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A Sense of Urgency as a Spur to Climate Action

We must act quickly and effectively while we still have a fighting chance. There is no more time for delay.

Feeling the Touch of the Goad: A Sense of Urgency as a Spur to Climate Action TruthOut , 05 October 2014 10:12By Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi,  “……..Too much is at risk for us to proceed on the hypothesis that climate change might be a false alarm. If we fail to take the momentous steps required of us, we risk losing nothing less than the Earth as we have known it, along with the human civilization that has evolved on its surface over thousands of years. We risk making huge tracts of the planet virtually uninhabitable. We risk condemning small island-nations to rising seas and more violent typhoons. We risk turning verdant land abundant with crops – our grain belts and rice bowls – into barren deserts. We risk mass extinctions, famines, droughts and floods, unpredictable epidemics and large-scale deaths. And we risk kindling more ethnic, religious and cross-border strife, thereby creating more climate refugees, more mass migrations, and more destructive eruptions of terrorism.

The second factor that should provoke the sense of urgency and raise it exponentially is the recognition that the window of opportunity is closing. We may be about to lose our chance to avert the worst. Since the late 1980s we’ve been told that climate change is a fact; that higher carbon emissions are raising global mean temperatures; that the oceans are undergoing acidification and sea levels are rising; that glaciers are melting and weather patterns are changing; that even the world’s food supply is in jeopardy. Yet world leaders have dithered and procrastinated. They’ve attended conferences and read reports, but at best they’ve taken only tiny steps, token measures that are far from adequate to deal with a problem this severe.

Thus, as the years have slipped by, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has already passed the 400 parts per million mark and is heading toward 500 ppm. By the end of this century, global temperature is predicted to rise by 4 or even 6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. We have only 20 or 30 years left to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent. If we fail to do so, a drastic increase in global temperature will be inevitable, resulting in even more calamities and perhaps the wholesale devastation of human civilization.

Acknowledging imminent climate chaos may initially give rise to fear, but this reaction is not necessarily undesirable. While fear over climate disruption often spurs denial and ends in panic or mental paralysis, it may equally well give rise to samvega, a sense of urgency leading to wise decisions to avert the crisis. Everything depends on how we metabolize our fear. The sense of urgency is, in a way, the wholesome metabolism of fear, transforming our initial disorientation into an intelligent grasp of our situation. Transformed fear thereby becomes the incentive for a genuine solution, opening up a new field of possibilities that can only emerge when we’re moved from the inside out……..

when we are stirred to a sense of urgency by destructive climate events, we also know what we must do: reduce carbon emissions as rapidly as possible.

We may be as yet uncertain about the mechanics of emission reductions, but we do understand a few things we must do fast and decisively to avoid wide-scale catastrophe. We must end subsidies to fossil fuel corporations. We must make the polluters pay. We must switch to sources of clean and renewable energy. We must dethrone big money from control over our political system and vote only for candidates who affirm the findings of climate science. We must replace the industrial model of agriculture with a model that gives priority to small-scale producers, end wasteful consumption and learn to live with greater simplicity.

From a broad perspective, we must also envision a new social paradigm that restores true democracy at the national level and establishes a global commonwealth committed to promoting equity for all peoples everywhere. Our collective sense of urgency must be infused with a compassionate concern for all life forms imperiled by the crisis and by a commitment to justice for those who bear the brunt of calamity out of all proportion to their role in causing it.

We are now in a position similar to the thoroughbred horses in the Buddha’s simile. The shadow of the goad was cast 25 years ago, when climate scientists first warned us about the threat of climate change. Since their warnings went unheeded, over the past decade we have felt the touch of the goad against our skin, in the form of more frequent heat waves, droughts, floods, violent hurricanes and wildfires. But still action is being postponed. Perhaps we have not yet felt the impact of the goad against our flesh or against our bones, but if we don’t start moving, the goad will strike. We must act quickly and effectively while we still have a fighting chance. There is no more time for delay. http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/26602-feeling-the-touch-of-the-goad-a-sense-of-urgency-as-a-spur-to-climate-action

October 6, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general