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Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Why Obama and Cancún Miss the Point

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This story originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

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And don't forget my own new book, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, which has received superb reviews from both The Nation and American Conservative Magazine, a reminder of what a new world we're actually in.  If you're interested in my past writing life, check out The End of Victory Culturemy idiosyncratic history of the Cold War (updated through the Bush era) which the inimitable Studs Terkel once called "as powerful as a Joe Louis jab to the solar plexus," or my novel about my long-time work world of choice, The Last Days of Publishing, which all these years later couldn't be less dated.  And keep in mind that anything you buy after you've arrived at Amazon via one of TD's book links will contribute a little money to this site at no extra cost to you.  Tom

At the moment, if you live in the American Midwest, where part of the roof of a football stadium just collapsed under the weight of a massive snowfall, or in Europe in the grips of a frigid cold spell, it may seem strange to be talking about warming, global or otherwise, no less vanishing ice.  But the long-term trends seem ever clearer as 2010 threatens to be the warmest year on record.  With the Midwest blizzarded in, it doesn't seem as if melting ice should be the story of the hour and yet the ice-face of the planet is morphing and shrinking remarkably rapidly and global ice melt turns out to be -- if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor -- the canary in the mineshaft of climate change, and so a leading indicator of problems to come. 

In the Himalayas, which contain the largest non-polar ice mass on the planet and whose run-off waters feed 10 major rivers in Asia, the glaciers are receding and scientists, according to expert Orville Schell, fear a "43% percent decrease in land mass covered with ice in these mountains by 2070"; in Argentina, a Greenpeace expedition has just presented evidence that the Ameghino glacier has receded by four kilometers in the past 80 years; of the 150 glaciers that existed in 1850 in what is now Montana's Glacier National Park, only 25 remain today (and they, too, are melting away); in Greenland, where a 250-square-kilometer island of ice broke off a glacier this summer, fears about the "rapid disintegration" of the southern part of its vast ice sheet are rising; in the Arctic Sea, recent years have seen the rapid summertime melting of its year-round ice cover, leading toward seasonally ice-free waters; in northern Canada, Hudson Bay was basically ice-free this November, a historical oddity; and even in the Antarctic, covered with ice to a depth of up to three miles in some locations, the melting seems to have begun.

Beyond the vision of rising ocean waters inundating coastal areas (in or near which a significant portion of humanity lives), it's hard even to take in what this means for us, other than increasingly severe weather and disruptions of every sort, potentially staggering migrations of destitute populations, and the sort of future possibilities that once were restricted to science fiction.  It's in this context that the just concluded global warming conference in Cancà ºn, enmeshed as it was in the usual politics, has proven so expectably disappointing, as TomDispatch regular Bill McKibben indicates below.  The author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, creator of the remarkable 350.org, and winner of the prestigious Puffin Prize, McKibben understands that while almost anything on this planet is theoretically negotiable, the rate of ice melt can't be negotiated with glaciers, nor the rise in sea levels with the oceans of the planet.  If only our politicians grasped the same.  (To catch a TomCast audio interview in which McKibben discusses various kinds of global-warming denial, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.)  Tom

Everything Is Negotiable, Except with Nature
You Can't Bargain About Global Warming with Chemistry and Physics
By Bill McKibben

The UN's big climate conference ended Saturday in Cancà ºn, with claims of modest victory. "The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine," said Tim Gore of Oxfam. "Not as rancorous as last year's train wreck in Copenhagen," wrote the Guardian. Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister who brokered the final compromise, described it as "the best we could achieve at this point in a long process."           

The conference did indeed make progress on a few important issues: the outlines of financial aid for developing countries to help them deal with climate change, and some ideas on how to monitor greenhouse gas emissions in China and India. But it basically ignored the two crucial questions: How much carbon will we cut, and how fast?

On those topics, one voice spoke more eloquently than all the 9,000 delegates, reporters, and activists gathered in Cancà ºn.

And he wasn't even there. And he wasn't even talking about climate.

Barack Obama was in Washington, holding a press conference to discuss the liberal insurgency against his taxation agreement with the Republicans. He said he'd fought hard for a deal and resented the criticism. He harked back to the health-care fight when what his press secretary had called the "professional left" (and Rahm Emanuel had called "retards") scorned him for not winning a "public option." They were worse than wrong, he said; they were contemptible, people who wanted to "be able to feel good about ourselves, and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are." Consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he continued: when he started Social Security it only covered widows and orphans. Medicare, at its start, only helped a relative few. Sanctimonious purists would have considered them "betrayals of some abstract ideal." And yet they grew.

It was powerful and interesting stuff, especially coming from a man who ran on abstract ideals. (I have t-shirts on which are printed nothing but his name and abstract ideals.) I don't know enough about health-care policy or tax policy to be sure whether he's making a good call or not, though after listening to much of Bernie Sanders's nearly nine-hour near-filibuster I have my doubts.

I do know the one place where the president's reasonable compromises simply won't work -- a place where we have absolutely no choice but to steer by abstract ideals.  That place is the climate.


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The terms of the climate change conundrum aren't set by contending ideologies, whose adherents can argue till the end of time about whether tax cuts create jobs or kill them. In the case of global warming, chemistry rules, which means there are lines, hard and fast. Those of you who remember your periodic table will recall how neat that can be.  There's no shading between one element and the next. It's either gallium or it's zinc. There's no zallium, no ginc. You might say that the elements are, in that sense, abstract ideals.

So are the molecules those elements combine to form. Take carbon dioxide (CO2), the most politically charged molecule on Earth. As the encyclopedia says: "At standard pressure and temperature the density of carbon dioxide is around 1.98 kg/m3, about 1.5 times that of air. The carbon dioxide molecule (O=C=O) contains two double bonds and has a linear shape."  Oh, and that particular molecular structure traps heat near the planet that would otherwise radiate back out into space, giving rise to what we call the greenhouse effect.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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