The Rising Tides of Climate Change

The Rising Tides of Climate Change

Published in the Buffalo News, Sunday Viewpoints Cover, December 2, 2012

under the Title: 

Seeking a Sustainable Future-Region Must Treat Climate Change as an Emergency Situation

http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20121202%2FOPINION%2F121209983%2F1074

by Jay Burney

Image Courtesy Buffalo News and Daniel Zakroczemski

For decades denial has been a river running through Washington, Albany, Buffalo, and probably through your house.  Harris Polls conducted between 2007 and last year, indicate American’s belief in climate change has dropped from 71% to 44%.

Today, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and an election campaign that ignored climate change, we face an onrushing economic, cultural, and environmental reality that will shape our future. If for whatever reason you don’t want to call it climate change, call something else, call it a “situation”, because whatever you call it, we have a situation.

The question- are we in a position in Buffalo and WNY to address and mitigate potential consequences of climate change? Do we have a sustainable future? The answer is maybe.

During his election victory speech President Obama said, “We don’t want our children to live in an America… that is threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”

It’s about time.  Now he and other policy makers including NY Governor Cuomo are raising climate issues understanding that if we do not, we face a precipitous decline in our future opportunities.   This includes the potential for disasters like hurricane Sandy that made many of our friends and families refugees’ -without shelter, food, power, warmth, and water. Imagine the consequences of a storm-caused, prolonged, deep winter power outage in WNY?

Since the Clinton White House sent Dr. Peter Sousounis here to release the initial Regional Climate Assessment (Great Lakes) in 2000, we have witnessed escalating global and regional change including warmer winters and extreme weather events.

 Sousounis said at that 2000 event held at the Statler “We can predict increasing average temperatures, changing lake levels, and extremes in weather conditions in the coming decades.”

Last spring NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies Director Dr. James Hansen, initially a climate skeptic, declared that “Now we can go beyond global and regional predictions because we have actual evidence that climate change has arrived, and is worse than we thought it would be”.

This is all eye opening.

Yet climate skeptics continue to divide public opinion. Even the more rational recent discussions pit those that think Sandy was caused by climate change against those that say “not.”  The inconvenient truth is that Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, was a storm supercharged by climate change.  Lets not equivocate here. Without climate change Sandy would not have been Sandy. Period.

What our city and region does in the next months and years regarding climate change will help to characterize the future of our community.  This is a collective responsibility. We have to educate ourselves and invest in personal, neighborhood, and regional strategies that address our future. It must be a wide-ranging public policy discussion and a deeply personal discussion that affects virtually every aspect of our lives. This will determine our ability to survive as a species.  It is about you and me. We can make a difference.

Economic Strategies

There is a lot going on locally and more is on the way. A primary strategy to dealing with climate change is to address renewable energy issues.  Programs such as FIT- (Feed In Tariff) help to incentivize renewable energy by guaranteeing markets and values to investors and make renewables competitive in the energy market. This is important. It is a no brainer given our current political economy of consumerism and growth. But is it enough?

Sustainability rests on three pillars- Culture, Economics, and Environment and understanding relationships between these three pillars with one caveat- the environment is the bottom line. Without a substantial environmental context, the others could not exist.

Contemporary economic strategies identify the free market as fundamental, consumerism and growth as the tactic, and profit as the objective. Environment is considered to be an “externality”. This means that the costs to the environment of economic development, including polluted water, air, food, soils, climate impacts, and the very real costs of human health, are costs that are born by society and not the entities engaged in profit-taking.  This socialized offloading of responsibilities and real costs is a fatal flaw of the free market and makes “sustainable development” an oxymoron.  Climate change may be the biggest failure of free markets.

David Suzuki, the outspoken Canadian environmental activist, resigned form his own organization recently because of economic threats by big donors. He calls our economic system “brain cancer.”  Naomi Klein, author of “The Shock Doctrine” says that this system empowers what she calls “disaster capitalists” -those that make money by deliberately creating or taking advantage of economic shocks and then taking advantage of a distracted citizenry. She would argue that disaster capitalism took full advantage of WNY after the surprise October snowstorm of 2006. Shocks include environmental crises and destabilization events such as the austerity budgets now sweeping parts of the European Union.

Klein says we need to treat climate change as an “emergency situation”.  “That means pulling out all the stops.”

Klein says that many well-meaning environmental organizations are as much a part of the problem as part of the solution. Because of their own economic pressures, many enviro groups have promoted business friendly solutions. If they rock the boat much, like Suzuki, they are threatened with defunding.  She says that while important, simply changing light bulbs to be more energy efficient, planting trees, or advocating investment schemes to make energy more renewable while ignoring the climate change elephant in the room, -consumerism and growth, are just not enough.  Klein says that most enviro-groups enable the economic and policy maker hands that feed them by addressing strategies that everyone in that bubble considers “winnable” and not strategies that push the envelope and demand solutions to the emergency that confronts our planet. Emergency Declared. Now what can we do?

Support Local Business

-Many activists point to local economies as a way toward a more sustainable future.  Corporate models such as Walmart, treat communities like Buffalo as an extractable profit center. They invest relatively little, and take a lot. When they are finished, they leave behind abandoned buildings and neighborhoods, a looted environment, and forgotten people.

Sarah Bishop the executive director of Buffalo First that is laying the groundwork for a local economy, says that “A local economy is about local dollars staying local, and local businesses being more responsible, responsive, and engaged about local issues including local culture and environment.

“Choosing a locally owned store generates almost four times as much economic benefit for the surrounding region as compared to shopping at a chain. This is a hopeful statistic in a city and region that has seen significant divestment over the past quarter century. “

Bishop recently co-sponsored a visit to Buffalo by Chicago activist Naomi Davis, founder of “Blacks in Green.”

Davis, whose focus is on livable and walkable self-sufficient neighborhoods, told us that a “city is comprised of many villages.” Each village can create local jobs, benefit, and investment, and support individuals and families. Can we do this in Buffalo?

-The ecological services of habitat including clean air and water are fundamental to life and have a great impact on wealth.  The atmosphere evolved as a part of a biodiverse system. Biodiversity helps to regulate atmospheric gasses including greenhouse gasses by absorbing and storing carbon. Protection of our remaining habitats -oceans, forests, freshwater ecosystems, is fundamental to addressing climate change.

Externalizing the environment in the name of economic development encourages the destruction of biodiversity.  This destruction has both cause and effect. Science is pointing to an ongoing current extinction episode, described as the sixth great extinction, with climate change as an accelerant.

Protect the Great Lakes

One of earth’s greatest natural resources are the Sweetwater seas known as the Great Lakes. Each year over 20 billion gallons of raw sewerage are dumped into the Great Lakes, which contain 1/5 of the world’s fresh surface water.  This causes biodiversity loss and subjects humans to disease and the ravages of climate change. Buffalo/WNY is responsible for between 2-4 billion gallons of raw sewerage released each year.

Jill Jedlicka Spisiak, executive director of the Buffalo Niagara RiverKeeper is working with the Buffalo Sewer Authority on a green infrastructure plan that if fully financed could reduce the release of raw sewerage significantly. She says-“A major investment in sewer infrastructure is needed”.   The cost of the project is estimated to be $500 million over 19 years. It is imperative that we find money to address this problem.

-there is a new approach to land use modeling that is beginning to emerge in WNY. The model would begin to evaluate land use from an ecological services perspective rather than the traditional land use models that characterize land as and economic commodity such as “agricultural” “mining”, etc. this new model would help to quantify the real values and costs of land, and would help to inform zoning and tax practices that currently “externalize” environment.

These are just a few examples of solutions that are emerging locally. Finding a comprehensive strategy including some of these projects can make a big difference and help to create a sustainable future for all of us.

This situation is an emergency-If we don’t treat it as one, and if we don’t seize the reins, we can expect a future predicated on a globalized disaster economy that will turn our region into the third world instead of the sustainability leader that we can become.