Nations that export fossil fuels often find it grossly inconvenient to believe in man-made climate change, and understandably so. Who really wants a responsible carbon budget that respects the finite nature of the atmosphere and the oceans when you can make a killing by exporting dirty oil? Real innovation might even result in a loss of hydrocarbon jobs and easy revenue for lazy governments, and that's bad.
Therefore, climate change driven by fossil fuels must be a hoax; a scientific fraud or another attempt by elitists at the United Nations to impose one world government on us all. So, long live the carbon liberation movement and Exxon Mobile.
Whenever I get e-mails from these happy carbon makers, I kindly invite them to open a profitable business on lifeless Mars, where CO2 has become the dominant gas. I also recommend that they try fishing on an ocean of carbolic acid.
Now or Never: Why We Need to Act Now to Achieve a Sustainable Future, by Tim Flannery, HarperCollins, 167 pages, $22.99
Tim Flannery's important and elegant essay, Now or Never, probably won't sway many members of the oil-exporting crowd or bridge the solitude. But it might help to broaden a grassroots political movement that forces our political leaders out of the camp of libertarian carbon makers and into the common-sense realm of caring about our children. Flannery, a world-renowned paleontologist and specialist in the evolution of mammals, argues that we will probably fail to achieve sustainability unless we observe an ancient commandment: “Thou shalt not steal – even from future generations.”
So this essay doesn't beat about the bush. The author of the bestselling The Weather Makers and Australia's proud version of David Suzuki, Flannery makes a convincing case that we are about to provoke a dangerous biological meltdown driven by climate warming and our addiction to fossil fuels. “Humanity is now between a tipping point and a point of no return,” he writes, “and only the most strenuous efforts on our part are capable of returning us to safe ground.”
Given that the atmosphere is the smallest of the world's vital organs, it is also the most vulnerable to carbon pollution. Flannery soberly notes that the oceans are 500 times larger than the great aerial sea, and they are already acidifying. The last time the polar ice caps melted, 250 million years ago, the ocean became green with algae and belched hydrogen sulphide. The fishing was really bad.
Flannery wants to believe that the civilization that abolished slavery an do the same with oil and its carbon legacy
Here's the climate problem as the best science sees it. The consumption of fossil fuels has taken CO2 to astonishing levels of 385 parts per million in the atmosphere. The evidence suggests that we are about to surge to 450 ppm. The latest science warns that we can't avoid a Martian-style carbon economy (and not much business takes place there) unless we stabilize emissions at 350 ppm. That requires some restraint, which is not our most polished virtue as a species. Moreover, international climate scientists have “underestimated the scale of the task by two-thirds,” Flannery adds.
