What this says to me:
A whole lot of seemingly innocuous (at least until recently) everyday activities are moving us further from the 350 PPM number. Turning on the heat. Taking a shower. Starting the car (even if it is a Prius). Turning on a light (even if it is a CFL). Biting into a burger, banana, or California strawberry. Watching the Pats game. Or even just sitting down to the computer to participate in Blue Mass Group.
Many of us have taken action to reduce the carbon emissions of our activities, from the simple and inexpensive (CFLs) all the way to bigger investments (more efficient furnaces, alternative energy). I do not want to belittle these efforts, because we first need to slow down before we can turn around and return to 350. The purpose of this post is to illustrate just how much, much more needs to be done both on the conservation side and on the development of carbon-neutral energy sources. And it needs to be a world-wide effort.
I don’t pretend to have the answers, but it seems to me that getting people to consider the number 350 (and the fact that we are past it) provides a concrete frame within which to generate discussion and puts our efforts thus far into context (i.e., don’t be complacent just because you have done something).
Getting to 100% clean electricity seems like a good idea. Perhaps we need a similar goal for the auto industry? What else?
less medical care, no transplants, no vacations, less driving across the country for useless causes like gay marriage.
Here was an article I posted a link to here a couple months ago (try again Sabutai, there is a point being made here):
<
p>Economic Woes May Give Planet A Breather
In the short term, carbon emissions and economic activity are tightly coupled.
<
p>In the long term, they don’t have to be. E.g. in the U.S. we’ve reduced our carbon intensity from 0.35 to 0.25 kgC/$ of GWP from 1970 to now. That’s the good news; the bad news is that we probably need to reduce it a lot more.
<
p>Here’s another data point- check out this map of carbon intensity of various states. There’s a lot of details that explain what’s behind the state by state numbers, but you’ll notice that the numbers with the lowest carbon intensities aren’t exactly the poorest.
<
p>Put another way: Recessions reduce emissions. But reducing emissions, done correctly, doesn’t have to cause recessions.
What’s interesting though is that it looks the exact same if, instead of dividing by state GDP you simply divide by population.
<
p>The numerator drives it — some states crank out the carbon. Which ones? The ones which generate most of their electricity with coal, and the ones which have lots of roadway miles per person.
<
p>P.S. Texas and Alaska are disgusting energy hogs. In fact, Texas uses far more total energy than California, despite having fewer people and a much smaller state GDP. Throw in the reality that California uses far more green electricity than Texas and it’s really ugly.
The Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ and I believe other denominations are encouraging that church bells be rung 350 times to draw attention to this.
it is a good idea to have a limit, though, after which they don’t waste any energy ringing them anymore.
That’s at least your second snide remark on this thread. Many churches have/will manually pull the ropes thereby expending human energy. For the record, the Mass. Conference is asking that it be done by December 15th, the 350th day of the year.
i was imagining this day of incessant bell ringing, and I live right near a church. Ringing them once a day is cool with me, as long as the bell ringer lives in the church tower and doesn’t expend any energy getting there, or if he was going there anyway to save people’s souls or whatever they do there. It would be cool to stop ringing them on the 350th day, and then to not ring them for 37 days, like 37 days of silence for the planet, and then start ringing them again when it starts going back down, like in The China Syndrome.
That’s the easiest instruction on getting down to 350.
<
p>Consume less energy — in transit, in heating, in electricity.
Consume less food — less fast food, less meat, fewer bottles of water.
Consume less stuff — fewer Christmas gifts, less clothes, fewer electronic gadgets, and so forth.
<
p>
<
p>Personal action will be necessary, because government can’t make all those small choices for us, and those choices will be necessary in addition to government action.
<
p>
<
p>Want to cut your carbon footprint by about 1/3? It’s easy — just go to
<
p>http://www.nstar.com/residenti…
<
p>and enroll in NSTAR green. It’ll cost you literally a few dollars more per month, and you’ll be getting 100% wind power from upstate NY. As more and more NSTAR customers sign up, NSTAR will sign more long term wind contracts, driving the construction of more wind farms. Vote with your dollars.
<
p>Even though it won’t change where your electrons are coming from in the short term (that’s driven by the physics of the NE grid), buying ‘green’ energy sends a very clear market signal to utilities, which will, as stomv notes, result in more clean energy coming online.
Focusing on the carbon cuts through all the BS and greenwash. An antidote to too-little (“2005 levels”) too-late (“by 2050”) targets set by clueless politicos advised by industry lobbyists. It’s a refreshing results-oriented test of new policy.
<
p>A note on timing, which is critical. 350.org cites James Hansen at NASA for the 350 ppm target. Hansen has also said we have a decade to turn things around. He said that two years ago.
<
p>Given how long it takes to ramp up things like infrastructure and the economic framework for change, that’s not a lot of time.
<
p>We’ve regrettably squandered the two years since then. And we can expect stiff opposition to the needed reforms, which will at best slow things down. We haven’t had the political debate about this yet and it will be difficult.
<
p>So what President Obama does in the first half of next year is probably decisive. I am not optimistic but I allow myself to hope pessimistically. There are certainly tremendous opportunities that will not come again within the time that is left to us.
I go by the principles of Chip & Dan Heath’s book for making ideas memorable. They claim that ideas are more memorable if they are:
<
p>Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Stories
<
p>Yes, the acronym (SUCCES) is a little lame, but the ideas behind it are not. Anyway, let’s measure the 350 idea:
<
p>Simple: Yes!
Unexpected: Sort of- the unexpected part is that current CO2 is already above the target
Concrete: Yes! Most enviro messaging is not concrete, so this is an improvement
Credible: If you find James Hansen (the scientist who arrived at 350 ppm being the max safe level) credible, then yes
Emotional: Not so much
Stories: ‘350’ in itself doesn’t tell a story, but there are plenty of related stories to tell, so I’m not sure on this one.
<
p>Overall, I think the 350 ‘brand’ or whatever you want to call it is a pretty good one; it is simple, concrete, and reasonably credible. So even though enviro wonks seem to be arguing about whether 350 or 450 or some other number is the ‘right’ goal, I’ll sign up for the 350 message for now.
<
p>Charley,
<
p>First, the central message of 350.org is not just lifestyle changes. I saw Bill McKibben speak a couple weeks ago; his central vision was to spread the ‘350’ idea as a way to send a clear message to the next round of climate negotiations- his vision was very much to focus on government action. And what he wanted governments to do was simply price the impacts of carbon into things (read: carbon tax or cap ‘n’ trade), and let the market (including you and I) figure out the rest.
<
p>This is hardly a radical notion, in theory, at least; internalizing external costs is necessary for markets to perform well (and it amazes me that free-market types completely ignore this; this stuff is taught in lecture 3 or 4 of introductory microeconomics).
<
p>In the meantime, because I am impatient and because their are multiple side-benefits to doing these things, I have been and will continue to make lifestyle changes to reduce my (still pretty considerable) carbon footprint.
syphax, thanks for posting about charlie’s header. The whole point was exactly to get the 350 concept (which is actually a concrete climate number, much less ambiguous, and more importantly internationally applicable, than 80% by 2050) to be the frame from which the next international treaty on climate change is negotiated.
<
p>And it’s working… at the UN conference currently underway in Poznan, Poland, a block of 49 of the least developed countries (those going to bear the harshest and first effects of climate change) have agreed to fight for a vision of 350ppm. Check out this article.
<
p>And as for what McKibben thinks about taking personal action, he had a POWERFUL article in Orion last month, which you can find here:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/i…
Easy on Charley, I’ve been arguing for top down here for a while as well. I have this debate with many people, despite being a hybrid owning, as light a carbon footprint as I can figure out-earth scientist.
<
p>IPCC and most global carbon models now predict that if we did reel in CO2 emissions as best as technology allows we’d stabilize at 500ppm, then after that point we can start utilizing new technologies in the coming decades to bring us down below that. Otherwise we’re heading for 750+ ppm, a stark and sobering estimate. And looking at the past few years we’re currently exceeding worse-case scenarios (that’s higher than the higher number above). I’ll try to come back and put some linkies in tommorow, I’m a little time crunched now (or look back at my previous posts).
<
p>Take home is that personal actions are definately important, but without leadership from the top, 10% of us greenies doing the best we can (for example, maybe its 50%, I’m just throwing a number out there for example)probably isn’t going to drop our societal emissions enough or fairly for that matter. Top down has real benefits when added in – gas taxes, incentives for clean power, for example, add in an economic incentive that all of society can participate in, not just those who are inspired or feel like it is their personal priority (there are obviously many just causes that individuals believe need action in addition to climate change).
<
p>But now we finally have a new administration that isn’t trying to pretend climate change isn’t real. We have a new leader who promised to make Al Gore and his movement an important part of his administration. Last time Al Gore tried in 1993, his energy tax went nowhere because the voters didn’t support it. The most important personal action we can do now is arguably helping this new administration get these top down changes get installed into our otherwise fossil fuel gluttonous society. Let’s call our representatives.
<
p>