I’d love to hear your thoughts on this day.
——-
The excitement here in D.C. is palpable. We have friends in town who brought their five-year-old and are walking down to the National Mall. My wife got an invitation to watch the whole thing from an office that overlooks the Capitol.
I’m an indoor type (Duh!)—especially on a cold day with a wind chill that could only warm the hearts of anti-scientific global warming deniers. And someone needs to stay home with my 21-month-old daughter and blog.
She is so excited. She keeps saying “Where is Barack Obama?” and “Is Joe Biden here?” (Note: If you ask her who ran against Barack Obama, she’ll answer “Grumpy old man.” Go figure!)
So what is the great challenge for Obama?
Global warming, obviously, but what does he need to do?
Yes, he needs to pass a major climate bill and accelerate the deployment of cleantech. But those are really secondary challenges.
No, the single most important thing he needs to do is to change the political equation in this country.
Humanity must stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at 450 ppm or lower. We must. The risks of failing to do so are simply too grave.
The notion that we can possibly stabilize at 550 ppm or 650 ppm is now I think debunked in the scientific literature because of the growing evidence that those CO2 levels will take us through tipping points in the global carbon cycle that will result in amplifying feedbacks that take us to 800 to 1,000 ppm or higher. In fact, many leading climate scientists think 450 ppm—if sustained for an extended period of time—is enough to take us beyond safe thresholds.
But stabilizing at 450 ppm (let alone below that) is simply not politically possible today. The recent USCAP proposal certainly makes that clear (see “NRDC and EDF endorse the weak, coal-friendly, rip-offset-heavy USCAP climate plan” and NRDC’s reply).
Yet by the end of Obama’s second term, stabilizing at 450 ppm must be politically possible or else it will be all but unattainable. (If Obama is a one-term president, that almost certainly means he has failed and been replaced by a Republican, who, with almost equal certainty, will not aggressively pursue the needed climate action (see “The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP” and my series on the conservative and stagnation movement—The conservative stagnation, Part 12: Cap-and-trade bill will return GOP to power “in 2010”)).
And that means that not only must Obama change U.S. climate politics, but he must also bring China along with him.
The challenge for Obama and his team is to make the science tangible and the moral necessity self-evident. I suspect he will need some “help” over the next eight years from the increasingly painful reality of human-caused global warming itself. And indeed temperatures are poised to soar—if not in the very short term, then certainly over the next several years.
How Obama can meet this challenge will be the subject of later posts, but it obviously starts with his inaugural address, whose theme will be the central one for meeting all of the challenges that face our nation today—“responsibility.”
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Chuck Norris on Copenhagen
Comments
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Billhook Posted 9:09 am
20 Jan 2009
you touch upon the matter of "making the moral necessity self-evident"
This policy option has long seemed to me wickedly neglected -
For instance, at the launch of IPCC-AR4 it was stated that some African nations will,
as a consequence of GW, lose 50% of their former annual farm outputs by 2020 -
Given that the great famines in medieval Europe arose from 10 to 15% crop failures, a 50% loss implies an horrific number of entirely avoidable deaths that denialist prevarication has committed us to causing.
The extermination of distinct races is entirely foreseeable (the broad definition of genocide)
let alone the legal UN definition regarding cultural erasure.
Even if we were to succeed in peaking airborne CO2 below 420 ppmv, the scale of such crop failures will of course expand for many years after 2020 :
the several decades' time-lag from warming to climate destabilization implies famines such as we have not seen before.
Since this issue has attracted near-zero comment by politicians, I think it is only apt to now write that we face causing a genocide unprecedented in history.
Yet in over 25 years campaigning I have never seen the issue of famine proposed as an imperative reaosn for global industrial reform.
Instead, the realos (with the smart suits) have been loud in their hopeful claims that we must show business how it is more profitable to stop fouling our nest . . .
(as if enviros were going to appeal to peoples' base selfishness better than industry's shills ?)
Well now Obama has very little time at all in which to awaken people to the imperative of stringent change,
and he has this untapped option, of appealing to the peoples' conscience.
In short, while the profitability of the Green is open to outright negation by devious fossil interests (at home and abroad)
it is the self-esteem of people sponsoring the Green in work / investments /shopping /heating /food /etc
that could rapidly grow into a strident popular demand for radical change.
And, I think you may agree, we have time for nothing less.
Regards,
Billhook
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Colin Wright Posted 9:19 am
20 Jan 2009
High gas prices and a stalled recovery could then undermine Obama's chances of re-election. Which is why I think he needs to come clean with the public and launch a WW2 effort to get off oil (and coal) with a national program to electrify transportation.
In the longer term I think we could be looking at many changes of governments, each election cycle, all over the world, as governments prove impotent at managing energy decline.
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LPS Posted 10:59 am
20 Jan 2009
That's not to say that global warming may not have more dire and far-reaching consequences, but I don't think we're looking at anywhere near the same time frames. I would not dismiss the global cultural dislocations and dramatic consequences for human populations that may occur as the result of peak oil.
Or, as George Carlin opined, this may all just be nature's way of shrugging us all off.
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