We know how to make clean energy, and for all that climate-change deniers and anti-wind farm campaigners may mutter about the unreliability of renewable electricity sources, it could supply all of our energy needs. It was only in February 2013 that pollsters were suggesting that public concern in the UK about climate change was at its lowest for twenty years, yet eighteen months later, we have seen 30,000 people on the streets of London in the People’s Climate March on 21 st September and more than one thousand at Klein’s London talk about her book, run by The Guardian.Īll these people are right to be enraged at the lack of progress on reducing worldwide emissions, since as Klein makes clear, it is not for the lack of the right technology. It is also extremely well-timed, part of what feels like a resurgence of climate campaigning in a short space of time. Klein is not the only writer on climate change to sound the alarm about the imminence of the crisis, but she brings a degree of star power to the issue which makes her book a particularly high-profile statement of what we already know. For the West, this means cuts in carbon emissions of 8% – 10% a year, every year, beginning not in 2030, or by the end of the next parliament, or after the next election, but right now. This means that it is already too late to avoid 2 oC of warming the struggle is to keep the warming at that 2 oC increase and avoid the catastrophic effects that 4 oC of warming, or even more, would bring.
Despite decades of climate summits and green posturing from politicians and multinational companies alike, carbon emissions worldwide have risen by an astonishing 61% since the 1990 threshold set in the Kyoto protocols. Naomi Klein ‘denied climate change for longer than I care to admit’ (p.3) but her awakening to the issue comes at the time when the climate crisis is at its most urgent. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs.
0 kommentar(er)
