ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

I’ve just finished reading Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by British author, journalist and environmental activist Mark Lynas. The bottom line: Human activity has already resulted in raising global temperatures by almost 1° centigrade. We’ve already built in another degree of warming - so we’re committed to a global increase in temperatures of almost 2°. If global temperatures rise by more than 2°, the risk of runaway, catastrophic global warming - and an extinction event of unthinkable proportions - skyrockets.

Our minds and efforts have to become focused on avoiding this disaster. That leads to the questions that nobody is asking about Measure 49: Does it leave us in a better or a worse position to begin the battle against global warming? Is the campaign to pass Measure 49 the right place to expend limited and precious time, resources and energy? Or is the campaign an unfortunate and wasteful distraction from what is by far the most consequential issue of our time - climate change? Whether the measure passes or not, we’ll wake up the day after the election with the same task urgently awaiting us: stop global warming. What course of action and outcome leaves us better positioned for the crucial battle to come?We’ve got a brief window - maybe until 2015 - to bring a halt to “business as usual,” brake the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, and then begin to drastically reduce our emissions by 90% by 2030. Yet here in Oregon, climate change hasn’t even made it on the agendas of progressive, environmental, and land use organizations, much less at the top where it belongs. If we fail to drastically reduce emissions, and if the global rise in temperatures reaches or exceeds 2°, climate feedbacks are likely to kick in and global warming spin out of control. The last time in Earth’s history this happened was at the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago. 95% of the world’s species disappeared as the world turned hot and hostile to life. In such a world, our feeble efforts to save fragments of farms, forests, and wild places - and to fight for social justice - will look pathetic in retrospect.

Earth is no longer as young and resilient as she once was. She’s 4.5 billion years old, and has maybe another billion years of life before the steadily increasing output from the Sun makes life on Earth impossible. After the last extinction event, it took 45 million years before life returned to previous levels of diversity and abundance. 45 million years is a big chunk out of Earth’s remaining life - and conditions for life are now not so so favorable as they once were. We can’t afford to screw this up.

Note: I first ordered this book from Amazon, and after six months or so they canceled the order as unavailable. I then ordered it from Powells and received it within a couple of weeks without any problems.