The Moral Equivalent of War
The world climate summit, recently held in Durban, South Africa, illustrated once again how difficult it is to get the biggest carbon emitters in the world to take serious measures to curb their output even in the face of threats to their very existence. The summit was saved, sort of, from abject failure by a last minute agreement to meet in 2015 to discuss binding limits by 2020. What made it happen was the agreement of China and India to sign on, which made it safe for the US to sign on.
You may remember that the world’s leading economies agreed recently in the Copenhagen Summit that we must keep global warming within 2 degrees C. Inherent in that figure is a compromise between what level of climate disruption is acceptable and what sacrifices we are willing to make to meet that target.
Here is the scenario we are facing, according to Kevin Anderson, director of the UK’s leading climate research institution, the Tyndall Energy Program. In order to have a 50/50 chance of meeting the 2 degree C target, we have a cumulative carbon budget of about 1.4 trillion tons that we have to stay within between now and 2050. If we burn just the proven reserves that we have now, we will have put twice our budgeted amount into the atmosphere and are headed for a 6 degree C future. So, if, as it appears, we aren’t willing to follow a realistic plan to stay within 2 degrees, why don’t we just settle for, say, 4 degrees? The reason, according to Anderson, is clear: "A 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable." The last part refers to the probability that feedback effects, such as melting the permafrost or releasing CO2 sequestered at the seabed, will send warming far beyond the 4 degree mark. In other words, we are probably looking at another mass extinction. It has happened six times already, although perhaps not in exactly this way.
So, going beyond 2 degrees C of warming must be avoided at all costs. If we wait until 2020, as we are currently intending, to start reducing emissions, all countries will have to then reduce emissions at a rate of 10%/year. When the Soviet Union collapsed they had a 5% reduction. Ten per cent is unheard of. Even if we could do it, it is unlikely that China and India could.
The approach to climate change by industrialized countries has been, "How can we address climate change without endangering economic growth?" Years of study by our best minds have not produced a solution. Many have concluded that it is the growth economy itself that is at the root of climate change. The fact is, we don’t want our growth economy to change and we don’t want climate change that will jeopardize it.
In Asia, monkeys are easily caught by putting a fruit in a tethered jar that is sized so that, when the monkey grabs the fruit, he is unable to get his hand out of the jar. As it happens, very few monkeys will abandon the fruit even as they see their captor coming to take them.
My basis for hope lies in the premise that we haven’t seen our captors yet and that we will be smart enough to drop the fruit soon enough to avoid getting caught. The growth economy is our fruit in the jar. If we don’t drop it, we’re done for.
Underlying all this is the fact that we aren’t convinced that our survival could be at stake. And why should we be? Never have we had more control over our world; never have we been more ensconced in the world of our making and unaware of the world without.
Another basis for hope is that World War II has shown that we can drop everything and mobilize a huge coordinated effort once convinced of the danger. Unfortunately, it usually requires a war or other imminent threat of violence from humans to trigger it. It was that same war effort that ended the Great Depression. What if we could marshal those forces when the threat was our own behavior and not somebody else’s?
In 1906, William James wrote an essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in which he said that since war was the only thing that fully engaged the human spirit, a pacifist needed to find the moral equivalent to satisfy that need constructively. He didn’t foresee the situation we are in now. What is required here is an effort that is the moral equivalent of war. We are fighting for our existence and we can’t let the economy or our individual lives, much less our comforts and conveniences, stand in the way of what must be done. Jimmy Carter used James’ phrase to characterize what was needed to face this problem thirty years ago. We then voted him out of office in favor of Reagan’s "Morning in America." We would be far better off today if we had started to transition then, and we definitely can’t afford not to act now. We can get our governments to move that 2020 date up if, as after Pearl Harbor, we have the courage and the will to do what needs to be done.
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