http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/10/1...n_blindness.php
Carbon Blindness
Alex Steffen
October 13, 2006


Alex Steffen edits Worldchanging.com , a leading planet sustainability website. He is also the editor of the forthcoming book Worldchanging: A User's Guide For The 21st Century (available starting November 1 at Powell's Books), an overview of the latest tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future.

For those of us who have spent years warning that climate change is a problem of the highest magnitude, these are gratifying days. Politicians, business leaders, labor unionists, celebrities and religious figures all seem, finally, to be listening to the science and beginning to hear its meaning: We must change, dramatically, at once.

This is a Very Good Thing. At the same time, I am beginning to have misgivings about some of the debate emerging around climate change—and perhaps not in the direction you might think.

We still have much convincing to do—and a lot of denial to brush aside—to get action commensurate with the magnitude of the problem. But that is not what is beginning to worry me. What has begun to set off my inner alarm bells is a new meme emerging from the ranks of the newly-converted: Fight climate change at all costs.

Now, just in case I have to say it again: Climate change is real; it is here; it is part of a looming crisis which presents a greater threat to our civilization than anything we have ever faced; and we need to act decisively and immediately to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gasses. It is, indeed, time to get real.

What is worrisome, though, is the idea, which one is beginning to hear all over the political map, that climate change trumps every other environmental issue, or, even more, that climate change is not an environmental issue at all. These arguments usually precede a call for some action which reduces carbon output but has other demonstrably negative environmental impacts, whether that's damming a river for hydropower, launching into a massive nuclear energy program or seeding the ocean to produce a plankton bloom.

The climate crisis we face will not be bested through the kind of thinking that got us into the problem in the first place: because, seen with any degree of rationality, the climate crisis cannot be distinguished from the overall planetary crisis of environmental degradation, massive poverty, conflict and inequity of which it is a part.

I am pro-technofix. I believe that climate change can only be contained through ingenuity and innovation. But innovating to solve the wrong problem usually fails as a strategy, and the problem we have today, I believe, is not that our climate is changing, per se, but that we have created an unsustainable civilization which is deeply instable.

Therefore, our task is not just to reduce our carbon emissions, but to do it in the context of a renewed and restored international order; not just to grow a more efficient economy, but a more dynamically fair one as well; not just to stave off the worst effects of cooking the planet but to protect and promote the health of ecosystems around the world; not just to fear runaway global warming but to move strongly towards a civilization which doesn't destroy nature and people's lives to generate fleeting advantages for a tiny fraction of a percentage of the world's population. This, I am sure, is an all-or-nothing fight, because all these issues—climate, biodiversity, population, poverty, conflict, public health, toxics, terrorism—are bound together and part of the same fabric.

To think otherwise is to suffer from a carbon blindness which could lead us actions which undermine the future, taken in the name of the future itself.