Heroic carbon price to fix a breaking world.

Princess:The world is but a broken toy,
Its pleasures hollow false its joy,
Unreal its loveliest hue,

Alas! Its pains alone are true.

Hilarion:The world is ev'rything you say,
The world we think has had its day.
Its merriment is slow.

Alas! We've tried it, and we know.

- Gilbert and Sullivan : Princess Ida. [1]

This song in a satirical operetta, was first performed in 1884. In its original context, it takes place in a kind of feminist retreat, which is being infiltrated by three male characters in drag. I will take these convenient words and plaintive melody, designed to touch our hearts, to apply to our predicaments of today.

As a consuming whole, dedicated to economic growth, we effectivly treat the world as our toy. The breaking of this world, has previously been a very hard thing to do. Over the ages of geologic time, and previously absent of malacious anthropogenic interference, the worlds climate systems have proven themselves self regulating in the very long term, although more than a little tippy with respect to Malankovitch ice age cycles. Instability is due to vicious positive feedback cycles between temperature and carbon, temperature and ice albedo. We have not yet felt the full repercussions of pushing the world climate system out of kilter so quickly by our fossil fueled human plague.

An awful lot of blogosphere is echoes, remixes, and distortion, and so it is good to be able to quote from original sources. A recent serious original work is "Carbon Shift", with a number of contributers, edited by Thomas Homer-Dixon, forward by Ronald Wright. The concluding chapter says this ...

[ ... When it comes to our energy and climate problems, we’re going in diametrically the opposite direction to where we should be going. And while the world’s current economic crisis legitimately demands policy-makers’ attention, its consequences, no matter how severe, will pale beside the long-term consequences to humankind of energy scarcity and climate change.

For all their capacity to radically alter nearly every facet of our civilization, these threats rarely capture our imaginations. They develop incrementally and their consequences are both uncertain and relatively distant in time and space. They are what specialists call “wicked problems.” As David Keith points out in his chapter here, climate change, in particular, is characterized by high uncertainty and high inertia. Systems with lots of uncertainty and inertia are notoriously hard to control, because we can’t effectively predict their future behaviour, and we can’t quickly correct behaviour we don’t like. So such systems give us enormous scope for denial and procrastination.

But the carbon challenge is real, and deep change in our lives, economies and societies is inevitable. ...]

And what does broken really mean? It means deadly dangerous. The "Carbon Shift" book quotes from a James Hansen et al publication.

[ ... Palaeoclimate data show that the Earth’s climate is remarkably sensitive to global forcings. Positive feedbacks predominate. This allows the entire planet to be whipsawed between climate states. ... Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of our control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures"... ] [8]

In the face of ecological decline, our pleasures of consumption are hollow, and our joys from the world are false, as we erode the worlds living systems. Our economic systems even have cost pressures felt by both consumers and corporations. Energy and clean water are becoming expensive. Guilt is growing in us as consumers. With or without a carbon tax, we are compelled to cut down our energy and material consumption.

Destruction of natural commons continues. Collectively we are turning over at least 50% more natural resources of our world, than it can sustain long term.[4]. Forests and fisheries continue to be plundered, by technologies that negate their ability to recover. Clear felling of forests terminates the carbon stores in trees and soil, and removes the homes of entire species. Ocean floors are mined of everything living by trawl dredging techniques. Dams are constructed across the best rivers. Wilderness is paved for housing developments. Wildlife areas and corridors are fenced off, fragmented and abolished. Few limits are set. The natural world continues to be taken away until all the best is gone.

Our worlds hue might be taken to be the blue-green light from the large surface areas of the worlds oceans. In "The vanishing face of Gaia", James Lovelock highlighted the change in the earths hue, as can be seen from our instrumental satellites and forays into space. It is changing from blue-green, signifying ocean fertility, to a deeper blue, which is the oceanic equivalent of a desert. So the loveliest hue on our planet is becoming an unreal deep blue, to match our despair.

The green hue from the oceans, where it is still found, is due to phytoplankton at the surface, that photosynthesize, and do the world a service by taking in carbon dioxide. They form the basis of a food chain that supports all the worlds fisheries. Research teams whose techniques include measuring this hue from space, calculate that since 1950 the world has seen a phytoplankton decline of 40%. Like many signals in climate science, there is seasonal, cyclic and regional variability, and the reasons for this observed decline are not fully understood, but appear to have troubling implications for global warming feedbacks. [2]

Wether we are aware of it or not, the pain of our biosphere are true. It still is unlikely that the world has had its day, but our civilisation is past its heyday. Growth in our absolute numbers of people may continue for a while, but this means less available for everyone. There is a sense that many resources, including time, are running out.

Climate systems so not feel pain, and phytoplankton do not feel pain, but we must acknowledge that we feel pain. Our social ability to join together in common cause for our own good seems to be disappearing. Income inequality increases, as does poverty, and even the rich seem ever more motivated to avoid paying any extra taxes.[3] The financial sector, containing many retirement savings, is manipulated exclusively for and by the technocratic rich for monetary gain. It has grown to be a destabilising influence on world economy. Money, financial trickery and military force take priority over our declining physical reality and our personal choices, which they claim to represent. With a disappearing world, the value purchasable by our monetary share declines daily, even if our dollar is increasing in relative value to other currency. Much of the world should have never been ours to buy, own or occupy. Those born lucky and still in the employment rat race get to hang on to their jobs to benefit from a trickle down share of the loot for a little while longer.

Civilisations have come and gone many times now in our human histories. This is the first-ever global one, and it appears that it is yet another progress trap. [6]

We can see the trap closing in, but the collective social response is too slow to organise escape. [7] We speend everything to keep the current economic survival systems going.. Those with options other than mere survival can opt for varying mixes of denial, retreat, and mitigation. Some may take the path similar to the Buddhist retreat, and learn to live simply in the community of mental discipline and love with their brothers and sisters. We can still sing beautiful songs, and hold each others hands. Remember that slow merriment is better than nothing. Concentrate on the joy of breathing. This of course, will not stop the rest of humanity from ruining the world.

Denial is the stoic path. It allows many to continue on in the ways of our culture that we we brought up in, and ignore the turning tide of history. It keeps going the economic activities of individual and group survival, where in everyday we must consume. As the screws of surivial tighten, we are forced to survive with less.

Now that we are blessed with knowledge and even a modicum of self knowledge, the heroic path is to seek to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

[ ... Once humankind decides that real action is necessary, the task of refitting our global civilization to run on a carbon-free energy will be heroic in scale. Very few people grasp its true magnitude...

.. And impossible though it may seem, at a carbon price above eighty to one hundred dollars per tonne, it would likely be profitable to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pump it underground, assuming a carbon-free energy source powers the process.

Even with such heroic interventions, however, the atmosphere’s levels of carbon dioxide will almost certainly continue to rise for several decades—and perhaps for much of this century. We’ll steadily approach that unknown and perhaps unknowable threshold at which warming becomes its own cause.

][[9], Conclusion.]

Thomas Homer-Dixon has argued that its going to take a real climate crisis to shock humanity into taking heroic action. But the climate crisis is already here in our faces, and what if we keep denying that events have nothing to do with climate change? Or as many blind dunces continue to say "So what? The climate is always changing." [10].

[1]. West Norfolk G&S's production from 2004. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofc-WyejaVo

[2]. Plankton decline across oceans as waters warm. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10781621

[3]. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44084236/ns/health-behavior/t/rich-are-different-not-good-way-studies-suggest/#.TlPDxJlRyK4

[4]. 2010 Living Planet Report

http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/2010_lpr/

[5]. Earth In Midst Of Sixth Mass Extinction: 50% Of All Species Disappearing

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020171454.htm

[6]. A short history of progress. Ronald Wright http://books.google.com/books/about/A_short_history_of_progress.html?id=r4SOSOWIqlkC

[7]. Escaping the progress trap. Daniel O'Leary http://www.progresstrap.org/content/escaping-progress-trap-book

[8]. Climate change and trace gases. James Hansen et al, http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1856/1925

[9]. Carbon Shift. Edited by Thomas Homer-Dixon.

[10]. Disaster at the Top of the World

http://www.homerdixon.com/articles/20100822-nytimes-disasteratthetopoftheworld.html