BRATTLEBORO — I went to the People's Climate March in New York City on Sept. 21. It was great to see 400,000 people geared up to make change happen - change for human and organic survival. There was peace in the crowd, a model for the world. There was urgency, too.
I heard a term, “decade zero,” meant to identify the immediate period after climate change reaches the tipping point, the marker in time after which no amount of carbon reduction will stop the seas from rising.
Global warming is currently unleashing millions of tons of methane from thawing tundra in the Arctic, Antarctic, Greenland, northern Asia, Alaska, and Canada, terrain previously capped by glaciers for hundreds of millennia.
At a certain tipping point, so much carbon will be in the atmosphere due to the combination of human carbon release and collateral methane release that reductions of human carbon will have no effect on warming. From then on, the seas will rise, category 5 storms will rage, floods and droughts will dominate, and people will try to adjust.
It is a scary proposition. Food and water shortages will increase in a world already experiencing too much violence. How will democratic societies manage a fair distribution of the necessities of life? Given the growing income gap in the United States, how will climate change affect the great majority with little to no money?
Some scientists, notably Dr. James Hansen, formerly NASA's chief climatologist, think the tipping point has been reached.
Certainly, the seas are rising. Currently, a number of islands in the Indian Ocean are in danger of full submergence, including the Maldives and Seychelles. The list of weather extremes is endless. Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene remains close to mind for Vermonters.
It is no wonder, then, that 400,000 people showed up in New York City to march for climate action. The wonder is that society has gotten to this point.
And the question is: Can people pull society back from the brink? Clearly, only a global social movement has a chance to do so.
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Organizers of the People's Climate March understood these points. The slogan of the march - “To change everything, we need everyone” - signaled as much.
Days before, Naomi Klein published a new book This Changes Everything. “If we are to curb emissions in the next decade,” she writes, “we need a mobilization larger than any in history.”
But what would such a mobilization do in the face of the scientific data which agrees that the only way to avert global catastrophe is for “wealthy countries to cut their emissions by somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-10 percent a year”?
That certainly isn't happening now. In fact, the United States has been increasing emissions by 3 to 4 percent a year for a decade.
And U.S. politics preclude such a turnaround. Days after the march, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky put it this way: “It's time for global elites to face facts. President Obama's war on coal won't have any meaningful impact on global carbon emissions.”
Senator McConnell speaks as a representative of the coal industry in Kentucky and America's carbon-driven economy in general. To prevent catastrophic warming, a global social movement will have to override his constituency and the industries behind it.
That is a tall order.
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Many participants in the People's Climate March recognized the severity of the challenge. Changing the carbon-driven economy will be, quite literally, revolutionary.
And the funny thing is, such change is inevitable sooner or later because the data is in. The Earth will not tolerate the status quo any longer.
The question is whether people in this country and around the world can compel elites at the top of the system to implement a Marshall Plan for the globe, or whether they, like Senator McConnell, will continue championing the carbon economy and thereby sentencing the Earth's climate to catastrophe.
Which will prevail, people or profits?
To quote one placard I saw in the march, “the climate is not the crisis, capitalism is the crisis.”