98 months, and counting

Governments moved quickly to rescue our banks. Why does it take any longer to act to save the planet from runaway warming?

We now have only 98 months before the world enters a new, more perilous phase of global warming, and that’s if we are lucky. Glaciers around the world may be increasing their rate of retreat, but something else is also beginning to move. When was the last time you can recall a former American vice-president calling on the youth of the world to commit widespread acts of civil disobedience?

The Bush administration’s ad hoc disregard of international law may be familiar, but the audience did a double take when Al Gore, speaking in New York in September, surprised the next generation by telling them to rip up the domestic rule book.

He called it “stock fraud” when fossil fuel companies create the impression to potential investors that climate change shouldn’t make them think twice before buying shares.

“I believe we have reached the stage,” said Gore, “where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”

His comments followed the extraordinary emergence in the UK of case law that is beginning to legitimate previously illegal environmental direct action.

Six Greenpeace campaigners were brought to trial last month facing damage claims. They climbed a chimney at the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in an attempt to close it down (declaration of interest – I am on the board of Greenpeace UK), getting as far as daubing the word “Gordon” on the smokestack before an injunction stopped them finishing off with the words “bin it”.

But at the trial, the jury refused to convict them after hearing expert witness evidence on the threat of climate change. They accepted the “lawful excuse” defence, which allows property to be damaged if it is done in the name of preventing damage to property elsewhere.

The occasion was symbolic because Kingsnorth is the focus of a debate about whether or not the government will allow a new wave of coal-fired power stations. At the Labour party conference, the business secretary, John Hutton, scaremongered that Britain’s lights would go out if they were not built. And in his keynote speech, the prime minister, Gordon Brown, called for a new generation of “clean coal” plants.

Speaking almost simultaneously in the US, Al Gore stated explicitly: “Clean coal does not exist.” The energy cognoscenti will be aware that there is a term for one of the most polluting types of fossil fuel – it is “brown coal”.

But while one legal tide seemed to be turning last month, we discovered that another was rising in a far more worrying fashion.

The biosphere – our oceans, forests, fields and atmosphere – is, in reality, the global economy’s parent company. It can only produce so many resources and absorb so much waste each year. But, measured using the ecological footprint – a conservative assessment of our rates of consumption and waste production – since the mid-1980s, humanity has been overshooting available biocapacity, running up an ecological debt.

Demand on nature’s services is exceeding supply. Taking a typical calendar year, the date at which humanity goes into the environmental red has been creeping ever forward. Comparing like with like (the data sources and methodology are continually being improved), this year the world ran into ecological debt on September 23, five days earlier than last year.

Considering that it took governments in the UK and US just a week to drop decades of hardened economic practice to save the financial system (a subsidiary of the environment) from meltdown, nationalising banks at great public expense, we should be asking why it takes any longer to act to save the planet from runaway warming.

With talk of new runways and coal-fired power stations, the government is engaged in the environmental equivalent of promoting unguaranteed sub-prime mortgages with no credit checks and telling banks with no assets to keep lending.

While the potentially irreversible environmental damage of such developments is familiar, the economic value is increasingly under question. Following doubts raised by voices as diverse as the former government chief scientific adviser, David King, and the Cooperative Bank, a new report last month called Plane Truths from the World Development Movement and my own organisation, nef, questioned the economic value of aviation growth to both rich and poor countries alike. At least, reportedly, the cabinet ministers Hilary Benn and David Miliband are opposing new coal plants that are not capable of capturing and safely storing their own emissions.

From overheated economies in meltdown, to an overheating planet with melting icecaps, it’s now 98 months and counting …

Ref: Guardian