pinion Climate Fight Only Scratches the Surface

Last week, President Obama outlined a modest plan to basically keep moving (very slowly) in the right direction on climate change. In some circles, you would have thought he'd proposed a radical rethinking of our entire culture. Unfortunately, the latter is almost certainly what is needed to ensure a sustainable future for human beings on Earth even in the next 100-150 years. That we are so far from that in terms of both policy and orthodoxy perhaps best demonstrates the magnitude of the challenge.

President Obama's "Clean Power Plan" imposes the first nationwide limits on carbon dioxide pollution from power plants, which account for 31 percent of America’s total greenhouse gas emissions. It will continue to retire coal-fired power plants and encourage the transition to cleaner alternatives. In essence, it will basically codify existing trends in our energy landscape, in which the role of coal has been steadily reduced by both regulation and market dynamics, most notably the rise of cheaper, cleaner natural gas.

Coal is down more than 10 percent in terms of its share of our national electricity production over the past decade. The rise of solar energy—which now employs more people in the United States than the entire coal industry—has also had a large impact and will continue to earn its way into a larger share of our energy pie (California's two largest solar plants now produce energy on par with same-sized coal-fired plants).

The President's plan aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions 32 percent by the year 2030 (using a 2005 baseline). The plan would give a tremendous amount of autonomy to states who would come up with their own plans to reach the target levels.

I call it a modest plan because based on even optimistic scientific data, such efforts would be unlikely to adequately reverse the damage we’ve done to our environment. Based on less optimistic data, like former NASA climatologist James Hansen’s controversial new paper, “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming is highly dangerous,” the plan seems almost like taking a pea shooter to a Sherman Tank.

In the paper, Hansen suggests that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will melt as much as 10 times faster than previous estimates and that sea levels will rise 10 feet over 50 years starting at the end of this century or the beginning of the next. That sort of increase would submerge millions of American homes in places like New York, New Orleans, and right here in south Florida. Hansen argues that we should try to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from about 400 parts per million to 350 parts per million.

It should be noted that Hansen’s paper was not peer-reviewed but rather published in the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, a user forum of the European Geosciences Union in which peer review is done in real time while it is viewable, in order to get important information into the public sphere more quickly (and ahead of the UN Climate change conference later this month). It should also be noted that Hansen had an impressive team working with him on the paper that included 16 other scientists, including NASA climatologists, the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Institute of Earth Environment at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

If a plan this reasonable and modest in its scope is so controversial, what does that say about our real chances of meeting what is without question the greatest challenge in human history? The short answer: not much.

First, there’s the idea that everything in our economy and socioeconomic culture relies on perpetual growth of population and consumption. As the old paradox rhetorically asks, how do you achieve infinite growth in a world of finite resources?

Our current paradigm is indeed stretching us thin from all angles. First, let’s look at water. As water demand continues to grow at alarming rates, the melting of ice sheets and reduced snow packs from a warmer climate translate to less river flow and more seawater. So while freshwater drought is hurting us on one side of the equation, rising salt water in our oceans threatens us from the other.

Energy demand puts more stress on the water supply, especially thirsty methods like fracking, which uses billions of gallons of water each year. Still, that’s only a small fraction of the water consumed by the meat and dairy industry, which already uses ⅓ of the Earth’s freshwater (root to fruit, a single hamburger requires 660 gallons of freshwater).

Compounding the matter is our fast-growing population (expected to hit 9 billion by 2050). More people means more energy use, more meat and dairy and most of all, more water. Plus, they need housing, which means less permeable ground for water to return through the water cycle and more of it finding its way to the ocean as runoff, where it becomes both unusable and a contributor to already rising sea levels.

When considering greenhouse gases, we always seem to focus on transportation and fossil fuels, but the truth is that animal agriculture produces 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, while all transportation generates only 13 percent. Livestock is responsible for 65 percent of the world's nitrous oxide emissions, while 91 percent of Amazon Rainforest destruction is owed to animal agriculture.

Again, more people means more meat and dairy, less water and a need for land for both housing and meat and dairy agriculture. Nine billion people certainly sounds like a lot (and it is), but consider that there are just under 50 billion non-wild farm animals on Earth right now, taking up 45 percent of the total land area. Then consider how much stress each extra billion people really puts on the grid.

You might be noticing the disproportionate share of the burden that animal agriculture is creating and wondering why it’s spoken of so seldom (and by seldom, I mean never). That same question was raised by documentary filmmaker Kip Anderson in Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, and I highly recommend watching it (I wrote more on this subject in an earlier column that can be found here).

You might also be wondering why almost no conversation is taking place on population considering that population growth is compounding all of the other problems and pushing us hurriedly toward the tipping point, especially as more and more previously third-world countries begin to develop into Western-styled consumers (it’s often said that the Earth can handle 100 subsistence farmers more easily than a single American teenager). That goes back to our growth paradox.

If it seems like an insurmountable problem, that’s only because solutions are so far removed from the current givens our society clings to. Knowing what we know about water (and fertilizers and runoff), we’re still planting grass that isn’t supposed to be here in Florida, dumping toxic fertilizers on it and wasting tons of freshwater all to keep our lawns looking like they would someplace else. Knowing what we know about meat, Americans are still eating around 200 pounds per person each year.

Put in this sort of context, I think it’s much more clear why I called the President’s plan modest, and if we can’t achieve even those standards, then I suppose we ought to strap in and prepare to go down with the ship. More importantly, we need to ask why we are not considering, or even discussing, more serious responses to the challenges.

Dennis Maley is a featured columnist for The Bradenton Times. His column appears each Thursday and Sunday. Dennis' debut novel, A Long Road Home, was released in July, 2015. Click here to order your copy. Click here to read previous columns by Dennis.