The Copenhagen Climate Conference Debacle: What Does It Mean for Massachusetts?

It starts to feel like I'm repeatedly writing the same editorial about different subjects at times like this. Just a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned how it surprised no one when Pres. Barack Obama recently announced that the U.S. was escalating the war on Afghanistan. Now I'm going to do the same thing about the United Nations Conference on Climate Change that just ended in Copenhagen. Because no serious observer was surprised when the United States and a few allies derailed two years of multipartite negotiations and rammed through the so-called "Copenhagen Accord" - that has only been signed by the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. The "accord" bore a suspicious similarity to a document called "The Danish Text" which was leaked to the climate conference attendees in advance of any agreement and caused an uproar when it was rumored to have been authored by a number of nations from the global north, including the US, the UK and Denmark. According to the Guardian UK, the text "hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations." Much like the "accord" that officially surfaced soon afterward ... and that most of the world's nations have only agreed to "take note of" and understandably refuse to sign. Millions of words have already been written and spoken over the last few weeks about these events; so I won't belabor them here. But I will ask a simple question. What does the failure of the Copenhagen conference to agree on a binding global climate treaty (that is properly fair to the developing nations and stringent with the developed nations) mean for the future of Boston and Massachusetts?

In short, the future doesn't look great for us if global warming isn't brought to heel. Climate deniers of the right - and unfortunately, a few on the left - spew huge amounts of diversionary verbiage into the ether that cloud the popular view of what the vast majority of climate scientists are really saying about global warming much like the smoke from our cars and coal-fired power generators had clouded our view of the stars in the last few decades. They play semantic games, try to pick apart the methods used by the top climate scientists, and raise specters of some kind of "One World Government" using its dreaded "Black Helicopters" to do something or other to someone or other. It's not quite clear in these conspiracy theories who is trying to do what to regular folks. But rest assured, they're apparently trying to do something bad. And the only way to avoid the vague yet supposedly dire threat posed to us by hordes of government-funded science geeks is ... basically to keep doing things exactly as we've been doing them heretofore.

Keep burning carbon in the form of oil, coal and natural gas until it runs out. Keep fouling the air, and despoiling the land and water. Keep pushing up that global temperature. Because why worry, right? No problems round here, right? Oh look, it's cold here in Boston today - no global warming here, right? Oh there is? Well it's those volcanos pushing the global temps up, not us puny humans, right? Cast your gaze away from the energy corporations ... don't look at the men (and they are mostly men) behind the curtain, folks, nothing to see there. The problem is not the billionaires from Big Oil and Big Coal (and Big Nuclear, a group that fakes "green" while breaking bad) - and the NGOs and governments that they buy off. Right? The problem is those sneaky climate scientists and environmentalists. Always up to no good. Trying destroy our productivity and our American way of life by having the temerity to insist that we owe some kind of "climate debt" to the rest of the world. That we need to cut our carbon emissions by like 85 percent from 1990 measurements by 2050 or doom the world to wild weather, sea level rises, drought, desertification, famine and so on. Stuff and nonsense?! Right?

Wrong. Those bad consequences are just some of what we face. Here in Massachusetts we may not ultimately deal with all of them, but any we don't suffer directly we'll suffer indirectly. For example, the Northeastern U.S. isn't expected to become a desert due to a global temperature rise of 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, but we are going suffer from water stress. We will lose a lot of coastline with the estimated 1 meter sea level rise by 2100 (a conservative estimate that assumes that the Greenland ice cap doesn't slide into the ocean sometime between now and then, and that doesn't account for the data that indicates the North Atlantic will rise more than other parts of the Atlantic). Much of the New England population lives close to the coast - in cities like Boston, Portland, Providence, and New Haven - and in many smaller coastal communities. Another chunk of the population lives near rivers and will suffer from flooding during storm surges - especially people that live close to deltas where rivers empty into the ocean (including the aforementioned cities).

In the process, we'll lose some arable land even as our regional hydrological cycle is negatively affected by the predicted droughts and by sea water inundating coastal water tables. As it is, Massachusetts can't grow anywhere near what it needs to feed itself. The figure that I recall last time I checked a few years ago was that we only produce about 13 percent of the food we need to feed ourselves now. Maine is the only state in New England that can currently produce enough food to feed itself. The rest of us get most of our food from the Midwest, South and Califormia - plus a good deal from overseas. All of the major bread basket areas of the world are at serious risk from the forces I mentioned above, and food production is expected to drop sharply if nothing is done to curb global warming.

To make matters worse, if humans follow the patterns our ancestors did during the last period there was a sea level rise thousands of years ago, they'll move to higher latitudes. Higher latitudes like here in New England - which straddles the 45 degree north latitude line. So we can expect population to increase as summers get hotter and hotter, years-long drought grips the American South and Midwest, and people start moving north for what they hope are fairer climes.

Don't forget that all this is going be happening as we are projected to run out of easily accessible oil and natural gas. So transporation costs are going to skyrocket if we keep doing things the way we have been. Then at a certain point, it will become economically unfeasible to ship large amounts of food and durable goods around the planet. We will have great difficultly even providing energy to heat our homes and workplaces during winters that will still be cold. All while new diseases (dengue fever anyone?) are making their way north. And species extinctions continue at an accelerated rate. And the oceans become more acidic and keep getting warmer - generating further chaos and hampering the oceans' ability to sustain most of the species that humans rely on for food. Especially in coastal areas like much of New England.

So that is not a pretty future, and it is a future that is already now in some important respects. We've seen the first major signs and portents of the coming crisis in the last few years. And the logical question to then ask is: what are politicians doing about all this?

Well in the US the subsidiary question you have to ask is: which politicians aren't already owned by the energy cartels? The same kind of question you have to ask about other problems we face like the crisis in health care. Meaning that it's no mystery why a politician like Joe Lieberman is an enemy of working people when it comes to winning national health care. He's a creature of Connecticut's huge insurance industry lobby.

Fortunately, Massachusetts (and New England in general) does not possess large extractable oil, gas or coal reserves. So the energy industries are relatively weak here. That's why Gov. Deval Patrick has been pretty decent on getting reasonable legislation passed to help ameliorate global warming. There's not too much political risk for him to do so. And I think it's reasonable to surmise that's why Massachusetts is one of six states that have actually passed solid carbon emission caps into law in the last few years. And our state government has actually put some good chunks of money into growing the alternative energy industry, as Massachusetts has joined nine other Northeastern states in a regional compact limiting power plant emissions.

That's all good stuff. Not even close to enough, but much better than most other American states, and way better than the false Copenhagen "accord."

This is not to say that I can't (or won't) pick the Mass. Global Warming Solutions Act, or the Green Jobs Act, or the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative apart and find many weaknesses and inconsistencies - largely due to their reliance on market-based initiatves rather than stronger government initiatives. Not to mention the very real likelihood that the giant energy corporations will blow so many legal holes in those state and regional efforts in the next few years that they'll collapse before doing any good. I feel sure I can (and will).

But these decent efforts by Mass. politicians at least provide a good starting point for local grassroots environmental activists and policy experts to build upon.

And build we must. And soon. This coming year will see big international confabs in Canada and Mexico which will provide new opportunities for popular movements to push global political leaders to do the right thing, listen to the scientists, and ultimately pass binding treaties that will limit global warming to the latest projected tipping point of 1.5 degrees Celsius worldwide by 2050.

So I leave Open Media Boston viewers with a final question ... what are you all going to do to help get a binding and meaningful global climate treaty ratified by every nation on the planet within the next five years? What are you going to do in Boston? In Massachusetts? In Washington? And at the UN?

What are you going to do?

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston