In need of a new strategy

We are losing the fight with carbon usage. Since the summer of 2009, climate and energy legislation has gone from passing the House of Representatives with bipartisan support to worse than dead on arrival in the Senate. Climate change has evolved — according to President Obama — from an “epochal man-made threat to the planet” to something not even worth mentioning in the State of the Union. Widespread concern over the reliance on oil that led us to Deepwater Horizon has all but vanished from present discourse. Where Copenhagen was a household term in the winter of 2009, earning daily front-page mention in the New York Times, the international climate negotiations have resumed their status as relevant only to the wonky and involved.

Climate science has not assumed the same downward trend. The World Meteorological Organization and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration both reported last year that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade on record. Human-caused Arctic warming has overtaken 2,000 years of natural cooling; oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred; carbon dioxide concentrations haven’t been this high in 15 million years, when seas were 75 to 120 feet higher than present levels.

We are clearly in need of a new strategy. It may be decades before the salience of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions can be raised on the political and social agenda to a point of action. To some extent, this is understandable; reliance upon a pollutant that literally drives our economies and societies is not an addiction easily overcome.

Luckily, options are emerging that could buy time. Carbon will always be the thermostat; it will always determine the long-term trajectory of average air and water temperatures globally. But scientists are increasingly finding that in the short term, gases like methane, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and pollutants like black carbon are major determinants of warming.

Methane originates predominantly in factory farming and agriculture. HFCs were what we replaced CFC’s with when the hole in the ozone layer was discovered; they are generally required as aerosols and refrigerants. Black carbon’s number one source is inefficient cooking fires; billions of people around the world lack stove technology and therefore cook their food mostly on open pit fires, fuelled by wood, dung and biomass.

The ancillary benefits of reducing these short-term warmers could motivate significant change in the next few decades. Transitioning away from large-scale agriculture toward more local, sustainable methods would do much to hedge against widespread antibiotic resistance and water pollution resultant of manure and fertilizer run off. Providing households across the Global South would do much to improve respiratory health (indoor air pollution from combination fires and poor ventilation kills more than 2 million people per year) and gender equity (women are often standing over fires all day, while young girls are tasked with the gathering and chopping of fuel), in addition to helping curve fuel-demand-driven deforestation in some of the world’s most important forests. Reduction in diesel consumption — another black carbon source — would also contribute to improved respiratory health in urban areas, and less pollution-caused damage to buildings, etc.

And in the end, addressing sources of black carbon, methane and HFC’s would bend the warming curve substantially in the 30-50 year range, and in the favour of low-lying coastal areas, small island states and tropical in-lands. We will always have to take on carbon if we are to take on global climate change in the next centuries, but it is entirely possible that we cannot, and do not, necessarily have to in the short term. For anyone committed to the climate that is crestfallen on carbon, it’s some food for thought.