350 Climate Action: Fifty Days and Counting

(Yeah, I kind of stole my own title from earlier in the week. This is now posted at DKos to massive indifference, and DK Green Roots. DKos wouldn't accept most of the links, though. And for some reason, this blog won't accept the proper paragraph spacing towards the end of the post. So Internet, baby, I give up.) Wait--I fixed this blog at least! Hah!

Earlier this week, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown emphasized the crucial importance of completing an effective global agreement to address the Climate Crisis at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting:

"If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice. So we should never allow ourselves to lose sight of the catastrophe we face if present warming trends continue."

Referring to the time between now and the Copehagen meetings, the BBC report began: "Gordon Brown said negotiators had 50 days to save the world from global warming." Fifty days--and counting, I thought. And that reminded me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Climate Crisis trilogy, and the last volume titled Sixty Days and Counting. Some might think this a frivilous association. But in the midst of the scientific, political and economic considerations in the diaries today, I want to take a step back, and honor the equal need for perspective and imagination.

Fiction can focus on the human elements that often go missing in other discussions. Making up stories can be a reality check. Fiction can develop the problems in depth and over time, and it can propose and test solutions. For the kind of crisis we face, it is especially valuable as a tool for perspective.

Robinson's trilogy is a good example. It is set in an unspecified near future. As the final volume begins, a Democrat has just been elected President after a familiar-sounding Republican administration. President Phil Chase is fictional, a Vietnam vet like John Kerry, but with a disposition more like Barack Obama. He might also be characterized as a 21st century California athletic but very savvy and somewhat philosophical FDR.

In the first two novels, the Climate Crisis has become dramatically evident: Washington is temporarily flooded, an island nation is completely and permanently inundated, and the Gulf Stream has shut down, causing extreme cold in the U.S. So the Chase Administration has to deal with both parts of the Climate Crisis: the effects in the present, and the causes of even worse effects in the future.

That's the perspective that we need to maintain, particularly as the effects become more pronounced and less deniable. We have to keep both in mind, and not get suckered into a political war over which one we will address. We can't get caught in our own kind of Climate Crisis denial: concentrating so much on the efforts to save the far future through reducing greenhouse gases etc. that we deny the need to prepare for nearer term consequences. We can't get caught in a self-destructive either/or. We must do both.

This is the most complex kind of crisis humanity has ever had to consciously deal with. The Climate Crisis involves long lag-time between cause and effect. It involves "tipping points" in which effects themselves become causes, as they prime positive feedback loops, or start crashes and cascades.

Because of lag time, even if we do cut greenhouse gases in the present, bad things may still happen for some time to come. "The continuity effect, as they called it, and a nasty problem to contemplate," Robinson writes. Right now we may be feeling the effects of greenhouse gases mixing in the atmosphere of 50 to 100 years ago. It's a lag time measured in decades.

We have two Climate Crises, calling for two strategies. They can be described in different ways: the short term and the long term, the effects and the causes, or as I categorize the tasks: the "Fix It" efforts to fix the effects in the present moving forward, and the "Stop It" efforts aimed at saving the future from even worse catastrophe.

Mark Hertsgaard has been warning about this for years. The American Association for the Advancement of Science noted that "We need an aggressive research, development and deployment effort to transform the existing and future energy systems of the world away from technologies that emit greenhouse gases," but also that "it is essential that we develop strategies to adapt to ongoing changes and make communities more resilient to future changes. The growing torrent of information presents a clear message: we are already experiencing global climate change. It is time to muster the political will for concerted action."

There are efforts now to deal with both crises. As representatives of several nations met in London this week for talks preliminary to Copenhagen, there was a conference in Vancouver focused on preparing for the near future of climate-caused disasters, which may well characterize the next several generations. That AAAS statement from a few years ago uses the word "resilience," and it has since become a kind of watchword among some of those preparing for the future. And so the Vancouver meeting was called the "Resilient People + Climate Change Conference." It was mostly concerned with psychological and cultural resilience, a necessary if not sufficient emphasis.

We're used to crises that are happening before our eyes. It takes imagination to anticipate effects, as well as the will to face the consequences already happening elsewhere in the world, and to grasp the patterns of what is happening around us.

It takes imagination to understand that the Climate Crisis is two crises, and we can't be so intent on one part of the problem that we neglect the other part. That's a political as well as a policy peril. Another fictionist and futurist, Bruce Sterling, has been warning of this (as well as a near future in which the Climate Crisis dominates everything, including the world economy.) If Republicans suddenly pivot away from total denial to demanding total concentration on what's inelegantly called "adaptation" or "remediation," (words that only bureaucrats can love) then efforts towards changes to save the long-term future will again be endangered.

Though we haven't yet seen the kind of large-scale dramatic effects Robinson writes about in his trilogy, this fiction does in a sense rehearse our future. The Climate Crisis has begun, and no matter what we do, the lives of several generations to come--including people living now--are going to be affected, and probably changed more than we can otherwise imagine.

Fiction is not only about issues and events, it is about people. First of all, the people who must deal with the problems. They can't afford to choose one crisis or the other--they must confront both.

Fiction can suggest how people can deal with change, how they can themselves change, and yet go on with their lives. Fiction can provide reassurance that this is possible. This last novel of the trilogy, for example, ends like a classic Shakespearian comedy: with marriages.

Fiction like this can give us a vision of a better future we work towards in the present, as in President Phil Chase's goal of a permaculture: "a culture that can be sustained permanently," with meaningful work, education, and health care for all. "Taking care of the Earth and its miraculous biological splendor will then become the long-term work of our species."

The title of this last book in Robinson's trilogy comes from the Chase administrations'plan to turn the government towards confronting the Climate Crisis in its first sixty days. But soon Chase realizes, "It's like our first sixty days never ended, but only keeps rolling over. It's like sixty days and counting all the time."

It's fifty days and counting all the time. Every day is to going to be Climate Action Day.