The Buck Stops Here

Part of President Obama's inaugural address concerned an astonishing position on the climate change issue:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise. That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

With that, a Bicameral Climate Change Task Force has just now been established, co-chaired by Rep. Waxman, the Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Sen. Whitehouse, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. This article has a link to an important letter that was written by them to President Obama, establishing that the United States must assert its leadership in addressing climate change. This is in response to an overwhelming petition by the public regarding a climate change discussion to the then-candidates during the debates, which was deflected by both parties.

This immensely important issue was thus put out in front as a major domestic crisis, requiring the attention and the resources of the entire country. What has been left unsaid is how this shift in position will play out in the global sphere.

The world is looking towards the USA and China to step up to this issue in an immediate and substantive way, and reaffirm the 2 degree climate change limit that was a global target at Durban in 2011. Both countries are the biggest emissions sources, and they remain outside the agreement framework that is trying to be established. This can't continue because the carbon emissions are already exceeding the limits of the 2 degree impact.

This leadership by the USA is critically necessary even as other countries and many corporations prepare for a warmer and more volatile planet. These carbon emissions must be reduced by all countries very quickly, or there's no future for the world's people and its living systems.

Here is the hope that it will happen.

Harmonic Infinities

Proportional harmonies, the structures of Phi and the underlying quantum mechanics are the inherent patterns of the universe. Understanding these is achieved through many paths of inquiry - mathematics, music, natural science, philosophy and religious practice. They tie together as universal patterns and channels of energy, and are also expressed in the structures of music, which explains the video above.

These are inherent properties and relational structures to all things in the universe, as Einstein, Bell and Bohm discovered, and they are now beginning to be understood as parts of the whole interconnected life that nature and human society is bound by. Understanding this impact of human societies on the earth's systems is a crucial part of coming to grips with this energetic structure that plays out in nature. Its creativity and intelligence is orders of magnitude greater than our own, yet resonates with us.

As soon as we understand that in this biosphere the balance of these things is critical to life, and that there are limits to its tolerance for the degradation of extractive processes and the unbinding of carbon that took the earth millenniums to absorb, the path forward to a collective way of life that balances within the earth's natural bounds will become evident. The synchronicity of this approach is embedded in the Eden Projects and its association with the C&C method of carbon reduction.

May we enter a new beginning with the understanding of the true challenges of the world before us.

A Small Moment

A photo above of a traditional station of the cross in a public underpassing in Zagreb, Croatia last year. I love to see people in small moments of grace, and their meditation upon meaning. It happens in the big European cathedrals while the sermons float past the crowds of tourists in many languages, focusing on the local faithful who look inward while the world moves past their walls. It happens on winding streets looking over the piazzas of Rome and the waterways of Venice.

It happens in Nepal while the Buddhists mingle with people on the streets, touching each with a moment of retrospection. It happens in India in the streets and temples jammed with humanity among the Hindu traditions of erotic sculpture and Gods of Death and Life. And in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand with the connection of common culture and the touch of children with strangers and friends. The small celebrations of the Chinese in their festivals in the public square. The ablutions of the Muslims in their daily call. In Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, the sacred is blessed every day with the scattering of petals and the immersion in meditation. The African dusk is a time to gaze into the long shadows of the bush, and celebrate the native traditions with people from all over the world. Mexico is a celebration of The Dead in the zocalo, and in life with people in private spaces and the cathedrals in every square.

In our USA, these moments are more rare and formalized, not part of the everyday ebb and flow of life in all its gifts and trials. Somehow the quiet inner spaces and human connections have been drained from the common sphere of life in our cities, and the sprit retreats in the face of the commercialized public space. It somehow seems impolite to express that centered moment except in formal structures, the warp and weave of human life and its meaning is not strongly expressed in our isolated communities.

I would hope that our emerging global community can help bring these connections back into our everyday experience, unburdened by theologies, cliques and partisanship. I am heartened to see the flash music that erupts in civic and commercial spaces to break open the closed off pursuit of things. I love the public holiday events that are celebrated in parks and open city plazas, where people feel free to express their connection to life, music, ideas and play.

Urban Regeneration

A remarkable urban green space has been developed in Copenhagen in response to a site with heavy traffic and no urban forestry. It uses ribbons of concrete that support pedestrian movement through a site of trees and native plantings, in effect, unpaving the city.

The result is a sustainable and fully accessible urban space covering an area of 7.300 m2. Like a giant dune of sand or snow it slips in between the buildings, thereby creating a spatial coherence in the design. Simultaneously, the urban space, elevated 7 meters above the surroundings, ensures the mobility of pedestrians and cyclists, leading from SEB and the harbor past The Danish National Archives and on to the Tivoli Congress Center.

This kind of creative engagement, along with net zero building structure design, is the best hope for sustainable cities as a node of intelligence and human community.

It Begins to Turn

The COP 18 global conference in Doha is once again exhibiting the display of climate change brinksmanship. It's probably the last time that opportunities will be available to the global community to actually come to an agreement about the reduction of carbon emissions in time to salvage the ecosphere from catastrophic warming. There's no escape, the USA is now experiencing the disastrous consequences of climate change on the food and water supplies as severely as the rest of the world.

The only hope is that leadership will be asserted not only in agreements, but in myraid ways by all countries. The growing awareness by people all over the globe is beginning to coalesce on strategies that are being undertaken in many ways. But this also means a shift in our values away from the corporate model and into a humanistic value system, a critically necessary step in the cooperation of the world governments and their people in this immense crisis we face.

But this can be the beginning of a new way of living deeply in this natural world, while it still exists.

Eyes on Qatar

The 18th United Nations Climate Change Conference opened yesterday in Doha, with a call for action from the President of the sessions, Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Atttiyah:

“Now more than ever, the issues at the heart of these negotiations are at the forefront of global debate and discourse. All seven billion people living on the planet share a single challenge: climate change,” Mr Al-Attiyah has said. “This is why we gather at the highest official levels in an international framework; this is our mission. If we do not make the changes we need to now, it will soon be too late. We must decide whether we let our lifestyles jeopardise our life.”

This is in response to the dire report from the World Bank regarding the impact of climate change that has already taken place. The US has refrained from being a part of the UNFCCC protocol because of its objection to being designated as Annex II country when India and China are equal carbon emitters and are not held accountable for that because of their earlier "developing country" status.

The US delegate to the conference, Jonathan Pershing offered no new sweeteners to the poor countries at the opening day, only reiterating what the United States has done to tackle global warming: investing heavily in clean energy, doubling fuel efficiency standards and reducing emissions from coal-fired power plants. Pershing also said the United States would not increase its earlier commitment of cutting emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. It is half way to that target.

"I would suggest those who don't follow what the U.S. is doing may not be informed of the scale and extent of the effort, but it's enormous," Pershing said.

Now all eyes are on the US Administration to reaffirm a core commitment made at last year's COP in  Durban for a 2 degree limit on climate change. A statement made by Todd Stern, a State Department envoy, earlier this year, appears to back off from any commitment to this hard goal. However, the EPA is poised to finalize a rule approved in March that would put severe limits on the construction of new power plants in the USA.

How else is the US participating? The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements will be conducting a significant side project at the conference. Which indicates that US leadership could possibly come from a myriad of strategies rather than a single goal commitment.

The Carbon Can

The world community has a unique opportunity coming soon. Has the time arrived when global agreements are put into place that put a hard cap on the carbon emissions? Can we expect leadership from key players (i.e., the World Bank) in accomplishing the completely do-able shift to renewable and non-fossil energy? Can we actually preserve our world so that it's fit to live in by 2030? Can we change the corporate business model so that they can't simply externalize the carbon waste that's impacting the entire globe? Can these business models adjust to the long view?

As Eric Roston succinctly puts it in his Forbes article:

I bet the policy professionals and scientists who ponder climate change adaptation spend little if any time with investors and traders whose livelihoods rise or fall on the spread between company estimates and earnings. There’s a yawning chasm between how much tolerance companies and investors have for blips in performance, which is to say not much, and the large-scale threats to life and property in years and decades ahead, which as far as anybody knows could be considerable. I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

There are numerous examples of countries and regions going directly into renewable energy sources right now, and they're not waiting for some formal payback system. The profit is there already, and it increases as more businesses, governments and companies make the changeover, a synergistic effect. So there's really nothing keeping the global community from grabbing that can and opening it, since that creates so many opportunities for everyone to participate in a livelihood that pays back the earth and its climate as well as the investors. Broad-brush the numbers and work the concept.

So let's do it.