Global warming, the G8, and Faustian economics
July 8th, 2008 by Jim JustJames Hansen warned the leaders meeting at the G8 summit that past approaches to climate change have proved a failure, and that continuing down that path “would doom our children and grandchildren to an increasingly impoverished life on a more desolate planet.” Hansen said if we are to avoid “tipping points” that would lead to catastrophic climate change – in geological terms, the end of the Holocene epoch within which human civilization developed and thrived – we must reduce atmospheric CO2 to no more than350 ppm.
So what was the G8′s bold response? To “move towards a low-carbon society” by endorsing the idea of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 while failing to set a short-term goal for actually getting their. And by the way, the 50% cut is from current levels, not from the 1990 levels that served as the baseline in Kyoto.
In other words, they set a target that guarantees catastrophic climate change and then failed to adopt any steps to actually achieve that grossly inadequate goal.
The G8 statement says: “Achieving this objective will only be possible through common determination of all major economies[.]” What ever happened to countries, to peoples, to polities? “Economies” don’t make decisions.
Hansen’s letter points out that responsibility for global warming is a physical fact, not an ethical statement; and is proportional to cumulative CO2 emissions, not to current emission rates. This is a result of the long lifetime of atmospheric CO2. Responsibility of the United States is more than three times larger than that of any other nation. The United States, Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia are responsible for most of the fossil fuel CO2 in the air today. Looking at per capita emission, the United States and Canada are the largest emitters, while per capita emissions of Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom are about half that large.
The main concerns of the G-8, as laid out in the group’s joint statement, are to avoid the most severe consequences of global warming by cutting emissions, but only by guaranteeing “sustainable economic development” and “energy security.” Again paraphrasing, we’re willing to tackle global warming, but only if we don’t have to give up on our belief in unlimited growth.
Wendell Berry has a great article in Harpers exploring the Faustian bargain we have made. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves. Our problem is more than prodigal extravagance – it’s also an assumed limitlessness, a trait reserved for the gods. Yet we have founded our present society upon delusional assumptions of limitlessness.
As the ancient Greeks knew, the inevitable consequence of transgressing limits is tragedy. In Greek tragedy, an important function of the chorus was to ensure that the audience does not forget things, to put the actions of the actors in context. Let’s hope that the audience is paying attention, that the end has not already been written, and that the only thing left for the chorus to do is lament.