The Gulf Oil Spill has caused a surprising number of calls for fundamental change from a diverse set of commentators, from journalists to politicians, especially in the US, where folks are starting to make the connection that oil is a declining resource mainly produced in places that don’t much like them. The optimists hope they may eventually join the climate club via the back door, if the whole thing is not yet another passing fad of our short attention span society.
There seems no doubt that an international climate treaty is stalled unless the US makes a significant move on emissions reductions, with the news from the Bonn talks sounding more depressing by the day. The US senate climate bill looks to be quietly dying, and the spill reaction is probably its only remaining hope. The resolution to strip the EPA of its ability to regulate carbon dioxide was only narrowly defeated. Senator Bernie Sanders was scathing, pointing out that it was a debate on whether public policy was made based on science or not. This video of his speech, posted at Grist is worth watching.
Here at home we have the disgraceful spectacle of our mining barons whining about how hard life is when they can’t get the government to do exactly what they want for a change, while the voters are having a justifiable hissy fit about their politicians apparently being almost completely in thrall to commercial interests, as well as unable to organise a piss-up in a brewery. Unfortunately the short attention span will probably come into play again, though political cynicism is on a long term rising trend, and will eventually force some concessions. Apart from voting Green, especially in the Senate, I would suggest any “Get Money out of Politics” campaigns (such as this Getup petition) are worth supporting in the lead up to the federal election, just in case our current government is desperate enough to promise some well overdue change in this area. In Iceland recently a completely new party lead by a comedian won 34.7% of the vote and the comedian becomes the major of Reykjavik. Their platform was a vow to clean up politics.
However the forces for change face very significant obstacles, and not just from entrenched interests. Ensuring the public interest is placed above powerful private interests requires a sense of community, the passing of which pundits from bishops to police chiefs similarly lament. The problem is, many of our current technologies have been, and continue to push us in the other direction. Our species evolved in small groups, and continued to live in small communities until relatively recently. We cope with urbanisation by ignoring everyone outside our immediate circle of friends and family, which has stayed roughly the same size as a hunter gatherer clan. I have been totally surprised by the major difference in attitudes between the city, and our small community at one end of a rural valley, where the Gift Economy, still plays a significant part, and most people know almost everyone in the area.
TV’s and computers make it even easier to cut ourselves off, and once started the feedback makes it difficult to stop. From the limited statistics available children don’t seem to be any more at risk out on the streets now than they were in my childhood, when we were allowed to roam around all day on our bikes. The more we stay in our homes, the more dangerous the outside appears.
As I’ve mentioned before, we ignore our innate behaviour at our peril, as it seems to be responsible for much more of our behaviour than we would like to think. In a world that cannot sustain six billion people in small rural communities this presents a fundamental problem.
The science isn’t getting any better, with the arctic still exhibiting rapid change. The dissentients have made a bit of a thing about the recovery in the arctic sea ice extent (the area of ice which is fairly easy to measure with satellites – the volume of ice showed a brief recovery but has since declined rapidly). Now we are starting to see why. It seems a step change of some sort has happened in the last few years. Hot Topic discusses the matter here while Prof David Barber gives an interesting talk on his recent trip in this video. He describes sailing a Canadian icebreaker into what looked like thick multi year ice, only to find that they were able to stream through it at almost their full open water speed. It was made up of small chunks of waterlogged multi year ice glued together by only a few centimetres of new ice.
Climate Progress discusses the general decline, linking to a study that projects that the arctic will be essentially ice free in fall by 2016 (plus or minus 3 years), and shows a graph (below) that shows that even the ice extent hit an all time record low in June this year.
.
