Global Disaster or Sustainability?: The Need for Deep Political Reform to Save the World

Will we take up the challenge, personal and political, of building the movement for fundamental political and policy change that is needed to address the crisis that faces us all? James Speth argues on the basis of current science that if we continue along our current path of political and economic decision-making, we will have made the world unlivable by the end of this century. While so much of the discussion of global climate change misses the forest for the trees by focusing on such a narrow range of elements that we never get to see the big picture that results from this science, Speth brings the big picture into focus, and challenges us to ACT NOW, or face the fact that we and our children will be witnessing the decline of the world into global disaster over the coming decades.

According to James Speth, we need to build a "mighty political force" for fundamental political and economic change, and this is now our most basic task and challenge. The environmental movement has been far too timid politically, and unless all environmentalists team up with the environmental justice movement and begin to work for more fundamental forms of political and policy change, we will have little chance of saving our world for even this century.

Summary of book from Yale Press: How serious are the threats to our environment? Here is one measure of the problem: if we continue to do exactly what we are doing, with no growth in the human population or the world economy, the world in the latter part of this century will be unfit to live in. Of course human activities are not holding at current levels—they are accelerating, dramatically—and so, too, is the pace of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment, and toxification. In this book Gus Speth, author of Red Sky at Morning and a widely respected environmentalist, begins with the observation that the environmental community has grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to decline, to the point that we are now at the edge of catastrophe.

Speth contends that this situation is a severe indictment of the economic and political system we call modern capitalism. Our vital task is now to change the operating instructions for today’s destructive world economy before it is too late. The book is about how to do that.

James Gustave Speth, a distinguished leader and founder of environmental institutions over the past four decades, is dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He was awarded Japan’s Blue Planet Prize for “a lifetime of creative and visionary leadership in the search for science-based solutions to global environmental problems.”

Today NPR's Diane Rehm Show hosted Speth for a discussion of his book and his vision of what we need to do--Check out this program for an introduction to the major themes of Speth's book.

The "Fierce Urgency of NOW"!

Now, more than ever--in the face of global climate change, the new energy crisis, and the increasing militarization of our lives under the shadow of a perpetual war on terrorism eroding all we have cherished about our democratic way of life--we live in urgent need of a creative new vision and approach to politics and policy in the United States.

While the campaign of Barack Obama has inspired many of us by its invocation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s words and spirit, it still remains unclear whether the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party will in 2008 be able to live up to the spiritual wisdom and challenge embodied in King's phrase, "the fierce urgency of now."

Given the wild cards of the superdelegates and the Michigan and Florida primary debacle, the arithmetic of the Democratic campaign indicates that neither Obama nor Clinton will have enough delegates by this summer to wrap up the nomination simply by virtue of completing all the state primaries. This means the decisions of the Democratic Party leaders in the coming weeks about how the Party will resolve this likely standoff and deal with both the superdelegate and the Michigan/Florida wild cards will be pivotal to ensuring a Democratic nomination process that has legitimacy with both Democratic and national voters.

Two things are already clear: 1) If the Democratic Party fails to resolve the superdelegate wild card in a way that ensures that the majority decision of the Democratic primary voters (of at least 48 states, if not 50) will be the determining decision in this nomination process, the Democratic Party will help to ensure a Republican victory in November by alienating many voters from the entire Democratic nomination process. Voters in Michigan and Florida are already in danger of being alienated because of the disenfranchising mess the state and national parties have made of the primary process in those states. If the Democratic Party wants to add insult to injury and ensure nation-wide alienation, all the Party has to do is allow the superdelegates to overrule the choice of the majority of the country's Democratic voters.

2) If the Clinton and Obama campaigns continue in the direction of the politics of mutually-assured destruction, they will together be helping to deliver the country and the world to another four years of Republican rule and Bush-style policy on the war.

Last fall I thought there would be little the Democratic Party could do to lose this election in the face of the almost universal failure of the Republicans in Congress and the White House to serve the public interest on issues like the environment, the war, and public health. But the old saw about the Democratic Party's amazing ability to find a way to pull loss out of the jaws of victory seems once more to be proving itself to be true....

The Democratic Party lost in both 2000 and 2004 because of overconfidence in its ability to win against an "incompetent" and "dumb" Bush. Overconfidence in the upcoming election campaign against McCain (who has already proven in the primary that he is neither incompetent nor dumb) will almost certainly ensure another Republican victory....

So now it is time for a fiercely urgent appeal to all voters inspired by Obama's call for a new politics of vision to act to ensure that the Democratic Party and its two competing candidates will act wisely in the months ahead to avoid the kinds of self-destructive folly that will deliver the Democratic Party over to another bitter loss to the Republicans in November.

Given the stakes of this election not only for the future of this country, but for the world and the global environment, Democrats--and especially the two remaining Democratic candidates--cannot afford to be selfish. It is time for both candidates, all leaders and members of the Democratic Party, and all voters who care about the future to act to ensure that the usual degrading selfishness and small-minded politics does not now take over the Democratic nomination process. To whatever extent this downward spiral is allowed to happen, the Republicans will grow in the strength of their prospects for the general election in November.

It's up to all of us who care about and desire a new politics and vision of government to make sure this nightmarish politics of mutually-assured destruction does not take control of the remaining months of the Democratic primary process. The drive downwards has already begun, with the stated intent of both candidates to deepen the politics of attack and counter-attack in the weeks ahead. The Clinton, who seem to represent the establishment politics of the status quo, have been taunting Obama for some time now to join battle in the mud. And Obama has been getting drawn in. Now it seems both campaigns are fully engaged in the usual political war that surrenders the high ground of a visionary politics in order to engage the narrow-minded tooth-and-nail battle for momentary victory on the low ground of the status quo.

If both candidates follow this downward spiral, one will emerge victorious in the politics of the moment, but at the fundamental price of betraying the meaning embodied in the Fierce Urgency of Now--and that betrayal will turn the momentary victory of one of these candidates into a terrible loss for the Party, this country, and the world at large. We will all be the ultimate losers in such a pyrrhic victory.

So let us all work in whatever ways we can to make sure that the politics of THIS moment and this campaign stand for more than a pyrrhic victory. Both Democratic candidates have their own responsibility to guard against engaging in this pyrrhic struggle, but all of us share the responsibility to make sure we do not allow these candidates to drag THIS political moment down to the level of those that have come before. This moment requires and DEMANDS better from all of us. And the Fierce Urgency of Now demands that we all not merely stand by as spectators and allow what is politically inevitable (according to the status quo) to happen.

The audiences of the debates between Obama and Clinton were great at letting the candidates know that we demanded more of them. But now that the candidates are free from our guidance and restraining influence during the debates, they seem to be throwing off all restraint and slip-sliding into the same old political muck. We need to find new ways of reminding them that if they do this, they will be battling each other in the muck alone. THIS time we will not follow them there. If they go there, they both risk rejection by us. If they wish to fight for a pyrrhic primary victory only to lose the general election, and betray us all, then we must conclude that neither one of them is wise enough to lead us into the new politics we so desperately need.

Let us remind these candidates of these truths loudly and clearly--the fierce urgency of Now demands nothing less than this from all of us.

In Face of Collapse of Major Antarctic Ice Shelf, UN Climate Chief Warns of "Accelerated Melting" of Ice Caps

BRUSSELS (AFP) — The head of the UN intergovernment climate change body on Wednesday voiced strong concern at the accelerated melting of the polar ice caps, calling for international tariffs on carbon emissions.

"Now there's enough evidence to show that there is accelerated melting of some of these large bodies of ice; west Antarctic ice-sheet, the Greenland ice-sheet," Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told reporters at the European Parliament in Brussels.

His comments came after satellite images by the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center showed Antarctica's massive Wilkins Ice Shelf has begun disintegrating under the effects of global warming.

The collapse of a substantial section of the shelf was triggered February 28 when an iceberg measuring 41 by 2.4 kilometers (25.5 by 1.5 miles) broke off its southwestern front.

Pachauri spoke of the possibility of "irreversible and abrupt changes... that would result in several metres of increase in sea levels," as a result of global warming, blamed in part on carbon dioxide emissions.

He refused to speculate on how soon such catastrophic changes could take place but insisted on the urgent need to introduce an international system for charging polluters for carbon emissions.

Major Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapses while the US Democratic Presidential Primary Process Self-Destructs

While the two US Democratic presidential candidates are wrapped up in the small and petty politics of mutually assured destruction for the Democratic Party in November (as new polls are indicating), a vast hunk of floating ice has broken away from the Antarctic peninsula, threatening the collapse of a much larger ice shelf behind it, in a development that has shocked climate scientists.

Satellite images show that about 160 square miles of the Wilkins ice shelf has been lost since the end of February. The collapsing shelf suggests that climate change could be forcing change much more quickly than scientists had predicted.

"The ice shelf is hanging by a thread," said Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). "We'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be." The Wilkins shelf covers an area of 5,600 square miles (14,500 square kilometers). It is now protected by just a thin thread of ice between two islands.

Vaughan was a member of the team that predicted in 1993 that global warming could cause the Wilkins shelf to collapse within 30 years.

Climate scientists around Antarctica were taken by surprise by the new find. "Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula yet to be threatened," said Vaughan. "I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. We predicted it would happen, but it's happened twice as fast as we predicted."

Six other Antarctic ice shelves have already been lost entirely - the Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and Jones shelves.

But Vaughan said the Wilkins Shelf is "bigger than any ice shelf we've seen retreating before, and in the long term it could be a taste of other things to come. It is another indication of the impact that climate change is having on the region."

In the face of the real problems the United States and the world are facing, all of us should be demanding and calling upon both the Democratic presidential candidates to focus on these real problems, and on what they will do to address them--instead of on what they can do to tear down their opponent with petty tactics that will only work to make a Republican victory more likely in November.

We should all be asking both candidates: How will history judge you, even if you win the primary, if in the process of winning you use tactics that help to insure a Republican victory this November?! In what is perhaps the most important election of this century for determining our ability to achieve the fundamental policy changes on global warming, war, and social spending that are needed IMMEDIATELY in the next five years?!!

Any candidate who cannot maintain focus on the real problems that face humanity and the citizens of the United States ought to drop out of the race NOW! For if the only way a particular candidate can win the Primary is by attacking and destroying the other Democratic candidate, what does that say about the desperate character of that candidacy and that candidate?! Have you no shame?! And the last thing the United States or the rest of the world needs now is another President who lacks shame and refuses to take responsibility for lies and errors of judgment!