We Are In It Now

"After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends."
Wallace Stevens
"The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"

Al Gore quotes this poem, probably not for the first time, in his new Rolling Stone article on the climate crisis.  It helps make his point that he believes chances are getting better than the climate crisis will be significantly addressed, specifically in the international meetings of 2015, but also more generally.

I'm glad he's no longer using the unfortunate "solve the climate crisis" formulation.  If it's a crisis, you can address it, you can confront it.  If it's a problem, you can try to solve it.  The difference is meaningful.  The climate crisis involves lots and lots of problems, many of which have no likely solution as such.  Sometimes it will be a matter of limiting the damage.

Anyway it's a very good article, very up to the moment, yet in useful context, and worth reading through.  Though much of what's happened--ice melts, drought, storms, etc.--has been reported as events (here at Dreaming Up Daily for example,) sometimes as events related to the climate crisis (here again), Gore provides a context of meaning and response, notably on the impact of the two studies on polar ice melts.

Likewise various efforts on various levels to directly address the climate crisis that were at least referred to here are placed in greater context, with a sense of where things are going.  Gore counts himself among those who believe President Obama's recent policies and speeches, particularly the EPA regs on power plants (a power again affirmed by the Supreme Court today), have suddenly returned international leadership to the US on confronting the climate crisis, prompting his optimism on a 2015 global deal: "...it is abundantly evident that he has taken hold of the challenge with determination and seriousness of purpose."

Most interesting to me are the early sections of this piece about the startling advances in clean energy, both in terms of technology and economics.  The best news is on solar power. "The cost of electricity from photovoltaic, or PV, solar cells is now equal to or less than the cost of electricity from other sources powering electric grids in at least 79 countries. By 2020 – as the scale of deployments grows and the costs continue to decline – more than 80 percent of the world's people will live in regions where solar will be competitive with electricity from other sources."

The positive trend includes developing countries which are doing what has long been hoped for--bypassing fossil fuel and going directly to clean energy as they develop.  And there's good news in general on "distributed generation" of power, primarily solar.  This section on energy is really worth checking out.

So it's clear that many areas--tech, a number of businesses (including insurance companies), the military, economists etc.--are out ahead of US national and some states' politics on the realities of the climate crisis, and they'll just have to catch up. Over the weekend yet another Republican, former treasury sec Henry Paulsen, called for a carbon tax to head off economic disaster caused by the climate crisis.  (Paul Krugman evaluates his ideas.)  Paulsen called for Republicans to confront the issue.

That's unlikely to happen soon in Washington.  As Gore notes, the Defense department warned that the climate crisis was not only likely to contribute to conflicts (as the drought in Syria is) but will likely be a major cause of conflicts.  The Navy was warned that due to sea level rise its Norfolk base--the biggest naval base in the world--will be underwater.  "And how did the Republican-dominated House of Representatives respond to these grim warnings? By passing legislation seeking to prohibit the Department of Defense from taking any action to prepare for the effects of climate disruption."

So the implacable no has not yet turned to yes.  But while there has to be a 'turning point' (as Gore titles his article) in some sense, the future may well be closer to Krugman's:" In policy terms, climate action — if it happens at all — will probably look like health reform. That is, it will be an awkward compromise dictated in part by the need to appease special interests, not the clean, simple solution you would have implemented if you could have started from scratch. It will be the subject of intense partisanship, relying overwhelmingly on support from just one party, and will be the subject of constant, hysterical attacks. And it will, if we’re lucky, nonetheless do the job. Did I mention that health reform is clearly working, despite its flaws?"

Still, the time is upon us because the climate crisis is here.  Gore constructs another interesting quote from a speech by Winston Churchill in 1936, talking about the gathering storm of World War II:  "Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. . . . The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences. . . . We cannot avoid this period; we are in it now."