By Ted Glick
I returned home late last night from three days at a Beyond Extreme Energy leadership retreat and two days at the Poor Peoples Campaign Moral Action Congress, both held in Washington, DC. This morning my first task was to go through all the email that had piled up over that time. One of them contained an extremely sobering news story from Reuters. The headline: “Scientists amazed as Canadian permafrost thaws 70 years early.”
The story begins with this sentence: “Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.” It goes on to say, “With scientists warning that sharply higher temperatures would devastate the global south and threaten the viability of industrial civilization in the northern hemisphere, campaigners said the new paper reinforced the imperative to cut emissions.
“’Thawing permafrost is one of the tipping points for climate breakdown and it’s happening before our very eyes,’ said Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director of Greenpeace International.”
Tipping points. Are there more than one that are relevant to our dire condition? I believe there are two others, technological tipping points and political tipping points.
This latest permafrost melt story is scientific evidence that, as Morgan says, we could be at the beginning of a climate tipping point right now.
Are we at a technological tipping point? I think so. Between the technological viability of wind, solar, electric vehicles and electric heat (and cooling) pumps, and the already-low prices on wind and solar and the coming-down prices for electric vehicles and heat pumps, as well as other emerging technologies, we have the tools we need right now to engage in the World War Two type of mobilization and economic transformation in a short period of time that we absolutely, critically need.
But what about a political tipping point? Could that be about to happen, too, or are we in the beginning of one already?
I believe we could well be. The Poor Peoples Campaign (PPC) event was one of the reasons I think this, others being the 2018 election results, the emergence in massive numbers of the youth-based and youth–led Sunrise Movement and international Youth Climate Strike, the explosion onto the political scene of the Green New Deal and the continually building support for it, the competition going on among the many Democratic Presidential candidates as to who has the best plan to address the climate crisis, and a decidedly more progressive orientation by most of those candidates.
Click here for the full article.
Source: tedglick.com
The story begins with this sentence: “Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.” It goes on to say, “With scientists warning that sharply higher temperatures would devastate the global south and threaten the viability of industrial civilization in the northern hemisphere, campaigners said the new paper reinforced the imperative to cut emissions.
“’Thawing permafrost is one of the tipping points for climate breakdown and it’s happening before our very eyes,’ said Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director of Greenpeace International.”
Tipping points. Are there more than one that are relevant to our dire condition? I believe there are two others, technological tipping points and political tipping points.
This latest permafrost melt story is scientific evidence that, as Morgan says, we could be at the beginning of a climate tipping point right now.
Are we at a technological tipping point? I think so. Between the technological viability of wind, solar, electric vehicles and electric heat (and cooling) pumps, and the already-low prices on wind and solar and the coming-down prices for electric vehicles and heat pumps, as well as other emerging technologies, we have the tools we need right now to engage in the World War Two type of mobilization and economic transformation in a short period of time that we absolutely, critically need.
But what about a political tipping point? Could that be about to happen, too, or are we in the beginning of one already?
I believe we could well be. The Poor Peoples Campaign (PPC) event was one of the reasons I think this, others being the 2018 election results, the emergence in massive numbers of the youth-based and youth–led Sunrise Movement and international Youth Climate Strike, the explosion onto the political scene of the Green New Deal and the continually building support for it, the competition going on among the many Democratic Presidential candidates as to who has the best plan to address the climate crisis, and a decidedly more progressive orientation by most of those candidates.
Click here for the full article.
Source: tedglick.com
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