The Two Key Challenges to Finding a Solution to Climate Change

Image by Oxfam International via FlickrBy Harold Forbes

"A person's life is composed of minutes and is most fulfilled by working and bringing one's earnings to the family table." So wrote Tim Gautreaux in the Guardian Magazine on 31st July 2010. Tim is a Louisiana local whose life has been turned upside down by the oil spill in the Mexican Gulf but with those few words he illustrates why the problem of global warming is so difficult for most people to engage with, far less get engaged with solutions to climate change.

A human life is not the shortest span of time living things can spend on the planet, nor is it the longest. Biological life spans are so much shorter than geological ones that it can sometimes seem impossible to believe that what a person does in their life can have any effect on the planet's climate. But humans have found powerful ways to speed up how they can impact the environment.

Over geological time, a drip of water falling on a stone will wear it away and the flowing of the Colorado River generated the Grand Canyon. But less than a human lifetime ago, during the nineteen fifties, when hydrogen bombs a thousand times more powerful than the atomic device that destroyed Hiroshima were being tested, the US Atomic Energy Commission seriously suggested that a new and better canal could be created through Panama using just a couple of dozen of the devices. While the threat of thermo-nuclear war has, thankfully, receded, the climate is being impacted by the aggregation of our individual actions.

In many ways, global warming can be thought of as being caused by processes that are more akin to the drips of water which have been concentrated into a powerful jet of water. Every time we use fossil fuels to generate our electricity, every time we use petrol/gasoline to power our vehicles, every time we burn gas for our central heating, every time we use oil based fertilizers to grow our food, every time we clear a forest for its lumber or to convert it to pasture, we contribute to the problem. It has been going on for generations and while the early ones can fairly claim to have been acting in ignorance, the science of climate change dates back to the middle of the 19th century and the first calculations of human activity's potential impacts to the early part of the 20th century.

Evidence that the effect was actually occurring has been growing for about two generations now and today it is unequivocal: 97% of scientists working in the field support the tenets of human induced climate change*.

But "a person's life is composed of minutes". Why should this be the time to worry, to take action? Quite simply because people the problems that rising global temperatures will bring are already becoming evident: without action now, people already on the planet now will face a much more difficult (and probably much poorer) life by their mid and later life.

Most of us, and certainly those who have given up smoking, drinking or overeating, are aware of how difficult, and how much time, can be involved in making change. Making the change to how we generate the energy that underpins our civilization is going to be no different. Thankfully, it is equally achievable. There is just one more little problem that needs to be sorted out, though.

"A person's life ... is most fulfilled by working and bringing one's earnings to the family table." Money has been around pretty much as long as modern humans settled down to become farmers. Money is an important part of our societies today and most of us will have frequent contact with it during our daily lives. Denied access to it makes us feel lesser beings.

How we account for our money, however has a much shorter history. All modern accounting and decision making tools only became possible after the invention of double-entry book-keeping a little over 500 years ago. It literally changed the way that people were able to think about their economic activities.

At the heart of the system is the concept of balance: ones assets and liabilities must always be in balance and the strength of an entity is represented in its "balance sheet".

There is however an unfortunate element to the timing of this development. 500 years ago there were many fewer people on the planet and they had not discovered how to use fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas in any meaningful way. Little wonder that the originators of the system overlooked the fact that using the natural services of the planet like fresh air and clean water carried a cost. Even when these costs did begin to be evident, the economists decided that the environment could simply be considered an "externality"; something that existed and operated separately from the economic system.

That has brought us into the ridiculous position where our economic activity not only is destroying the future but we are able to reassure ourselves that such action is "rational behaviour" because using the fossil fuels is the "cheapest" way to get energy. Faced with such a situation, the only really rational response is the change the system so that we reward our economic activity on the basis of how it replenishes the Earth's eco-systems so that when ordinary people go to work the earnings they bring back to the family table are not at the expense of their children.

We have invented an accounting system before: there is no reason we should not invent it again. But this time base it on encouraging us to live with the planet rather than on it. A system that will assist us in reclaiming a safe climate. A system that will bring make climate change solutions profitable and attractive.

* Expert credibility in climate change, April 2010, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1003187107

Harold Forbes is Author of "How to be a Humankind Superhero: a manifesto for individuals to reclaim a safe climate".

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