadhurst]

[Lorna Salzman posted this to the greensnotdems list at Yahoo! groups- OB]

(I had the privilege of hearing Gelbspan address the recent global warming
activist workshop in Massachusetts. It exceeded all my expectations. This
is someone who not only knows his stuff but understands the social and
political parameters of the global warming crisis. And make no mistake; it
is a CRISIS and it is here NOW... please buy his books and distribute this
email as widely as you can. And take it seriously. This is not future
sci-fi or what if? It is in our face right now....LS)

Disasters spawned by global warming are no longer science fiction, Ross
Gelbspan argues in "Boiling Point" -- they're already here.

http://www.salon.com/tech/books/2004/08/05/boiling_point/

The end of the world is here

SALON.COM
By Katharine Mieszkowski

Aug. 5, 2004  |  In Scotland, hundreds of thousands of arctic terns,
kittiwakes, guillemots and great skuas suddenly aren't having any
 http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=546138 babies.
The culprit?
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/3931465.stm Global warming has
disrupted their food supply, according to the
 http://www.rspb.org.uk/scotland/action/disaster/index.asp Royal Society
for the Protection of Birds.

The seabirds feed primarily on sandeels, a small silvery fish that once
teemed along the northern Scotland seashore. But changes in sea temperature
and currents caused by the heating up of the earth's atmosphere are causing
the plankton that the sandeels eat to move north, leaving no fish for the
birds to eat. One bird monitor who has spent some three decades counting
breeding pairs and chicks at the Scottish nesting site called the sudden
failure of the seabirds to reproduce simply "unprecedented in Europe."

You don't have to be a classicist or a binocular-toting member of the
National Audubon Society to read ominous portents into the sorry fate of
hundreds of thousands of seabirds. As journalist Ross Gelbspan voluminously
documents in his new book "Boiling Point," the first catastrophes of global
warming are not something to anticipate with dread in the distant future.
They're here now.

In a fast-paced, well-sourced screed, Gelbspan argues that while Americans
fret about terrorism, a much worse nightmare is accelerating. Gelbspan even
suggests that if the government of the United States continues to dodge and
subvert the international consensus on global warming the tremendous impact
of the phenomenon on the world's poor will serve to stimulate terrorism and
anti-Americanism around the globe.

"The continuing indifference by the United States to atmospheric warming --
since this country generates one-fourth of the world's emissions with 5
percent of its people -- will almost guarantee more anti-U.S. attacks from
people whose crops are destroyed by weather extremes, whose populations are
afflicted by epidemics of infectious disease, and whose borders are overrun
by environmental refugees," he writes.

If this all sounds like so much alarmist hysteria, tell that to residents
of the tiny island nation of Tuvalu in the southwest Pacific Ocean, all of
whom have been offered sanctuary by New Zealand, since their homes will
likely soon be watery to point of uninhabitable. They are global warming's
 http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=3784&method=full first
human diaspora, climate change refugees with absolutely no power to address
their plight.

Wildlife around the world are already on the move. One butterfly species
has shifted its range nearly 60 miles northward over the last century, as
the average temperature around the world rose just 1 degree Fahrenheit.
Spring itself has come earlier every year since 1960, Gelbspan reports. A
study by 19 researchers from seven countries published in the journal
Nature predicted that rising temperatures could doom more than one-third of
the planets' species to extinction by 2050.

The news isn't all bad. One group of creatures is bound to prosper from all
this warming. Insects are already spreading illnesses such as the West Nile
virus, malaria, Dengue and yellow fever to new populations as their range
increases.

Gelbspan reserves particular ire for journalists who have succumbed to a
successful disinformation campaign conducted by the oil and coal
industries, with help from the Bush administration. The goal of the
campaign has been to keep the American public convinced that the scientific
verdict is still out on global warming.

Some of this material is an update to Gelbspan's previous global warming
book http://www.heatisonline.org/ "The Heat is On," published in 1997,
which exposed the so-called climate skeptics for being on the payroll of
the industries whose pollution they were defending. But since the late
'90s, global warming science has significantly advanced. So, if back then
the industry response to the problem could be dismissed as simple spin --
business as usual -- now it amounts to "the privatization of the truth,"
and nothing less than "a clear crime against humanity."

The failure of the Bush administration to take action on global warming has
been well documented by Gelbspan and others. But Gelbspan's critique of how
the American media and the activist community have failed to adequately
respond to disinformation is fresh. Gelbspan, who spent 31 years as a
reporter and editor at the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, contends
that until recently, many journalists lent space and credence to
industry-paid scientific skeptics without ever mentioning their financial
ties, making them "unwitting accomplices" to the industry's agenda -- all
in the pursuit of an illusory "balance." He now argues that the American
press has entered a "stage two denial" of the climate crisis, acknowledging
it with occasional features about the decimation of forests in Alaska, but
under-reporting the scope of the crisis, as well as the larger diplomatic,
political and economic conflicts around the issue.

Gelbspan is a hard man to please on the topic of global warming. Even
activists from environmental groups who are working on the issue come in
for criticism -- simply because their agenda isn't ambitious enough to
confront the scope of the problem. Many of the large groups are locked in
Beltway politics, winning and losing specific legislative battles. Others
are engaged in grass-roots efforts to educate consumers about the
environmental impact of their choices. Both are missing the point, says
Gelbspan.

No matter how much we carpool or how quickly we switch to compact
fluorescent bulbs, we won't be able to do enough to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions to avert disaster, writes Gelbspan. "By persuading concerned
citizens to cut back on their personal energy use, these groups are
promoting the implicit message that climate change can be solved by
individual resolve. It cannot."

Such a strategy is a form of blaming the victim: "People are made to feel
guilty if they own a gas guzzler or live in a poorly insulated home. In
fact, people should be outraged that the government does not require
automakers to sell them cars that run on clean fuels, that building codes
do not reduce heating and cooling energy requirements by 70 percent, and
that government energy policies do not mandate home-based or regional
sources of clean electricity." Besides making elites feel ephemerally smug
about their own eco-enlightenment, the real advantage in mobilizing
individuals to make greener choices is that it can ultimately lead to the
creation of a political base for large-scale, global action on climate change.

And this is really the scariest thing about "Boiling Point" -- not the
now-familiar doomsday scenarios of melting glaciers, rising seas and mass
extinctions. More terrifying is what Gelbspan thinks must happen if we are
to have any hope of curbing it: massive, global international cooperation
on an unprecedented level. The prospect is frightening because of how
unlikely any hope of reaching it seems right now.

Gelbspan evaluates three plans to confront the issue, including the
 http://www.usskytrust.org/ the Sky Trust plan,
 http://www.apolloalliance.org/ the Apollo Alliance and the
http://www.schumacher.org.uk/schumacher_b5_climate_change.htm Contraction
and Convergence model. He finds them all wanting. They lack economic
incentives and regulatory mechanisms to force the transition to clean
energy, pander too much to coal-mining labor unions, rely too heavily on
the unproven promise of
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/06/04/carbon_emissions/index_np.html 
carbon sequestration or only address problems in the United States. Soon, notes
Gelbspan, both India and China will likely surpass the U.S. as the world's
largest carbon emitters.

Gelspan's fourth way -- an "Rx for a planetary fever" -- involves stripping
energy subsidies in industrialized nations from the fossil fuel industries
and putting them entirely into renewable energy; creating a $300 billion
fund to bring renewable energy to developing countries; and implementing a
global fossil fuel efficiency standard, which would rise by 5 percent a
year. In this scenario, tens of thousands of coal miners would have to be
bought out or retrained. And to avoid engendering geopolitical chaos in the
Middle East, the region would have to become a center of renewable hydrogen
production with wind farms and solar panels in the deserts instead of oil
wells.

Only regulatory measures this drastic, and involving such a level of
international unity have a chance of stemming global warming, argues
Gelbspan. But he also suggests that there would be an additional upside to
the necessary global cooperation. The creation of a new energy
infrastructure would spur new job growth and create huge new markets for
multinational companies.

The scenario he paints would not only address climate change, but bring
about a more equitable world, "putting people back in charge of governments
and governments in charge of corporations." Thus, ultimately "Boiling
Point" is not a horror story about our collective, incipient global warming
doom, but, paradoxically, wildly optimistic, as Gelbspan appears to believe
that such wide-scale international cooperation is possible.

Whatever happens, there's a generation of seabirds in Scotland that won't
be around to find out.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
mailto:km at salon.com Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for Salon Technology.

Lorna Salzman
631-653-3387 (or 718-522-0253)
lsalzman at rcn.com

"To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace
and war....I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major
military conflict". (Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector, March 2003).

"We are already fighting World War III and I am sorry to say we are
winning. It is the war against the earth" (Raymond Dasmann)