George Monboit environmental writer for The Guardian, shares a must read rant about the failure of governments to response to the climate crisis.
It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth's living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue "sustained growth", the primary cause of the biosphere's losses.
The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure – though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives – that it runs faster than ever before.
Indeed,
Monbiot lays it out realistically. We. are. on. our. own. And the sooner we realize that fact the sooner we can stop wasting time and energy and get to work.
The action – if action there is – will mostly be elsewhere. Those governments which retain an interest in planet Earth will have to work alone, or in agreement with like-minded nations. There will be no means of restraining free riders, no means of persuading voters that their actions will be matched by those of other countries.
That we have missed the chance of preventing two degrees of global warming now seems obvious. That most of the other planetary boundaries will be crossed, equally so. So what do we do now?
Monbiot offers some important suggestions and I would like to build on them. To dismiss the idea that there is nothing that the individual can do is to relinquish our last remaining hope to positively impact our future. I disagree that we have to give up on keeping warming to 2C degrees. There are proven low cost actions that can be taken and some are already working to this end. Reducing the short lived climate pollutants (SLCP's) can work to mitigate the worst effects of climate change but it's going to take all of us and we need to get to work now.
The work that is already being done to reduce the SLCP's in Africa by replacing wood and coal burning cookstoves is important. As is the work of some governments to clean diesel exhausts and introduce methane initiatives. But as is often the case they are missing the elephant in the room. We know that the greatest source of the Short Lived Climate Pollutants is livestock production (pdf). So that leaves us with a simple low cost solution that we can all participate in by eliminating or reducing our consumption of meat and animal products.
And read Monbiot's piece. It's well worth your time.