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

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22 politics and governance
adopt better technologies like hybrid cars, solar collectors, and
compact fl uorescent lights and change little else. We will need
all the technological ingenuity that we can muster, but the science
indicates a much more precarious situation and the need
for deeper changes that will require substantial alterations in our
manner of living. “There is,” in John Sterman’s words, “no purely
technical solution for climate change . . . we must now turn our
attention to the dynamics of social and political change” (Sterman,
2008, p. 533).
The second challenge, described in The Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment Report (2005), indicates that our future will likely be full
of nasty surprises caused by the breakdown of ecosystems and the
ecological services they provide. Changes in land use, encroachment
of human populations into formerly wild areas, and pollution,
all compounded by rapid climate change, will continue
to exacerbate the number and severity of changes amplifying a
serious decline in the health of ecosystems, species diversity, and
the overall stability of the biosphere. The Earth’s systems, including
the oceans, are everywhere under assault, with no end in sight.
The timing is particularly unfortunate. Ecological degradation
radically impairs the resilience of ecosystems to climate change
and reduces their capacity to sequester carbon.
A third challenge is that we are approaching the peak of global
oil extraction, which could collapse the energy scaffolding that
supports modern society, economic growth, and our particular
version of the good life. 11 The famous bell-shaped curve of oil
extraction developed by petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert
in 1956 to portray the peaking of U.S. oil extraction is applicable
to the global oil economy as well. The cheapest and most accessible
oil has already been exploited. Having exhausted the easiest,
cheapest, and nearest sources of oil, what remains is deeper down,
farther out, harder to refi ne, and often located in places where
we are not much admired and where the politics are unfathomably
contentious. As a result, it has become far more expensive to