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BEC阅读：Earth Day Dawns on a Climate
On the the 40th anniversary of Earth Day [April 22], this warming planet welive on is posing serious new challenges to human civilization: increasinglysevere droughts, floods, and storms across the globe, and slowly rising oceanlevels.
Author, educator and environmental activist Bill McKibben offers some advicein his new book on how to live on what he calls our "tough new planet."
Changing world
When Bill McKibben wrote "The End of Nature" 20 years ago, he thought that ifhe simply pointed out ecological problems, people would do something aboutthem."I was a 27-year old and more than a little na?ve. I completely failed tounderstand the depth of the kind of cultural transformation that we were goingto have to make it we were ever going to deal with climate change."
Holt & Company
Bill McKibben says climate change has created a new planet, stillrecognizable but fundamentally different, that we may as well call 'Eaarth.'Since that time McKibben has written a dozen books that address climate changefrom many different angles. His latest is "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough NewPlanet." He spells Eaarth with an extra letter "a," to make a point.
"The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists." It's aplace, he says, "where the atmosphere holds more water moisture, where the polesare melting, where we seeing the oceans acidify, not for our grandchildren, butfor us. It will get a lot worse if we don't get our act together, but it'salready started."
Deadly consequences
The United Nations estimates that 300,000 people die each year from theeffects of global warming.
Climate change is driving higher rates of migration and civil conflict whilealso fueling increases in poverty, disease, and hunger. McKibben wants theUnited States, the world's greatest polluter behind China, to do more.
He notes that the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the AmericanClean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The bill would require the nation'sindustries to reduce their carbon emissions by 83 percent over the next fourdecades. But the measure has stalled in the Senate.
Kris Krüg
Bill McKibben attended the Copenhagen climate talks with 350.org, agrassroots advocacy group whose goal is to spread the message that 350 parts permillion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is too much. Paying the price
McKibben believes that, ultimately, a price must be put on carbon. "If coaland gas and oil had to pay the price for the damage that they did, we would usea whole lot less of them. That would mean that we would have to find other waysto do things."
McKibben says the move to a new and greener economy won't happen overnight.While demand for renewable energy is growing, those supplies currently meet justseven percent of world energy needs.
"We're going to have to change some habits because those energy sources arefundamentally different. They are diffuse, dispersed, spread out instead ofconcentrated the way that fossil energy was. We'll want to have centralizedpower stations. We'll want to have an endless spread out Internet for powersystems, with all kinds of people pushing power from their rooftops down thegrid."
Survival essentials
McKibben says we must stop focusing economies on growth and start thinkingabout survival. He lists three essentials for life on this tough new planet:food, energy and the Internet. He advocates small scale agriculture, neighborsgenerating power for neighbors and communities empowered by the Internet.
"I think it's the one wildcard we've got going forward. We are going to needmore local lives. We are going to need to learn to live in our own economies.But in the past that has always meant a kind of parochialism. Not necessarilyanymore. The Internet offers a constant window on the rest of the world. We cankeep discussion of all kinds alive, new ideas flowing."
McKibben notes that the debate on climate change in the United States hasbeen highly charged and focused not solely on science, but on ideology. "Onegood piece of news from my travels around the world is that that polarization ismostly confined to this country. Other places have adopted a more sober andmature attitude when thinking about climate than we have."
Looking ahead
Despite what he sees as a failure of the global community to come to anagreement at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December, McKibbensays international cooperation on climate change is critical.
"The thing that stands in the way of a global agreement is the incredibleinequity and the gulf between rich and poor which makes the future look verydifferent, depending on where you live. We need to figure out some way totransfer resources, mostly in the form of technology, north to south, so thatcountries like India or China or continents like Africa have some decent shot atdevelopment without having to go through the fossil fuel era."

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