In a moving and important article at Grist, Adam Sacks argues that climate activists have made a disastrous mistake in framing climate change as an emissions problem. The root cause of climate change is our culture – our worship of technology and growth.

Greenhouse gases are not the cause of global warming. They are but a symptom of:

300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations. . . [T]he seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.

Global warming isn’t the only symptom:

[I]f planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry—to name just a few.

Sacks says the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions is absolutely over, and we have lost – and that we need to find the courage to tell this hard truth.

Because of the vast inertial mass of the oceans, which absorb temperature and carbon dioxide, there’s a lag of several decades between greenhouse-gas emissions and their effects. The starting changes we are already seeing today are thus the result of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of well under 340 parts per million (ppm). Today, atmospheric CO2 is 387.81ppm and increasing at almost 2 ppm per year.

Then there are positive feedback loops, which we don’t understand and which haven’t been included in our climate change models.

And then there are “tipping points,” points at which change becomes non-linear. We don’t know where these tipping points may be, where Earth’s climate may suddenly shift into a different state as it has many times before in Earth’s history.

As Sacks says, these bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths.

Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always—but always—ending in overshot and collapse.  Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most likely both.  We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable.  We simply cannot go on living this way. Our version of life on earth has come to an end.

I think the course of action urged by Sacks is the only sane and honorable one:

The sooner we embrace the truth, the sooner we can begin the real work.

Scientists have unearthed striking evidence that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels 200 million years ago led to a sudden collapse in plant biodiversity.  At 900 ppm, ancient biodiversity crashed.

Until this research, the pace of the extinctions was thought to have been gradual, taking place over millions of years.

Carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere has now risen to about 387 ppm – its highest level in at least 2.1 million years and probably 20 million years. If current rates of emissions continue, carbon dioxide levels could reach as high as two and a half times today’s level by the year 2100 – leading not only to hell and high water, but to global ecosystem collapse.

We’re truly playing with fire. And the best we can manage is the disastrous Waxman-Markey? Our political efforts, measured against the enormity of the challenge before us and the consequences of failing to act responsibly and decisively, are so feeble as to be laughable.

What else to do but laugh, faced with a catastrophe that is all but inevitable? Lucky for humanity that there will be no day of judgment.

A new study from Greenpeace using data from the World Resources Institute finds that the U.S. has contributed far more to global warming than any other country. The U.S is responsible for 29% of total cumulative CO2 emissions over the last 150 years.

You might expect those most responsible for creating a mess should be the ones to take the lead in cleaning it up. So much for American exceptionalism. Some example for the rest of the world.

Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (press release here) contains much that is admirable. But its glaring shortcoming is its failure to take us in new directions. Its unspoken premise is that the current “recession” can be “cured” and that economic growth can and should resume as usual. The very terms we use to describe the economic phenomena “recession” and even “depression” presume that they are temporary episodes along a long-term never-ending curve of exponential growth.

The plan fails to address what Euan Mearns at The Oil Drum: Europe identifies as the heart of the problem that has led to the unprecedented global economic, social, political and environmental imbalance: The U.S. has been living well beyond its means for over 40 years.

A piece by Jerry Silberman at Energy Bulletin titled “What Strategy for a Green Recovery?” contains a cogent critique of the Obama plan, a few points of which follow:

What the Act does [is] primarily deferred maintenance on existing infrastructure and social programs ignored during the Bush years, and clearly many of these upgrades are needed. A look at transportation funding, however, finds 3x as much, $30 billion, for highways compared to $10 billion for transit. Symmetrically, airports get three times as much as Amtrak, although the admitted backlog need is highest for Amtrak. The underlying assumption is that we will not, and should not move away from the primacy of the private automobile. This is underscored by the huge proportion of research and science funding devoted toward developing electric cars. Missing is the arithmetic of energy consumption not only in cars but in an automotive based land use pattern, and an understanding of the realistic potential for renewable electricity.

The plan’s focus on “shovel-ready” projects to get immediate stimulative impact ensures that most of the money will go to roads and that none will go to the top-to-bottom rebuilding of our rail infrastructure that is needed to make any real difference. We’ve been planning nothing but roads for decades – so of course we don’t have “shovel-ready” alternatives. As Alex Steffen says, regarding transportation: when it comes to greening the stimulus, we’re not only missing the forest for the trees, we’re not even seeing the trees right.

Back to Silberman:

Speaking of energy, the press release does not define renewables, but we know that “second generation” agrifuels are high on the list, and Obama is pushing for increased ethanol, despite the rapidly growing global consensus that any generation of agrifuels is a disaster on several levels. The logic is very simple – since these fuels at best have a dramatically lower net energy than fossil fuels, and growing them will accelerate the destruction of fertile land, because all the nutrients are removed, not to mention the natural ecosystems destroyed, they cannot meet the need. . .

By continuing to fund the chimera of fusion power [and "clean coal" - ed.],  the report underscores what it says, in fact very directly: “the next great discovery” is needed to bail us out. This is a classic example of expecting to solve problems using the same ways of thinking which created them. What is really being pursued, or hoped for, is a perpetual motion machine. It’s not there. . .

Over $120 billion is devoted to health care, as supplemental funding for Medicaid, with $30 billion in subsidies to laid off workers to pay their COBRA….in other words, to pay private insurance companies. For that much money, we could establish Medicare for All national health, (HR 676) and put many more billions back in the pockets of workers, and the coffers of state and local governments, and make a real contribution to economic recovery.

Silberman concludes that “recovery” plan whose goal is a return to business-as-usual is doomed to failure:

The most unconscious and fundamental premise of this bill is that within a short time, the US economy will “recover” – new jobs, more cars, increased housing starts, and more energy consumption, albeit with some portion from “renewables”. This is the fundamental premise, and it’s a premise which guarantees its failure.

Sharon Astyk frames it as a moral issue in a most powerful and moving open letter – “Not Advice, but a Warning” – to the incoming president:

[Y]ou stand in Lincoln’s shoes today, having embarked on a project whose price is far too high, and whose moral legitimacy is questionable at best.  You’ve decided your job is to save the economy, and to restore the American people to prosperity. . . But that way lies tyranny, and moral failure.  To do so represents the tyranny of the present over their posterity – the extraction of resources that will be urgently needed by your daughters and my sons and their children.  The direction you’ve taken, which involves salvaging the failed industrial and financial projects of the rich, rather than serving the poorest, represents tyranny as well . . .

It is also impossible to accomplish – you will not restore us to what we were at any time in the recent present, because even then, we were not as we seemed – that is, virtually all the accumulated wealth of the last decade and more that actually percolated down to ordinary people was illusory, debt-based, and based on false assumptions.  And all the wealth of the last few decades has been based on a rapidly declining natural resource base that is now not merely depleted, but emptying.  You will not restore us to past versions of our prosperity, nor can you carry the moral water of the preservation of the future on the backs of a false and tyrannical promise.

Astyk has it exactly right: a return to what has been considered normal is neither possible nor morally defensible.

Wendell Berry writes at OrganicToBe.org (also at The Energy Bulletin) that small farms and other locally-run enterprises are failing because the pattern they belong to is failing. The principal reason for this failure the universal adoption of industrial values which see things and places as assets, all relations as mechanical, and competitiveness as the prime human motivator.

Berry lists the values associated with the family farm: conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community – values suited to a world lived in by human beings, not to a world exploited by managers, stockholders, and experts.

I think Berry is more right than he knows. We must transform our economy and rebuild it based on the human-scale values he treasures.

“The economy” is no more than an abstraction, a description of how we extract our living from and survive in this world. Valuing it more than the global ecosystem on which it depends is blindness and folly. As we see the world economy collapse around us, the evidence is compelling that industrial values – which place “the economy” above all else – are ultimately destructive of life itself.

Conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community: as Berry says, these are the values that offer us survival, not just as farmers, but as human beings. And Berry is right that the transformation that is required cannot be left to others:

“It] cannot be accomplished by the governments, the corporations, or the universities; if it is to be done, the farmers themselves, their families, and their neighbors will have to do it.”

James 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.

This excerpt from an article by David Korten in Yes! Magazine (reprinted at Alternet) sums it up pretty well. We in the U.S. have accumulated a lot of bad karma.

“Cheap oil provided an energy subsidy that defined the wars, economies, settlements, values, and lifestyles of the 20th century. The result was a century of wasteful extravagance and inefficiency that encouraged us to squander virtually all Earth’s resources — including water, land, forests, fisheries, soils, minerals, and natural waste recycling capacity. We are now waking up to the morning-after consequences of a brief but raucous party. These include depleted natural systems, unsustainable economies, an obsolete physical infrastructure, and a six-fold increase in the human population dependent on the diminished resources of a finite planet.”

David Kortenin in a presentation in April at the Seattle Green Festival turned to Star Trek in laying out the task for our time:

“Remember those scenes in Star Trek. Scotty to Captain Kirk. Life support is failing. Kirk to Scotty. Shut down all nonessential systems and direct all available resources to life support. There it is — the order for our time. No resources for war or extravagance. Focus all attention on the health of the crew and the life support system.

“No more throwaway stuff. No more economic growth for the rich. Our priority must be to grow our well-being rather than our consumption. Invest in peace, education, and health care rather than war. Invest in compact communities rather than suburban sprawl. Invest in local economies and environmental rejuvenation rather than in shipping toys around the world and speculating in the global financial casino. Invest in sidewalks, bicycles, bicycle paths, and public transportation rather than cars and highways. Invest in education for living rather than advertising to get us to consume more.

“Here is the kicker. We must eliminate exactly those forms of non-essential production and consumption that our economic and political systems are designed to promote.

We need to redesign the way we live – but we can’t because our world, even our own nation, is not governed by democratically elected governments but rather by global financial institutions.

“We need to grow strong caring communities in which we get more of our human satisfaction from caring relationships and less from material goods. We will need to end war as a means of settling international disputes and dismantle our military establishment. We need to reclaim the American ideal of being a democratic middle class nation without extremes of wealth and poverty. And we need to encourage and support the rest of the world in doing the same. To do all this we will need to create democratically accountable governing institutions devoted to the well-being of people and nature.”

Our biggest problem is neither bad people nor bad institutions, but a bad story that keeps running on an endless loop in our heads – that competition rather than cooperation and compassion ultimately works to the benefit of everyone.

It is time to start filling our heads instead with the story that it is our nature to be caring and giving and that this is all for the good, and therefore we properly set our sights on perfecting our capacity for love and caring and create the world of our dreams. It isn’t a particularly new story. It’s the story of all the world’s great religions.

“if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

This stark warning is from the abstract of a recent report by James Hansen’s team of scientists.

Things aren’t looking good. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising faster than ever – and methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, is soaring as well as the frozen north begins to thaw. If the Arctic ice disappears as feared, the white reflector that sent 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space will have turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun’s heat. We’re already seeing feedbacks taking over. What humans have started, Earth may finish.

If we do everything right, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out, we could be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of irreversible tipping points.

Bill McKibben has an op-ed at the LA Times containing a great summary of what “doing everything right” means:

“[It] means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they’re supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way U.S. automakers made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

“It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.”

As McKibben says, this the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

Ecologist Tom DeLuca says there’s no way to avoid climate change. But our forests and wildlands have evolved under changing climates, and have some resilience.

To effectively allow for natural adaptation to climate change, size matters.  A substantial core habitat must be present for the migration of species across landscapes and to buffer zones with human development. But our approach to environmental protection has so far been seriously flawed. In protecting wilderness and other resources, we’ve created “islands.” That makes wilderness areas and other protected resources and habitats susceptible to climate change.

DeLuca argues that large-scale land conservation is required, and efforts must extend beyond traditional government management to involve society as a whole. We need a restoration of the land ethic.

But we’ve got far to go. As DeLuca puts it:

  “The efforts being conducted by our government are laughable.”