Time to focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions

What if you could save your child's life with a treatment that required 2 percent of your time? What if you could pay off your house with 2 percent of your income? Of course you would do these things, wouldn't you?

Scientists estimate that in order to limit global warming to just a 4-degree increase, we need to start reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 2 percent per year for the next 40 years. That little 2-percent decrease will compound into a huge reduction by 2050.

A 2-percent-per-year emissions cut could very well save the life of your child and your home. The difference between today's balmy temperatures and the last ice age is just 9 degrees. We are already going to endure a 3-degree increase, no matter what. If we act now, we can avoid a catastrophic 5-degree rise that may drastically alter our climate.

"Every 10th of a degree matters," notes Eban Goodstein, a professor of economics at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. "It raises the possibility that we might trigger some catastrophic outcome - massive sea-level rise, loss of forests globally - driven by intensified fire, or large-scale methane releases from the tundra, pushing temperatures even higher."

Goodstein is also the director of Focus the Nation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that is organizing a massive "teach-in" on college campuses and schools across the country on Jan. 31. In case you weren't around during the 1960s, a teach-in is when the entire school (faculty, students, staff) takes a break from academia and focuses its attention on one topic. In this case it will be solutions to climate change. This could be the largest national teach-in in our nation's history.

To kick it off, a live, interactive Webcast called "The 2 Percent Solution" will be beamed free to more than 10,000 screenings nationwide on Jan. 30 at 8 p.m., EST. "The 2 Percent Solution" features a panel discussion on global-warming solutions with Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider, sustainability expert Hunter Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute and green-jobs pioneer Van Jones, board president of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

The teach-in will culminate with people being asked to contact their congressional representatives and demand action now. This new style of green democracy was highly successful with "Step It Up" events in 2007 to get congress to draft legislation curbing emissions.

"Imagine every U.S. congressperson, U.S. senator, governor, mayor and state representative getting multiple invitations to sit down and talk with young people about their future," states the Focus the Nation Web site. "Imagine House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declaring Jan. 31, 2008, 'Focus the Nation Day' - canceling business in the House of Representatives and urging members to get engaged. Imagine thousands of elected officials facing the optimism, energy and moral authority of more than 100,000 students, forcing politicians out of complacency and fatalism, and helping them confront this challenge of our generation."

Focus the Nation's Goodstein recently wrote in the environmental Web site Grist: "Over the next year, a powerful, nonpartisan movement demanding global-warming solutions will sweep across this country and change the future, change our future." He pauses: "Or it won't. Each of us now has to decide: Will I be a leader in that movement? The science is clear. Our future will be determined, literally, by the readers of this post, who have heard the truth and have said yes - or will say yes - to this challenge. And unlike our forbearers, we are not threatened by dogs, fire hoses, blacklisting, firing, beating, torture, imprisonment or lynchings. We are free, if we choose, to create the future."

Ross Gelbspan, who has written and given speeches about climate change over the past 10 years, recently wrote on his Web log: "While a 2-percent reduction is too small, even that level of reduction could well kick-start an exponential increase in the rate of change. Eban Goodstein is tapping the country's greatest pool of natural renewable energy - young people's passion, dedication and willingness to embrace the most threatening problem of all. This is the target audience that I most believe will succeed (where the rest of us have failed) in reclaiming the planet for our common future."

Here are some policy-based solutions to climate change:

- Invest in renewable energy research and development (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal).

- Create green jobs by legislating energy efficiency (energy auditors, solar installers, retrofitting old systems).

- Place a moratorium on coal-burning plants that operate without carbon capture and chemical sequestration methods.

- Put a cap on carbon emissions and tax the largest polluters.

- Require that all new buildings be "carbon neutral" by 2030, (emitting no pollution from fossil fuels).

- Support forests as our first line of defense against atmospheric carbon.

- And finally, adopt California's standards requiring a 23-percent reduction in global warming pollution from new vehicles sold by 2012, and a 30-percent reduction in global-warming pollution from new vehicles sold by 2016.

Shawn Dell Joyce is a sustainable artist and activist who lives in a green home in New York's Hudson River valley.

� Copley News Service

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