The Environment Is The Economy

The numbers assigned to the climate march in New York have grown.  Bill McKibben in the New Yorker notes: "The Times, quoting a Carnegie Mellon data analyst and thirty-five crowd spotters, estimated that the marchers numbered three hundred and eleven thousand; Fox News said four hundred thousand. The point is, it was huge: a sprawling crowd of the kind that comes along once in a generation, one of the largest political gatherings about anything in a very long time."

Responding to someone who saw this as proof that people really do care about the climate crisis, McKibben writes that he believes they care but: "I’ve always thought that, to the contrary, climate change caused a peculiar combination of deep dread and a sense of powerlessness."

Individuals think they can't do much and they're right, McKibben says."...global warming is fundamentally a structural problem, driven above all by the fact that there’s no price on carbon."  Others emphasize different bigger than driving a Prius changes; Charles C. Mann in the Atlantic suggests that shutting down the 7,000 or so coal-fueled power plants in the world would pretty much do the trick.  But Mann agrees with McKibben in this respect: climate needs a movement. McK:

"That is one of the reasons numbers matter: they build on themselves, speaking to the part in each of us that doubts change can really happen. But numbers also say something to the larger world; they are the basic currency a movement relies on. The fossil-fuel industry represents the one per cent of the one per cent; lacking scientific arguments, its advocates use their only asset, an unparalleled pool of cash, to maintain the status quo. If the rest of us are going to shake up the planetary gestalt, our equivalent currency is bodies—and the passion, spirit, and creativity they contain.

To borrow a metaphor from the fossil-fuel age, our job is to inject pressure into the system. Marches aren’t subtle; they don’t lay out detailed manifestos (and, in any event, economists have been telling us for a quarter century what we need to do—beginning, again, with putting a price on carbon). Movements work by making the status quo impossibly uncomfortable—by deploying people, arguments, metaphors, and images until our leaders have no choice but to change and, in so doing, release some of that pressure."

In the meantime, the evidence keeps coming in.  NOAA affirms that 2013 heat waves were made worse by global heating.  A Stanford scientist says the California drought this time is linked to the climate crisis.

To emphasize this is not the only problem--or more to the point--it is not merely a technical problem--there's the World Wildlife Fund finding that human civilization has killed off half the "non-human vertebrae animal population" on the planet since 1970.  Actually the years were 1970 to 2010: 40 years.

The reasons had to do with habitat destruction, exploitation and pollution.  Global heating makes it all worse, when combined with human population, industrialization and urban sprawl. This is more than be nice to our fellow creatures, as this Washington Post Wonkblog piece explains. We're using more "resources" than can be replaced or healed, and therefore sustained.  The environment is the economy.  Until we all figure that out, we're arguing over nothing.