Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming (Brookings FOCUS Book) - Softcover

Antholis, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0815722192 ISBN 13: 9780815722199

Verlag: Brookings Institution Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Fast Forward is equal parts science primer, history lesson, policy prescription, and ethical treatise. This pithy and compelling book makes clear what we know and don't know about global warming; why the threat demands prudent and urgent action; why the transition to a low-carbon economy will be the most difficult political and economic transaction in history; and how it requires nothing less than a revolution in our sense of civic responsibility.
William Antholis and Strobe Talbott guide the reader through two decades of climate change politics and diplomacy, explaining the national and international factors that have influenced and often impeded domestic climate legislation and global negotiations. Recent United Nations–sponsored summits have demonstrated that the world cannot wait for a binding global treaty. Instead, the authors believe that the ""Big Four"" of America, the European Union, China, and India must lead the way forward. They recommend a new international mechanism modeled on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that would monitor national commitments and create incentives for other countries to coordinate their efforts to cut emissions.
Antholis and Talbott put their recommendations for legislative and diplomatic action into the larger context of our obligation to future generations, echoing a theme stressed by a diverse coalition of religious leaders calling for ambitious action on climate change. The world we leave to our children and grandchildren is not an abstraction, or even just a legacy; we must think about what kind of world that will be in deciding how we live—and act—today.
Praise for Fast Forward
""William Antholis and Strobe Talbott brilliantly explode the economic and scientific myths about climate change while elevating the political debate to a transgenerational moral crisis. Their synthesis of science, economics, religion, and philosophy is a clarion call to action for anyone interested in the future of the planet—which means all of us.""—Andrea Mitchell, NBC News
""In their very timely and fast-paced account of where we are today on the politics of global warming, the authors see Copenhagen as having pointed up the futility of relying on the United Nations as the only vehicle through which to tackle climate change.""—Ed Luce, Financial Times
""Strobe Talbott and Bill Antholis have made an admirable and important effort to move beyond the recent political rancor in Washington. They have a plan for leaders who want to be serious about energy and climate.""—Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-Ill.)

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

William Antholis is managing director of the Brookings Institution, where he is also a senior fellow in Governance Studies. During Bill Clinton's presidency, he served on the White House National Security Council staff and was a U.S. negotiator of the Kyoto Protocol.

Strobe Talbott is president of the Brookings Institution. He served as deputy secretary of state from 1994 to 2001. For twenty-one years prior to his service in government, he was correspondent and columnist for Time magazine. He has written nine books, including The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (Random House, 2002), a personal account of U.S. diplomacy toward Russia during the Clinton administration.

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FAST FORWARD

ETHICS AND POLITICS IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL WARMINGBy William Antholis Strobe Talbott

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS

Copyright © 2011 THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8157-2219-9

Contents

1 The Accidental Experiment..........................12 The Good News of Damnation.........................133 Three Presidents and a Process.....................244 Coalitions of the Willing..........................465 A Useful Disappointment............................586 The Big Four.......................................767 The Shadow of the Future...........................95Acknowledgments......................................119Notes................................................125Index................................................137

Chapter One

THE ACCIDENTAL EXPERIMENT

FOR TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS, we and our ancestors have treated the earth as a laboratory in which we have tinkered with the forces of nature. From taming fire and harnessing wind to developing antibiotics, the results have often advanced civilization. Yet for the past two centuries, we have been conducting what could be the most momentous and dangerous of all experiments: warming the globe.

We started the experiment without meaning to, and, until recently, we did not even know it was under way. Now it may be out of control, threatening to ruin our planet as a home for us and countless other creatures.

Avoiding that fate is a test of our humanity. We flatter ourselves with the anthropological designation Homo sapiens. The phrase is often translated simply as "man who knows." We have now, belatedly, met that definition: those of us alive today are the first generation to know that we live in the Age of Global Warming. We may also be the last generation to have any chance of doing something about it. Our forebears had the excuse of ignorance. Our descendants will have the excuse of helplessness. We have no excuse.

But the Latin participle sapiens means more than just possessing knowledge; it connotes wisdom, common sense, and competence. By that standard, we have a long way to go—and not much time. It is as though we were watching a video on fast forward. There is still some mystery about what is happening and plenty of suspense about how it will turn out. But we cannot just wait and see. We must respond, and our response, too, must be on fast forward.

Climate change is a test of our scientific and entrepreneurial ingenuity. The necessary restructuring of our industries and economy will be possible only if our leaders demonstrate determination, skill, and courage in their policies for their own nations and in cooperation with one another. So climate change is a test of politics as the art of the possible in the face of what we must hope is only a nearly impossible problem.

Climate change is also a test of our ethics, the values that underlie our politics. The potential catastrophe the planet faces obliges us to rethink our rights and duties as citizens. More fundamentally, we need to rethink our obligations as members of a sometimes shortsighted, sometimes sapient, potentially endangered species—and to act accordingly.

A PLANETARY FEVER

During the Industrial Revolution, starting in the late eighteenth century, manual labor and draft-animal farming gave way to the manufacture of goods by machines that ran on energy generated from burning coal. About a hundred years later, in 1897 Mark Twain thought it a witty truism to observe that "everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Yet factories in Europe and North America, including in Twain's adopted home state of Connecticut, were emitting carbon dioxide and other gases in quantities that would shift the balance between the absorption and reflection of solar energy in a way that would risk overheating the planet.

Shortly after Twain died in 1910, temperatures started to creep upward. At first, the warming effects of carbon dioxide were too small to be identified as a trend. Then, around 1970, scientists began to close ranks around the suspicion that something new and worrisome was happening. In 1988 the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Based on input from more than a thousand of the world's leading meteorologists, geologists, oceanographers, and physicists, the panel concluded that in the course of the twentieth century, the average temperature of the earth's surface had increased 1.3° Fahrenheit from the average in the nineteenth century.

That may not sound like a lot, given the day-to-day fluctuations in weather, not to mention season to season or even year to year. In the winter of 2009–10, for example, three snowstorms dumped a total of four and a half feet of snow on Washington, D.C. The U.S. government shut down for four days; Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware declared a state of emergency; and Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma mocked the idea of global warming by building an igloo near the U.S. Capitol. In fact, the blizzards—which President Obama called "Snowmageddon"—neither proved nor disproved the reality of climate change. Neither did Katrina, the Category 3 hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005.

The reason for alarm is in the pattern that scientists have discerned over time. A century ago, the numbers of record hot days and record cold days were about the same, whereas in the past decade, there have been about twice as many record highs, and the frequency and severity of storms have increased. And while there have been spikes at both the hot and cold ends of the spectrum, the net effect has been a rise in the average surface temperature of the planet.

Warming since the nineteenth century has initiated the melting of the polar ice caps and the rapid retreat of major glaciers, such as those in the Rockies and the Andes. That phenomenon has begun to deprive the earth of the dual cooling function that ice performs by chilling its surroundings and forming a reflective shield that bounces heat rays back into space.

A few degrees' increase in global average temperature can have a significant impact. Twenty thousand years ago—when it was about 9°F colder than it is today—the ice covering present-day Canada and much of the northern United States was more than a mile thick. As the earth gradually warmed over the following millennia, the combination of temperate climate and stable sea levels was conducive to the enrichment of soil and the growth of fish populations along the coasts. These conditions—a result of natural global warming—opened a new chapter in human history: the Neolithic Revolution, about 10,000 years ago, when nomadic hunter-gatherers settled down on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and formed stationary communities.

The IPCC has concluded that what is happening now—a sudden and rapid change in weather patterns—is not natural; rather, it is largely anthropogenic, a consequence of human activity. The panel also believes that the effects of rising temperatures to date are a likely prelude to more menacing developments in the decades to come.

So far the IPCC has issued four multivolume reports. The last came out in 2007. Each assessment represents an updated consensus, and each update has been more alarming than its predecessor about how fast the planet seems to be warming and more certain about human activity being the cause.

As temperatures...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Brookings Institution Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0815722192
• ISBN 13: 9780815722199
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 155
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland