The answer should be none of
the above, even though as a group they’vedominated the October/November headlines. In
fact, the piece of the week, month, and arguably year should have been one that
slipped by so quietly, so off front-pages nationwide and out of news leads
everywhere that you undoubtedly didn’t even notice. And yet it’s the
story that could turn your life and that of your children and
grandchildren inside out and upside down.
On the face of it, it wasn’t anything to shout about -- just more stats in a world drowning in numbers. These happen to have been put out by the U.S. Department of Energy and they reflected, as an Associated Press headline put it, the “biggest jump ever seen in global warming gases.” In other words, in 2010, humanity (with a special bow to China, the United States, and onrushing India) managed to pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than at any time since the industrial revolution began -- 564 million more tons than in 2009, which represents an increase of 6%.
According to AP’s Seth
Borenstein, that’s “higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate
experts just four years ago.” He’s talking about the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, or IPCC, which is, if anything, considered
"conservative" in its projections of future catastrophe by many
climate scientists. Put another way, we’re talking more greenhouse gases
than have entered the Earth’s atmosphere in tens of millions of years.
Consider as well the prediction offered by Fatih Birol, chief economist at
the International Energy Agency: without an effective international agreement
to staunch greenhouse gases within five years, the door will close on preventing a
potentially disastrous rise in the planet’s temperature. You’re talking,
that is, about the kind of freaky weather that will make October’s bizarre
snowstorm in the Northeast look like a walk in the park. (That storm had
all the signs of a climate-change-induced bit of extreme weather: New York City
Honestly, if we were sane,
if the media had its head in the right place, this would have been screaming
headlines. It would have put Rick Perry and Herman Cain and the
Kardashians and Italy and Greece andMichael Jackson
The only good news -- and
because it unsettled the politics of the 2012 election, it did garner a few
headlines -- was that the movement Bill McKibben and 350.org spearheaded to
turn back the tar-sands pipeline from Hades (or its earthly global-warming equivalent,
which is Alberta, Canada) gained traction in our Occupy Wall Street
moment. Check out McKibben’s account of it, “Puncturing
the Pipeline,” and think of it as a harbinger. Mark my words on this
one: sooner or later, Americans are going to wake up to climate change, just as
they have this year on the issue of inequality, and when they do, watch
out. There will be political hell to pay.
Tom Engelhardt,
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The
American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The
End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His
latest book, The
United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be
published in November.
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