Climate Justice: changing facts

Transcription

1 Climate Justice: changing facts The line I m going to push on you tonight is this: the moral dimension of climate change is shifting sliding around right now, under our feet because our understanding of the facts of climate change is shifting too. Much of this has to do with the grip we now have on the way our world is changing, how we re using our resources, the emerging track record our leaders have when it comes to action on climate change, and what the citizens of countries seem inclined to do about climate change in the time that we have left. This is not an easy line for me to take, and it s probably not an easy one to hear either. Some of the thoughts we ll explore here are difficult ones. There s a thing called cognitive dissonance, an uncomfortable feeling which arises when disturbing new thoughts come into conflict with the ideas and opinions we already have and there s a very strong mental drive to get rid of this feeling by avoiding the new ideas, downplaying them, denying them, ignoring them. Despite this, I d like to try to look at a set of new facts about our warming world square on if I can. I m aware that all of the statistics and papers I ll cite tonight are in a sense provisional, many of them very recent, and all of them just a part of the scientific picture as we have it, which of course is itself open to revision in the light of more evidence. But it seems to me to be a central part of that picture, a trend, emerging from many different sources and quarters. I don t pretend to know what s going to happen to humanity as our world heats up, but I want to at least begin to take seriously the possibility that our prospects for doing the right thing, the just thing, when it comes to climate change, are fading. I understand that other people who work on philosophy and climate are speaking in this series, but it won t hurt to give you a feel for what I mean by the connection between the morality of climate change and the facts of our warming world. Philosophers have a reputation for otherworldliness, and no doubt that s deserved, but a part of moral philosophy depends on facts and is rooted in them. Moral philosophy itself is divided into metaethics, normative ethics, and practical or applied ethics: Metaethics is concerned with the presuppositions behind our ethical concerns. Is morality relative? Are there moral facts? What do words like justice and courage really mean? Normative ethics, on the other hand, is an attempt to find a decision procedure, a moral algorithm, rules or principles which might help us make decisions in particular cases and come to reasoned moral judgements. Practical or applied ethics, which is what you re going to get tonight, is the attempt to think about real, live moral problems, using the fruits of both metaethics and normative ethics. Is abortion wrong? Is euthanasia morally acceptable and if so under what conditions? What rules ought to govern the use of animals in medical experiments? This branch of ethics, in a way unlike the others, depends on facts in the world. You need not worry about the morality of GM crops unless someone finds a way to produce GM crops. Similarly, you can t really get a handle on justice and climate change without knowing something about the facts of our warming world. So the moral dimension of climate change depends on the facts as we know them. When I say that our grip on the facts of climate change is changing, I mean that certain blanks in our understanding are being filled in with more and more research. I also mean that some facts themselves are changing too, facts having to do with such things emissions rates. It s worth locating the moral dimension of climate change in our thinking about climate change generally. The so called problem of climate change is not really one problem, but thousands, seen in 1

2 different ways, under different aspects, and if we neglect this truth, we re bound to fall into confusion. As Wittgenstein put it, any good philosophical problem is held up by a number of confusions, and if you shine strong light on one side of a problem, it casts long shadows on other sides. So you have to circle around the problem again and again to illuminate all the confusions that hold it in place. So too with climate change. If you think about it just in terms of morality or politics or economics or science, you fall into a kind of short-sightedness. You see some solutions as obvious, others as impossible, but sometimes this is just a trick of the conceptual light. So while I ll focus tonight on climate change framed in terms of right and wrong, justice and injustice, I d like to keep a bit of modesty in mind. I know that morality isn t all there is to climate change. But it is, nevertheless, somewhere near the heart of our thoughts about action simply because moral values lie conceptually deeper than most other values. And such things as economic and political values often depend on our prior thoughts about right and wrong as such. In the course of an ordinary day you can hear climate change discussed in terms of emissions rights, politics, technology, economics, science, international law, justice, psychology, and on and on. Notice, in all this, that framing the problem of climate change in one way rather than another closes down some avenues of enquiry and opens up others. If you think of climate change as a technological problem a difficulty we have in getting energy or getting the balance of our atmospheric gasses right you re likely to think of technological solutions as the only solutions on offer. Maybe you ll think carbon capture and storage is the only way forward. But if you do focus on morality, on right and wrong and climate change, three sets of ethical arguments might move you. Three kinds of consideration, anyway, get the most attention. There are historical arguments, having to do with responsibility for the damage to our climate, which lead in one way or another to the conclusion that the moral burden for action falls heavily on us in the developed world. There are arguments for equal emissions rights, equal per capita shares of the Earth s common carbon sinks, based not on history but on how things now stand in the present. Again, the conclusion is that cuts are needed here in the developed world, while we leave room for the developing world to grow. And there are arguments about our future, perhaps arguments depending on negative duties to leave the world in a habitable state for those who come after us rights to a green future as this series would have it which seem to fall on all of us equally, all of us who are alive and at large and therefore in a position to do something about how the world might one day be. I m going to suggest, tonight, that these three familiar arguments are under a new kind of pressure, a pressure which comes from our changing understanding of the facts of climate change. Each of these popular lines of thought, I ll argue, must now be revised. History Consider first the historical argument for action on climate change. This turns, in an obvious way, on the connection in our thinking between causal and moral responsibility. During the last century, the argument goes, the developed countries in Europe and North America produced such an abundance of greenhouse gas emissions that our world is now damaged, changing into a less hospitable place. The changes we ve caused result in a lot of unnecessary suffering, both now and in our future poignantly and relevantly, much of that suffering will fall disproportionately on people who, historically, had little to do with its cause. The developed world is causally responsible for this suffering, and if we think that one has a moral obligation to do something about the unnecessary suffering one causes, then the developed world has a moral obligation to do something about climate change. Peter Singer makes the point, starkly, in his book One World: 2

3 To put it in terms a child could understand, as far as the atmosphere is concerned, the developed nations broke it. If we believe that people should contribute to fixing something in proportion to their responsibility for breaking it, then the developed nations owe it to the rest of the world to fix the problem with the atmosphere. Strong, straightforward, and compelling stuff. It seems to follow, swiftly, that the developed world ought to follow a path of swift emissions reductions, as well as offer to do something about the unavoidable trouble that s already in the pipeline. You can hear something similar in arguments which depend on the so-called polluter pays principle. It appears in the 1992 Rio Declaration, accepted by 130 nations: National authorities should endeavour to promote the internalization of environmental costs and the use of economic instruments, taking into account the approach that the polluter should, in principle, bear the cost of pollution. There is also talk of common but differentiated responsibilities in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and indeed many developing countries, notably Brazil, have argued at length in an effort to ensure that historical responsibility at least remains on the table in climate change negotiations. What I want to suggest, or at least begin thinking about, is the possibility that the history of emissions is no longer a simple, straightforward story, and that, perhaps, we need to rethink the connection between causal and moral responsibility and the role of the developed world when it comes to taking action on climate change. The trouble has to do with the shifting facts of climate change. It might have been unthinkable, perhaps 5 or 10 years ago, that emissions in the developing world would increase as they in fact have. This is roughly how cumulative CO2 emissions looked about 10 years ago, in the year 2000, according to the World Resources Institute.. 3

4 But a study of projections undertaken in 2008 by Botzen et al shows that the cumulative emissions story is set to change, and perhaps with it, a part of the moral dimension of climate change. They write: Currently the USA has the highest level of cumulative CO2 emissions, followed by Western Europe, China, Japan and India. However, this ranking changes dramatically in the coming decades. In 2031 India will have emitted more CO2 than Japan. In 2021 China will have larger cumulative CO2 emissions than Western Europe, and in 2052 China will surpass the USA as the largest cumulative emitter. India is expected to have a larger total of cumulative emissions than Western Europe shortly after What does this shift in the facts of cumulative emissions mean for talk of responsibility and action? For some in our world, those outside the developed and parts of the developing world, those poor enough to have little effect on cumulative emissions, it doesn t mean much. They still have moral grounds for insisting on action. But you might think that in about ten years China will be responsible for more cumulative damage to the planet than Europe, and, therefore, it will have a larger moral responsibility to take action than Europe. Maybe in the middle of this century, China will have a larger historical obligation to act than even the United States. Perhaps, nearer then end of this century, India will be more responsible for damage to our world than we are in parts of the West, and perhaps it too should then have a larger share of the moral burden for action. There are, however, wrinkles, and probably something more than a simple connection between causal and moral responsibility is now needed if we are to think our way through the changing facts of cumulative emissions. It s worth noticing that a lot of the emissions in the developing world are somehow partly ours, as they result from the production of goods that we buy. We have, in a way, outsourced our emissions. But even if we look away from this, does it make a difference that the West got there first? If our emissions hadn t been so high in the past, then China and other developing countries would not face the burden of moral trouble that they stand a good chance of being in relatively soon. In a sense, our generation, which knows better, is passing the hard moral choices on to those who will come after us, in our country and other countries. Does that force us to cut them a bit of moral slack, even as their emissions rise so dramatically? We are, after all, handing a problem to them. Did or does the West have an obligation to help the developing world leapfrog past dirty energy particularly since the developed world still has more cash and more power than those whose lives are just getting tolerable? Or should we think that China and perhaps India are in fact in worse shape, morally speaking, given that the bulk of their industrial history, unlike the West s, will happen against the backdrop of a clear understanding of climate change? I don t know how to answer these questions, but they are relatively new ones in reflection on the moral dimension of climate change, brought on by a shift in the facts as we know them. What s clear is that arguments for action based on cumulative emissions histories are shifting along with those histories. Other shifts are perhaps more interesting, certainly more worrying. 1 Botzen et al, called Cumulative CO2 emissions: shifting international responsibilities, Climate Policy, 8 (2008)

5 The present Some moral arguments for action on climate change depend not on the past but the present. They get us past a certain sort of recrimination an objection to historical arguments on the grounds of a lack of foreknowledge on the part of the West and move us all in the direction of equality with a clear and green conscience. You might think, for example, that however we got to where we are, the benefits and burdens associated with using fossil fuels ought now be shared out equally. That s what human beings ought to do with a limited, scarce and common resource. Maybe this is something you think follows from reflection on distributive justice or fairness. Maybe it has to do with emissions rights, which follow in a way from the rights that some argue all human beings have rights to a secure and free life, for example. If there are safe emissions levels, if we can think clearly about the planet s sinks as common resources to be divided up equally, then it follows pretty sharply that everyone on the planet has an equal right to emit within those safe limits. Perhaps you think in terms of a greenhouse budget, that some maximum concentration of greenhouses gasses in the atmosphere is acceptable, and we must divvy up the shares that remain equally, and take care to stay under that limit. Whichever of these lines you choose to take, given the enormous levels of emission per capita in the West, it s been argued on almost all sides that the West has an obligation to reign in its consumption, bringing it down and in line with others whose use of the planet s common resources is less reckless. This, anyway, is part of the thinking behind such things as the contraction and convergence model, advocated by the Global Commons Institute and endorsed by a very large number of people and organizations, as a means to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions equitably. The idea is that some safe global emissions ceiling is set, everyone has an equal right to emit greenhouse gasses beneath that ceiling, and countries get emissions budgets based on population. High per capita emissions in the developed world contract, leaving room for the developing world to develop its way out of poverty, while levels converge beneath some safe threshold and, together, wind down and avoid the worst of climate change. The plan has many supporters these quotations are from the Global Commons Institute s website. If we agree to per capita allowances for all by 2030 then assigned amounts for Annex One countries would be drastically reduced. However, because all countries would have assigned amounts, maximum use of global emissions trading would strongly reduce the cost of compliance. In such a scenario Industrial Countries would have to do more, but it would be cheaper and easier. Jan Pronk COP Dutch Environment Minister Liberal Democrats argue for the principle of contraction and convergence with the long-term goal of equalising per capita emissions globally. Chris Huhne, now the UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change When we ask the opinions of people from all circles, many people, in particular the scientists, think the emissions control standard should be formulated on a per capita basis. According to the UN Charter, everybody is born equal, and has inalienable rights to enjoy modern technological civilization. 5

6 China State Counsellor Dr Song Jian, COP We do not believe that the ethos of democracy can support any norm other than equal per capita rights to global environmental resources. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Prime Minister of India, 2002 The international climate regime should be based on legitimate principles of equity, such as longterm convergence of emission levels per capita in the various countries. Nicholas Sarkozy President of France 2008 In the final analysis the per capita emissions in emerging economies will meet those of industrialised countries. I cannot imagine the emerging economies will one day be permitted to emit more CO2 per capita than we in the industrialised countries. With this proposal, emerging nations with rapidly expanding economies could be on board the global climate negotiations scheduled for Angela Merkel President of Germany 2008 But, again, the facts are changing. Around ten years ago, this was, and some places it still is, the model used for thinking about contraction and convergence: The idea is that, fairly rapidly after 2000, developed countries have a steep drop in emissions to make, while China, India and the rest of the world can grow a bit, meeting us in 2030, where we all cruise downwards, eventually to nearly preindustrial levels in one hundred years or so. 6

7 The trouble is that, in 2012, the world looks much different than it did just ten or even five years ago. The developed world has not undertaken a programme of rapid per capita emissions reduction, and China, India and the rest have not just grown a bit, with their emissions likely to flatten out and on course to meet us on the way down in While it is a mixed bag, with some countries taking steps to lower emissions rates, and indeed emissions dipping in places during the recession, the trend in global emissions has always been upwards the global increase is now 45% on 1990 levels, coincidentally the date of the IPCC s first assessment report. According to a report published by the European Commission in September and another by the International Energy Agency this year, 2010 was a record year in terms of increasing emissions. The long term annual average increase in emissions from 1990 is 1.9%, but in 2010 the increase was 5.8%, the largest jump ever recorded. 2 This was driven partly by increases in China of 10% and India of 9%, as well as rises in the developed world, notably the USA. How far have we strayed from the lines on that graph? The USA s emissions have not dropped sharply, but increased by 11% on 1990 levels. China did not slowly grow, but passed the US as the world s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in Amazingly, again according to the European Commission, China s per capita emissions could equal US levels by 2017 it s thought China has already overtaken France and Spain. China has promised not to let itself reach US levels, but it is astonishing to think that a country with a billion more people in it could match the United States in its bloated per capita emissions rates in just 5 years. It s growth on an extraordinary scale. The trouble with the moral equation and present emissions is not just this mess of facts, but the time we have left between now and It made sense at the start of this century to talk about emissions rights and equal per capita shares, which we might divvy up and keep under a safe emissions limit. As we move closer to the scientifically mandated point of convergence, the 2030 deadline and the so called safe threshold, our ability to do the right thing, our room for moral manoeuvring, wanes. Emissions rates, on this model, should have begun falling rapidly in the West 5 or 10 years ago, but they have generally increased. Per capita emissions in the developing world had a bit of breathing room, but were not expected to rocket up past our own, already excessive levels. Kant s dictum, ought implies can, is something worth reflecting on in this connection. It makes sense to say that we ought to do something only if we actually can do it. It makes sense to call for climate justice, to demand that emissions be shared out equally among the people of the world beneath some safe threshold, only if this is something we in fact can do. There is now at least the possibility that it is now too late to do the right thing. As the space on the graph between us and 2030 compresses, and the lines we have to contemplate riding out become steeper and steeper and therefore further and further from the realm of the physically possible, the possibility that it s too late is genuinely before us. Facts here intrude on morality, and sometimes the possibility of doing the right or just or equitable thing can slip beyond our grasp if we let it. This kind of thing isn t entirely outside our experience. Suppose you re at an office party, your friend has been drinking, and you know he s going to make a fool of himself as he walks towards the boss. You ve got a few moments to grab his arm and save him from trouble he doesn t deserve. But in that moment, at a certain point, it becomes too late for you to act, and in a single quiet breath, all your inner reflection about what you ought to do changes, passes from a live practical question to something theoretical, to a moot discussion of what you might have done or should have done. 2 PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and JRC European Commission, Long term trend in global CO2 emissions, 2011 report ( IEA CO2 emissions from fuel combustion 2010, 7

8 Maybe it becomes regret. We ve all felt that, that sense of a chance slipping away. It s possible to have that feeling about sharing out emissions rights. It s possible to have that feeling about this part of the moral dimension of climate change. This takes us, finally, to reflection on the ethics of sustainability, and our future. The facts about the future are related to these facts about the present, and again the idea is that our ability to do the right thing is, in a way, being compromised by the time that we have left to act. The future Arguments for action now sometimes tie a moral demand to some future good. These arguments are hypothetical in form: if we value a sustainable world, a green future, a nice and habitable planet like the one we ve got for those who come after us, then, the argument goes, such and such a sort of mitigation strategy is now morally demanded. Sometimes the argument is reversed: if we want to avoid a future with a lot of miserable lives in it suffering we might dodge if we choose wisely now then, again, such and such a mitigation strategy is morally demanded of us. Commitments to a sustainable future, when they do appear in international negotiations, typically mention the Brundtland Report s definition: sustainability implies meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The question at the back of everyone s mind when they hear this, the question which needs now to shift to the front, is this: is it possible for our needs and future needs to be met? There are now a lot of people around we were just joined by number 7 billion, and it looks like we ll have 10 billion before the world s population levels out. Most of our basic needs are met by burning fossil fuels. In other words, the moral argument for action now in the hope of securing a decent future boils down to the question of whether we really can act to meet everyone s needs. In a nutshell, is sustainability possible? Is it possible to meet our own needs and leave a habitable world in our wake? That s partly an empirical question. The world seems to have settled on two kinds of targets or limits the thought is that if we pass them we re in for dangerous climate change and an unsustainable world. One is 2 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, and indeed this target was identified at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Cancun in 2010, which called for all countries to take urgent action to limit the increase in global average temperature to beneath this temperature threshold. Some nations, particularly low lying island states with a lot to lose as sea levels rise, have argued that 1.5 degrees or less is the only safe maximum. How likely are we to stay under the 2 degree target? We have of course, already warmed the world by.74 degrees, and another half a degree or so is thought to already be in the climate system. In a paper which appeared in October of this year, the examination of published emission scenarios from different climate models found that in the set of scenarios with a likely chance of staying below 2 C, and by that the mean merely a better than 66% chance, emissions must peak and begin falling rapidly very soon, between 2010 and As they put it, 3 Joeri Rogelj et al, Emission pathways consistent with a 2 C global temperature limit Nature Climate Change, Volume: 1, (2011)

9 Without a firm commitment to put in place the mechanisms to enable an early global emissions peak followed by steep reductions thereafter, there are significant risks that the 2 C target, endorsed by so many nations, is already slipping out of reach. The related target is 450 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is thought to be the maximum we can emit and stay beneath the 2 degree threshold. The level at present is about 390 ppm. It turns out that while the projected date at which we 450 is unavoidable is still several years ahead, the choices we make now about building power plants and extracting energy can lock us in to pathways that overshoot 450 much sooner. According to a report released last month by the International Energy Agency, the world's existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of the carbon budget we ve got left if we want to stay under 450 ppm. If trends continue and we build more fossil fuel burning energy plants, by 2015, 90% of the available "carbon budget" will spent. By 2017, the remaining carbon budget that might keep us under 450 ppm will be gone, and we ll have no chance at all of staying under 2 degrees. As the Guardian reported, "The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]... If we do not have an international agreement, whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door to [holding temperatures to 2C of warming] will be closed forever," said Birol. Are we likely to have such an agreement? Copenhagen was viewed by many as the world s last chance at a global agreement, and of course that did not materialise. As I write this, newspaper reports from the current UN Climate Conference in Durban say that the world's leading economies now privately admit that no new global climate agreement will be reached before The EU is pressing for targets now, but the US, Canada, Russia, Japan, India and China say new negotiations should not begin until 2015, to come into effect in 2020 at the earliest. The IEA, again in its 2011 report, projects that world CO2 emissions from fuel combustion will continue to grow unabated, albeit at a lower rate... [this] is in line with the worst case scenario presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which projects a world average temperature increase of between 2.4 C and 6.4 C by This jives with the results of a 2009 poll of climate experts, undertaken by the Guardian, which showed that, Almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to 2C will succeed... An average rise of 4-5C by the end of this century is more likely, they say, given soaring carbon emissions and political constraints. What exactly does passing the 2 degree limit mean? No one is sure. It s synonymous with so called dangerous climate change or runaway climate change. The IPCC associate temperature rises above 2 degrees with more and more negative impacts. Mark Lynas put some flesh on the these conservative bones with a book called Six Degrees, an attempt to work out what we re in for as the world heats up, degree by degree, by looking at what the world has been like, in its long history, at those temperatures. It s just one take on our prospects past 2 degrees, but it s well-researched, compelling stuff. Here s a summary: Between 2 and 3 degrees of warming, one tipping point is crossed. Enough heat to cause the eventual complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet is in the system, which would eventually raise global sea levels by as much as seven metres and change the planet s weather systems. Heat waves are likely to be responsible for many deaths each summer in Europe, coral reefs die and the marine 9

10 food chain is disrupted, and the loss of fresh water from melting glaciers and snowpack affects both food production and the availability of drinking water. Between 3 and 4 degrees, a large tipping point is crossed, where it s thought that climate mechanisms might run out of control, with tipping points leading to the emission of more greenhouse gasses and more tipping points leading to the emission of still more greenhouse gasses, and so on until warming is, in effect, runaway. If the Amazon rainforest collapses, dries and burns, as is consistent with a 3 degree world, the carbon released could be enough to push us up another 1.5 degrees past a four degree world. Beyond three degrees, Africa, Australia and parts of North American turn into deserts on some climate models food production obviously suffers, and water becomes scarce. Between 4 and 5 degrees another tipping point is crossed, the Arctic permafrost melts, and huge amounts of methane and carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere, further increasing the effects of climate change and pushing us up to 5 or 6 degrees. The Arctic melts, again increasing sea level. Humanity is heads towards the poles, as other parts of the world become uninhabitable. Beyond 5 degrees... there s nothing like a clear picture. The world hasn t been that hot for 55 million years. Lynas talks of methane hydrates on the ocean floor erupting up in warmer waters and pushing the greenhouse effect out of control, and real questions arise here about the possibility of human beings joining the other 95% of the earth s species in extinction. There s talk of the Earth becoming a hot, desolate, lifeless ball, like Venus. So what can we make of arguments for sustainability in the light of all this? It seems to me that such arguments can take still take hold of us, with a particular sort of urgency, but perhaps only for a few years more, after which it becomes more and more likely that we ll be unable to do anything to avoid the prospect of runaway climate change. I have to admit that it s not easy to say things like this and keep a straight face. One sounds very much like some end-of-the-world cultist, warning that the end is nigh, but the voices telling us that we ve only got a few years left to leave a habitable world in our wake are coming from the authors of peer reviewed papers, the heads of respected research institutions, the writers of books that win the Royal Society Science Prize. Conclusions I ll say again that I don t know if our prospects really are this dim, but I think there s enough respectable talk along these lines out there now to warrant taking it seriously. In the light of all this, what is morally required at the level of governments? I used to think that more or less all of the moral weight fell on our leaders in the West to take strong action on climate change it was easy to say that the rich ought to do what s right for the poor. But now those who are still largely poor are contributing to the problem of climate change in an unanticipated way, and as that contribution increases, the harder the moral arguments bite on those outside the West. There are, as I say, wrinkles, but that s the broad brush conclusion. It s not just us in the developed world. Even the poor have an obligation to act on climate change, right now. Turning from emissions histories to facts about our present and future, it seems clear that we have a lot of thinking to do about what it means to be one of the few human beings alive and in a position to make a difference to the future of the planet. If you think of all the people who have ever lived, it s us, you and me, our generation, who might actually be the ones who have one last chance to do something remarkable for future human beings. There is this new fact of increased urgency if it s true, the possibility is that we have only five years or so, at most, to take the required measures to 10

11 cap and then reduce global emissions. For those in charge in 2020, perhaps, it will be too late. It s us, and that pressure can mean it s also incumbent upon us to do extraordinary things. I m reminded of Kierkegaard s line: To become human does not come that easily. He had no idea. What we ve got before us is a choice, a chance very few people have ever had. We can be real human beings for once, we can be principled, people who choose the needs of others over our own, because we recognize it as the right thing to do. Or we can squander that chance, and cave in to the darker parts of our nature. Miss a chance to be human beings. Maybe there s now no time for us to do the decent, democratic thing and vote the bastards out. Maybe there s no time for petitions and marches it s possible that we really do have only a handful of years. Before you throw in the towel it s worth recognizing the fact that a lot can happen in a year. That s time for concerted effort on our part, and the only thing I can think of that stands a chance of having the desired effect in the time that we ve got is disruptive, sustained civil disobedience on an enormous scale. The sort of thing that makes it impossible to carry on as we are. At least we now have clear targets: the construction of any new fossil fuel burning power plant, the extraction of fossil fuels from the ground, the building of new infrastructure that locks us in to an unsustainable world, any government that fails to take demonstrable steps towards capping and then reducing emissions by 2020 all of it looks like fair game to me. The trouble is that there aren t many people inclined to take action polls bounce around, but it s often only about half of us who really think climate change is a serious and urgent problem. This number falls when economic times are tough. But if that s true, then those of us who do think that we face an urgent problem have an even greater responsibility to get in the way of business as usual, and insist on nothing less than real action, right now. I heard Kofi Anan say that political leaders make good followers if their people have the strength to show them the way. We can only hope he was right about that. 11