Decade Zero

When the forests have been burned
their darkness remains.
--W.S. Merwin.

Our names, scratched in stone, as faint as the hours of our lives, or the rubbed out pencil marks you find in a book indicating nothing but the wonderment of the imagination's delight in picking out a word, a phrase, that unlocked some room in your unknown heart.

There is time without me & you..and that time is now. Drink well, Khayyam. The cup is empty!

~
A dinner in the old historical part of town, an enclosed space with high walls blocking out the cacophony from outside. A school friend from another era who keeps his rifles on the wall. The conversation is dominated, no matter how much we put a brave face on it, by the "theme"-God, that's a good way of negating it!- of ageing and illness (since one friend recently passed away and another barely survived a heart attack).

He asks, bemused, like a wild animal caught in the lights, a moment of reckoning dawning upon him: where did all the years go? As if no-one else had asked that, as if human beings hadn't been asking that question right from the start.

~

N. Klein has some startling facts in her new book. State and private fossil fuel companies have 2,800 gigatons of carbon on their accounts (coal, oil and gas deposits they have on their books). To keep the chances of global temperatures not rising by more than 2C requires that we don't extract more than 565 gigatons. That means roughly 4/5 ths needs to stay in the ground. That means that all the investments these companies make in terms of exploration and extraction are "stranded assets".

On 2C Kevin Anderson has the most succinct summary. Two degrees, remember, has now been upgraded to "extremely dangerous" (which is why everyone emphasizes 1.5). But for the earth to stabilize at + 2C depends on assumptions about improvements in technology and peak emissions (for Stern those are supposed to have happened by 2015-16). The later we reach a peak the worse it is because the stock of co2 will continue to be in the atmosphere (for on average a century). 

Over the last decade carbon emissions in the States has in fact fallen (by 12%) but global increases remain high (roughly 2.7% each year over the last century). Also, some academic work suggests that the gains made in less carbon are offset by the increase in methane. Do we, then, need to look at co2-e? 

What gets missed in this story-and where Klein is so good-is the way in which "innovation" is leading to other, in some cases "dirtier" types of extraction (tar sands). Fracking, for example, results (it is estimated) in 30% greater leaks of methane than from usual natural gas extraction. And methane, though shorter lived (14 years) is 36 times more effective at trapping heat than co2. Unsurprisingly, methane levels in the atmosphere have increased (figures?) and at a quicker rate. 

Brown coal production in Germany is at its highest level since 1990. So, co2 emissions actually went up 2011-12 (and have fallen only now for the first time in three years). Czech republic, Poland too (N. Klein). 

Is this the last chance to make a change, decade zero, as it were? Think about increases in population, the shift in population from low-income to middle-income, urbanization, the infrastructure and demand for consumer goods that follows, and you begin to see that we're being locked into a pattern of development that can have long-term consequences. And the longer we delay radical change to our production and consumption habits, the type of economies we have, the more difficult it will be to stabilize temperatures without very significant damages. Our decisions today may be locking us in to an unenviable future. 

Maybe I should have linked to Bowie's Five Years. 

The top ten countries (mischievously I've included the EU as one country) in the world produce 80% of all co2. China, which is the highest in absolute terms (25% of the total) still only produces half of what the states does in per capita terms. India, which is fourth in absolute terms produces at level that is 1/10th of America in per capita terms. So, if India and China even come close to America you can imagine what the implications will be.   

And, of course, back in the land of the pure there is a massive interest in coal production (since, apparently, we have the seventh largest reserve of the dirtiest kind). In fact, one of your former students is involved in a Pak-China six-year project to extract 4.2 m tonnes of coal per year. 

A photo taken by a friend who is working on people who are being displaced as a result of the coal projects: