Global warming as a political challenge

"To EANTH subscribers:

Global warming represents a political problem.  Governments need to put in
place new policies to deal with the crisis.  The United States is the
biggest barrier, thus making political action in the U.S. very important.

The Durban conference of December 2011 set out a timeline under which
countries would sign a new global warming treaty by 2015 and ratify it by
2020.  The world faces a point of no return, and we will be lucky if 2020
would be soon enough for greenhouse gas emissions to peak, then decline.
Yet December 2015 is less than three years away.

Given the fact that time is short, the U.S. Congress must act on global
warming.  Government regulations would not cover the entire U.S. economy;
they would not give people incentives to drive less or to live in smaller
homes.  Regulations would not convince anyone that the U.S. Senate would
ratify a new global warming treaty (the most important person to convince
is President Obama, since he decides the U.S. position in international
global warming negotiations).

We certainly face a huge challenge.  We can expect to have a difficult
time convincing Republican lawmakers, and also Democrats from coal
producing states.  But David Cortright's book, _Peace Works_ (1993) shows
how the U.S. peace movement had an impact on the Reagan administration.

Myself, I'm part of the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL), which is working to
convince the U.S. Congress to put a price on carbon.  CCL had over eighty
chapters in the U.S. and Canada.  The big environmental organizations seem
to be reluctant to use their political capital on a bill they think is
going nowhere.  CCL has a different approach: we are engaging in
grassroots activism to build the political will for a carbon tax.  The CCL
website:

http://www.citizensclimatelobby.org/

CCL will probably not be successful without protests on the street, but
people can both protest and lobby.  I hope that those of you who teach
classes will tell your students that the necessary social change will come
about only if people will become involved in politics.  Activism is the
antidote for despair, but given that time is short, people need to
carefully choose their strategy, hence my comments above about a national
carbon tax in the U.S.  A carbon tax would only be the beginning."
                                      --Milton Takei

------------------------------------------------------------
eanth-l@listserv.uga.edu - A forum for discussing ecology and
the environment in anthropology and related social sciences.
For more information, or to unsubscribe, visit our website at
http://www.eanth.org