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

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188 farther horizons
State-level initiatives in California and Florida, as well as the
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the Northeastern states,
are changing the politics of climate. With the leadership of Mayor
Daley and his deputy chief of staff, Sadhu Johnston, cities like
Chicago have developed aggressive climate plans (www.chicagoclimateaction.org).
Deployment of wind and solar systems are
growing at 40 percent or more per year, taking us toward a different
energy future. A cap and trade bill will sooner or later pass
in Congress, and maybe that will be enough. Maybe we can win
the game of climate roulette at a profi t and never have to confront
the nastier realities of global capitalism and inequity, or confront
the ecological and human violence that we’ve unleashed on the
world.
But I wouldn’t bet the Earth on it.
For one thing, the scientifi c evidence indicates that we have
little or no margin for safety, and none for delay in reducing greenhouse
gas levels before we risk triggering runaway change. So call
it prudence, precaution, insurance, common sense, or what you
will, but this ought to be regarded as an emergency like no other.
Having spent any margin of error that we might have had 30
years ago, we now have to respond quickly and effectively, or else.
That’s what the drab language of the Fourth Assessment Report
from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says. What
is being proposed, I think, is still too little, too late—necessary but
not within shouting distance of suffi cient. And it is being sold as
“realism” by people who have convinced themselves that they
have to understate the problem in order to appear to be credible.
For another, climate roulette is part of a larger equation of
exploitation of people and nature, violence, inequity, imperialism,
and intergenerational exploitation, the parts of which are interlocked.
In other words, heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere are
a symptom of something a lot bigger. To deal with the causes of
climate change, we need a more thorough and deeper awareness