Last Barrier to Climate Collapse

dohboi · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Dec 05, 2005 Posts: 1435

The take home here is that there are no "solutions" anymore. We have denied ourselves into a place where even desparate schemes like Flannery's are impossible.

There would surely be huge problems associated with any such scheme, and I'm sure Flannery is aware of most of them. This just shows that those most on top of the latest understanding of where we are in runaway GW are now totally freaking out. We should take no comfort at this fact.

Estemates of the amounts we need to reduce our emissions have gone in this decade from the already-impossible-sounding 50%, to the widely publicized 80%, to 90%, 95%...

Now it is clear that even if we extracted no more fossil fuels and cut down no more forests starting tomorrow we would need to somehow withdraw massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere and engage in wild geo-engineering schemes to avoid catastrophic climate change.

To me, this hopeless situation does not take us off the hook, morally. We need to radically reduce our use of everything immediately (yes, and stop reproducing more little monster/humans). But we can no longer do so with any kind of illusion that it will undo the damage we have already done. We have blown it, and there is no second chance to un-blow it. This will be particularly hard for Americans (those from the land of second chances) to accept.

And it's not just the Republicans--they just reflect more accurately than the Dem.s the actual, lived (rather than merely expressed) attitude of nearly all Americans toward the earth and the future. Dem.s are essentially no different from Republicans in their ecological footprint. Ask any affluent, travel-crazy liberal Democrat if she or he have stopped flying or cut back on (commercial) meat eating or other obscenely carbon intensive activities, and they will just stare at you like you are from some other planet, at best.

Bush is the most shamefully terrible president in our history, and pretty much the man we (though not our children) deserve.