Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

the carbon connection S 121
breathing small particles in the smoke that are laced with heavy
metals and that penetrate deeply into lung tissue.
While the issues and solutions are complex, the underlying
problem is very simple. It is a dance of mutual ruin. Some of the
oil extracted in the Gulf of Mexico powers the pickup trucks
and mining equipment in coalfi elds as well as the trains that haul
coal to power plants. The carbon emitted from those power plants
eventually amplifi es the storms and sea-level rise that will doom
the oil industry, if scarcity and economic turmoil don’t get it fi rst.
And the oil extraction business has helped to destroy coastal ecologies
that buffer the land from larger storms.
S
In 1987 the World Commission on Environment and Development
launched a global debate about how to make economic
development sustainable. Not surprisingly, the language and
recommendations in the fi nal report were crafted to appeal to
everyone—bankers and environmentalists, CEOs and citizens
everywhere alike. Its message was that the “present generation
could meet its needs without depriving the future,” which is to
say that if we are only a little smarter, all can go on as before. The
authors aimed to avoid giving offense and challenging existing
priorities, so they mostly ignored unpleasant things like the limits
of the Earth’s carrying capacity, fair distribution of risks, costs,
and benefi ts, and the need to reconcile infi nite human demands
with the limits of a fi nite planet. They proposed to fi ne-tune the
growth juggernaut, but nothing more discomfi ting.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, world population
has grown by nearly two billion, the gross world product has
doubled, energy use has grown by 42 percent, water use is reaching
critical proportions, 90 percent of the large fi sh in the oceans
are gone, the climate is trending toward destabilization, and the
disparity between the richest and poorest continues to widen. By