Real action on climate change is needed now in B.C. and at Copenhagen

“Humanity is now between a tipping point and a point of no return, and only the most strenuous efforts on our part are capable of returning us to safe ground.”
— Tim Flannery

Saturday (October 24) is an international day of action on climate change. We are close to if not over tipping points to what could become humanity-threatening runaway climate change. There is a meeting in Copenhagen in December to forge a global action plan—but what action should we be taking?

What action should we be taking today to help forge an effective global plan? And what action do we have to take globally at Copenhagen so as to not go over the tipping point of a melting Arctic ice cap or methane-producing melting permafrost or a drying Amazon?

The short answer would be to finally stop procrastinating and begin substantive emission reduction. But the powers that be and even many who recognize the danger are advocating puny carbon taxes or weak and leaky cap and trade plans. They are advocating green energy, changing your light bulbs (and politicians), riding a bike, clean coal, and electric cars. These are crackhead answers from carbon addicts who remain in denial about the degree of danger and the urgency of substantive emission reduction. Many advocating action today and at Copenhagen are carbon addicts who are lying to themselves about what scale of action is really needed.

At the other end of the spectrum of possible action are those who think the only solution is to work for the collapse of industrial civilization. Climate change is but one of the dangerous symptoms caused by humanity as a cancer that is killing the planet. But how do you work for the collapse of industrial civilization? And what about the implicit die-off of most of humanity? And how do you accomplish this cancer operation immediately so that continuing emissions don’t take us past those tipping points—there are carbon cycle time lags—or only manage to eradicate the cancer in part of the globe so that collapse is but a descent into war and chaos with climate change still a danger?

We can’t go back easily to a hunter-gatherer population of just millions living in a pristine world. Even if we wanted to. Even if that was the only solution to climate change and biodiversity loss and peak oil and all of the other “bottleneck” problems caused by exponentially increasing populations armed with potent technologies.

We must instead head for a future where humanity isn’t a cancer threatening all life on Earth. If such a future is possible.

We can’t evolve past being dissipative life forms and we can’t escape being human, but we can mature past being ignorantly destructive. Today six billion people live with negligible impact or greenhouse gas emissions while 750 million people are driving and flying and otherwise consuming us to extinction.

The action that is needed at Copenhagen is a profound change of direction. We need agreement on moving to a radically different vision of humanity on this Earth. We need agreement on managing humanity so that our actions today don’t threaten the future of life on Earth, don’t threaten our future. We need agreement on an immediate transition from economies based upon a growth imperative to powering down to relocalized economies with quality lifestyles. We must leave behind the present throughput economies, which use prodigious amounts of energy to produce prodigious amounts of waste.

We need action to unblock so that having a future becomes possible at Copenhagen. We must head off the political zombies who will settle for a weak and leaky treaty that will be as ineffectual and time wasting as Kyoto. We can’t lie to ourselves any more and stay in denial and stay within business as usual—if we do humanity and most life of Earth is toast. What is needed is systemic change, globally and in each nation, province, city, and community subsection, down to each of our individual lives.

The action we must take today is to demand real change, systemic change. We must demand a rapid reconfiguration of our societies and economies. We must get to a post-industrial society fast, within decades, with immediate substantial emission reduction. We must win the capacity to change and to leave fossil fuels in the ground till they can be used without emissions.

Today, those of us in B.C. can force our government to send a signal that we can change, that we can accept climate change as an emergency requiring systemic change. We can force our premier (who must know that climate change is this emergency) to set an example for the world by cancelling the 2010 Winter Olympics.

We cannot settle for addict lies like clean coal or cap and trade with offsets or even Being the Change—it’s too late for half measures. It’s too late for wishful thinking about the collapse of industrial civilization—more addict nonsense. We need urgent action commensurate with the danger from climate change, and action begins, for us, in forcing our government to do what it must do so that we can achieve a real deal at Copenhagen.

Cancelling the Olympics is the perfect act of recognizing what scale of change is needed and possible. Cancelling the Olympics tells the world: Yes, we can change. Yes, we can do what we need to do to have a future.

Bill Henderson is an activist who lives in Gibsons.