[
Note for TomDispatch Readers: Sad
news from me. On Monday, Eduardo Galeano died of cancer. I was his U.S.
book editor for years and consider him one of the greats of our age. His work appeared repeatedly at TomDispatch. Here’s my tiny tribute to him: Eduardo Galeano ended his history of everything, Mirrors,
with these lines, "In my childhood, I was convinced that everything
that went astray on earth ended up on the moon. But the astronauts found
no sign of dangerous dreams or broken promises or hopes betrayed. If
not on the moon, where might they be? Perhaps they were never misplaced.
Perhaps they are in hiding here on earth. Waiting." I hope that, like
the betrayed dreams he spent his lifetime recording and the voices of
the bold and the oppressed that he retrieved so movingly from the
discard pile of mainstream history to inspire the rest of us, Galeano,
who just died, is still in hiding somewhere on earth, or even on the
moon, waiting. Tom]
Consider the extremes of our present climate moment by the
numbers. Recently, Michael Greenstone, the Milton Friedman professor of
economics at the University of Chicago and the former chief economist of
President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, did a
little calculating.
He was curious to find out just how much the planet’s temperature might
rise if we managed to burn all the fossil fuel reserves that “can be
extracted with today’s technology.” Without beating around the (burning)
bush, the answer he came up with was a staggering 16.2 degrees
Fahrenheit. To put that in perspective, climate science suggests that
unless we keep the temperature rise from the burning of fossil fuels
under 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) catastrophic changes
are likely to occur, including, as Greenstone points out, the melting of
the
Greenland ice sheet, which will reshape human life on this planet in grim ways. And even that 3.6-degree mark might be
too high.
Add in another nearly 13 degrees of warming and you could have the
definition of an uninhabitable planet (at least by humans). It should
give us all the chills -- or more appropriately, leave us with fever
dreams of a future in which humanity was incapable of getting itself
together, dealing with entrenched fossil fuel interests, and saving a
planet that had for so many tens of thousands of years been the rather
habitable home of our species.
On the other hand, look at Spain: as Juan Cole
reported recently at his
Informed Comment
website, that country is now getting almost 70% of its electricity in
ways that do not generate carbon dioxide. That’s little short of
extraordinary. It’s possible that somewhere down the line that country
could even become “the first net-carbon-zero G-20 state”! As of this
March, it received 22.5% of its electricity from wind power (with solar
trailing badly behind), 17.5% from hydro power, and 23.8% from nuclear
power (which will make some environmentalists uneasy). And the country
hopes to almost double its wind power contribution to 40% in the next
five years.
In other words, depending on what you care to look at, this planet offers a grim vision of humanity preparing to
scourge and
flood
its own home or -- and this is a new development -- a more hopeful one.
In that, humanity, under pressure and moving too slowly by half, is
nonetheless beginning to reshape our world yet again in unexpected ways,
using new technology that is quickly becoming ever cheaper and easier
to employ.
TomDispatch energy expert
Michael Klare suggests today that while nothing may be settled, damage
is clearly being done, and the fossil fuel machine remains deeply
entrenched and determined, there are nonetheless unexpected signs that
we, like the cavalry of movie fame, may finally be saddling up to ride
to our own rescue. This is the sort of news that should stir the blood
and soul in all of us. It should leave us thankful for the years of toil
in the wilderness by climate activists like those at
350.org who have worked so hard to bring us to awareness of the dangers ahead, and of activists like those in the
fossil fuel divestment movement who want to shake what may be the most profitable industry in history to its core.
Tom
