I sent this to several newspapers and politicians:
“What the government needs to do, if it genuinely accepts the message of campaigners such as Greta Thunberg, is to dare to raise fuel taxes. What Extinction Rebellion needs to do is outnumber and out-influence the gilets jaunes.”
You have to be as brief as possible. You can’t mention everything else that cries out to be – mentioned.
You probably know that politicians have humbled themselves to Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swede who started the worldwide student strikes against inaction on climate change; and that Extinction Rebellion (“XR”) is the mass movement of mostly young people that has blocked traffic in London with the aim of forcing politicians to take the environmental crisis seriously; and that the gilets jaunes, “yellow vests,” are the mass protesters in France who forced President Macron to back down when he tried to increase the price of fuel.
Every time I read the admirable statements of XR and of Greta, I’ve wanted to say: “Too vague.” Politicians will say that they already take the great issue seriously, will admit that they haven’t been taking it seriously enough, and will promise to take it more seriously. They may mention some safe specifics. But they won’t do anything politically unpopular. Specifics like wind turbines and expensive fuel have to become prevailingly popular.
Runaway heating has already begun – methane is billowing up from the melting permafrost across the northern continents. The three largest tropical forests – Brazil, D.R. Congo, Indonesia – are being clear-cut to make way for cattle fodder. Cement: the production of each tonne – 4 billion per year and rising – releases a tonne of carbon dioxide. The top men in Brazil and the U.S. are giving the go-ahead to forest clearance and oil pipelines.
It’s either: a near future of being content with less meat and less gas cooking and short journeys by electric vehicles; or living to see unprecedented starvation.
An average car emits 4.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year – more than twice its own weight. (See Scientific American, May, page 8. Gasoline is 90 percent carbon, and each carbon atom pulls two heavier atoms of oxygen out of the air.)
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
“…a near future of being content with less meat and less gas cooking and short journeys by electric vehicles; or living to see unprecedented starvation.” I think this is a false choice. Let’s assume that suddenly by magic (a) everyone becomes vegetarian, (b) no one does gas cooking anymore and (c) everyone does short journeys on EVs; not only will this not solve the global warming problem; it may not even make a measurable dent.
What we need to do is to put a tax on fossil fuels (needs to be done ‘correctly’ although to be fair I don’t know how to do that; it’s obvious that Macron did it ‘incorrectly’) to *gradually* phase them out (need to find the right balance between phaseout/phasein speed & economic disruption), and replace those fossil fuels with a combo of nuclear (for baseload) and renewables for electricity generation to power civilization. There has been a lot of nonsense being spread regarding nuclear and renewables, and I am not that optimistic about this needed transition, but perhaps things will get better.
We also need a gradual transition away from internal combustion engines and into to EVs, which fortunately is slowly happening.
Finally, at present methane emissions are not that big of a deal, although we should keep an eye on it since it is a potent greenhouse gas.
I have very mixed feelings about the yellow vest movement. On the one hand, it is unfortunate that a plan to raise taxes on carbon was derailed, and the widespread gratuitous hooliganism reflects poorly on the movement. On the other hand, I sympathize with working people who depend on cars and trucks to get to work and to make a living. Rich people can more easily adopt new green technologies. The income from carbon taxes needs to be targeted toward helping poor and working people to transition to a carbon-neutral economy. Rather than a zero-sum win/lose conflict between XR and GJ, ideally these two movements should collaborate to create solutions that work for everybody and the planet as a whole.
I’m surprised you didn’t include light pollution on your list of causes? Global warming due to carbon based energy consumption is just ONE of the effects of light pollution.
During our planets existence haven’t we had similar types of climate change.
Climate change was the proximate cause of the Permian extinction 250 million years ago. Volcanoes belched a great amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The disruption to the global ecosystem was much worse than that caused by anthropogenic climate change, at least thus far. 96% of the world’s aquatic species went extinct, and probably a comparable proportion of terrestrial species. There are sobering parallels between the effects of human greenhouse gas emissions and the early stages of the Permian extinction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/climate-change-mass-extinction.html
Yes, there have been global warmings before. There were enormous ones about 183 and 120 million years ago, and the one 55 million years ago brought the Paleogene geological age to an end. It was caused by release of carbon from under the ocean; and caused multiple extinctions. The climate took at least 100,000 years to recover.
As the Geological Society of London wrote in a statement on global warming:, “When the human population was small and nomadic, a rise in sea level of a few metres would have had very little effect on Homo sapiens”, who could have just dodged inland. But now millions of us are encased in cities beside the rising sea.
It wasn’t nice for the species that went extinct, but we have a special interest in not going extinct: we’re the bearers of civilization – possibly the only one in the universe.