Ecocide Article 4
 

On May 10 2013 scientists announced that global CO2 emissions had crossed a threshold reaching 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in millions of years. As a result a sense of alarm spread around the world and not only among climate scientists. CO2 emissions have been relentlessly climbing throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Charles Keeling first set up his tracking station in 1958 to monitor average daily global CO2 levels. At that time CO2 concentrations registered 315 PPM CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentrations have been rising ever since and was at [June 2014 401.30] [Jan. 2018 408.87] and is today [3rd March 2023 at 422-4]1thus racing towards the dangerous tipping point of 440ppm. For all the recent climate summits, promises of “voluntary restraint,” carbon trading and carbon taxes, the growth of CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentrations have not just been unceasing, they have been accelerating in more recent times

Carbon concentrations have not been this high since the Pliocene period, between 3m and 5m years ago, when global average temperatures were 2˚C - 3˚C higher than today, the Arctic was ice-free, sea levels were about 25m higher and jungles covered northern Canada. Florida, meanwhile, was under water along with other coastal locations we now call New York, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Sydney and many others. Crossing this threshold has fuelled fears that we are fast approaching converging “tipping points” — melting of the subarctic tundra or the thawing and releasing of the vast quantities of methane in the Arctic sea bed — that will accelerate global warming beyond any human capacity to stop it.

Why are we marching toward disaster, or as the Guardian’s George Monbiot once put it, “sleepwalking to extinction”? Is the problem, as Richard Smith an economic historian whose book “Save the Planet, Turn the World Upside Down” (2014) argues, rooted in the requirement of maintaining a consumer world led by capitalist production. For Smith large corporations can’t help themselves; they can’t change, or change very much. And so long as we live under this corporate capitalist system we have little choice but to go along in this destruction, and that the only alternative — impossible as this may seem right now — is to somehow remove this global economic system dominated by the few, and replace it with a network of communities based on real democratic principles along with a fair distribution of available resources.

Although we are fast approaching the precipice of ecological collapse, nevertheless, around the world we are witnessing a new and exciting democratic “awakening” however, time is of the essence.

Selfish power, greed and ignorance have resulted in the unnecessary suffering of millions of people and huge damage to the natural world, and today is a major driver of planetary ecological collapse. From man-made climate change to natural resource overconsumption to pollution, the engine that has powered the last three centuries of accelerating economic development, revolutionizing technology, science, culture and human life itself is, today, a roaring out-of-control locomotive mowing down continents of forests, sweeping oceans of life, clawing out mountains of minerals, pumping out lakes of fuels, devouring the planet’s last accessible natural resources to turn them into “product,” while destroying fragile global ecologies built up over eons of time.

We don’t necessarily need any new technological breakthroughs to solve these problems. Mostly, we just stop doing what we’re doing. But we can’t stop because we’re all locked into an economic system in which companies have to grow to compete and reward their shareholders and because we are told that we all need the jobs. The vast majority of the world’s pre-eminent climate scientists argue that to save humanity coal emissions must be phased out as rapidly as possible or global climate disasters will be a certainty, and that, most of the fossil fuels must be left in the ground including coal, oil, gas etc. This is the message that the sciences provides. It could be said that Humanity today treads on a slippery slope. As we continue to pump green-house gases into the atmosphere. We seem oblivious to the danger — unaware of how close we may be to a situation in which a catastrophic occurrence becomes practically unavoidable.

In the wake of the failure of climate negotiators from Kyoto to Doha to agree on binding limits on green-house gas emissions, British climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows at the Tyndall Centre, Britain’s leading climate change research centre, wrote as far back as September 2012 that we need an entirely new paradigm. For them government policies must “radically change” if “dangerous” climate change is to be avoided. Interestingly, many writers in the environmental field describe their own personal journey of awareness. The journey often begins with what they describe a period of denial, before having a ‘climate change’ moment’ when they realise that the world on which they depend is in real danger. This if often followed by a period of despair and finally by some acceptance and a commitment to constructive action.

We urgently need to acknowledge that the development needs of many countries leave the rich western nations with little choice but to immediately and severely curb their own greenhouse gas emissions. The misguided belief that commitments in order to avoid warming of 2˚C, or more, can still be realized with incremental adjustments to economic incentives must be addressed now. A carbon tax here, a little emissions trading there and the odd voluntary agreement thrown in for good measure will not be sufficient. What governs future global temperatures and other adverse climate impacts are the emissions from yesterday, today and those released in the next few years.

In many ways solutions to the ecological crisis are blindingly obvious, however we seem to be unable to take the necessary steps to prevent such a crisis, that is in relation to human survival and ecological collapse on Earth. So long as we live in our consumer based societies economic growth has to take priority over ecological concerns. In the meantime, we know what we have to do, and that is to suppress greenhouse gas emissions. Stop over-consuming natural resources. Stop the senseless pollution of the earth, waters, and atmosphere with toxic chemicals. Stop producing waste that can’t be recycled by nature. Stop the destruction of biological diversity and ensure the rights of other species to life.