The big switch: Vanessa Baird on what it's going to take to tackle global warming - Keynote

New Internationalist, June, 2003

IT was easy. Glued to our screens we saw how easy it was. As the 'liberators looked on -- or looked away, or chose to be elsewhere -- looters took lifesaving medical equipment from hospitals. Computers, incubators, heart-monitors.

According to some reports, sick and wounded patients were turfed out of their beds so that these could be taken too.

Building after official building received similar treatment in Baghdad's post-invasion chaos. Centuries of human history, the beginnings of civilization as we know it, lay trashed in Iraq's National Museum.

Nothing was safe. Well, almost nothing. US marines did guard two official buildings. One was the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. The other -- the Ministry of Oil.

The choice was eloquent. No further explication of Allied priorities needed here.

The events of the past few months should leave us in no doubt about the violence, turmoil and insecurity that accompanies our addiction to fossil fuels.

As the 'great powers' scramble for the spoils -- each ostensibly wanting to 'help' the Iraqis rebuild their economy, of course -- it looks like more trouble ahead.

The battle for control over the world's energy reserves is on. And with the knowledge that they are not infinite -- oil scheduled to peak round about 2015 with significant shortfalls by 2020 as reserves begin to run out -- the scramble is likely to get bloodier. (1)

Unless.

Unless the world wakes up to the fact that we shouldn't be fighting over oil. In fact we probably shouldn't be doing anything over oil apart from leaving the damn stuff where it is. Under the sand or water or rainforest. Along with other fossil fuels like coal and gas.

A nice, but unrealistic, idea, surely? A massive four-fifths of the energy the world uses comes from carbon-based fossil fuels. They form the basis of our industrial economy.

But if climate scientists are right, being realistic is going to involve breaking that carbon lock. We will have to make the big switch to renewable energy and embrace sustainability -- and fast.

Speed up

Why? Because climate change is upon us. Last year was the second hottest on record, pipped only by 1998. (2) Australia experienced devastating droughts and bushfires. Indonesia saw weeks of incessant rain and the worst flooding in decades. In India, 1,000 people died in a heatwave. Rivers burst their banks and crashed through Germany, Russia and the Czech Republic. As temperatures rose in Antarctica, 3,250 square kilometres of the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed. Scientists found that the global icemelt rate had doubled since 1988 and predicted the sea could rise by 27 centimetres by 2100. (3) But already Native Alaskans were having to leave their rapidly shrinking island village of Shishmaref. (4) On the opposite side of the world the 10,000 citizens of the low-lying Pacific island of Tuvalu were making plans to emigrate.

The writing is on the wall -- and the people pointing to it are not just eco-alarmists or sandwich-board prophets delighting in Cassandrine predictions of doom. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draws contributions from more than 2,000 scientists from around 100 countries. In their Third Assessment Report (2001) they confirmed that global warming is happening faster than they'd thought, upping their estimates from a rise of 0.45[degrees]C to 0.60[degrees]C during the 20th century. (5) Early this year, Canadian researcher Nathan Gillet introduced another dimension. He reported that greenhouse gases were not only increasing the earth's temperature, they were also affecting air pressure. (6) This controls the atmosphere's circulation and can alter rainfall, temperature, winds and storminess. It fits with what we have been seeing.

The consensus of the IPCC scientists is that in order to prevent devastating climate shifts, worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide ([CO.sub.2]) -- the main greenhouse gas -- must drop by 60 to 80 per cent below their 1990 level within the next few decades. (7)

That then, at its simplest, is the solution. How we get there is the tricky bit.

Most climate scientists are agreed that the massive 30-per-cent rise in global CO2 since 1750 is mainly due to the human activity of burning fossil fuels. The implications for our carbon-based industrial economy are colossal.

Take the US, the greatest [CO.sub.2] producer in the world. About a third comes from transport, a third from industrial heating and cooling and a third from generating electricity in fossil-fuel power plants. So changing one sector can't do the job of producing a 60-to-80[per-cent reduction. Change has to be across the board.

At this point it's tempting to exclaim 'It'll never happen!' -- and disengage.

But stay the course. Because change is possible. We know it is because it's happening already.

Today, 10 times more electricity is being generated by wind-power than there was a decade ago; seven times more by solar power. Sun and wind power alone have the potential to meet the world's energy needs several times over -- not to mention hydrogen, wave power, tidal power, biomass, micro-hydro and others in a growing host of 'green' renewables.