Make Love Not Carbon

Here's some support for George Monbiot's initially startling zero-emissions analysis of global warming reported here on Blockhead in January. Climate Progress reports, "Avoiding climate catastrophe will probably require going to near-zero net emissions of greenhouse gases this century. That is the conclusion of a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters."

The abstract of the paper is appropriately weighty with jargon, but the message, as Climate Progress states, is clear: "stable global temperatures within the next several centuries can be achieved if CO2 emissions are reduced to nearly zero. This means that avoiding future human-induced climate warming may require policies that seek not only to decrease CO2 emissions, but to eliminate them entirely."

It seems like our choice is to take half measures while the planet heats, gradually unleashing world anarchy. Or to go for the zero. We have some representations of what the former will look like: a leaked Pentagon report from 2004 predicting "nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting," and Cormac McCarthy's brilliant fictional picture of such a world in The Road. Both are chilling.

The only idea I have of what the latter would look like is some kind neo-hippie "make love not carbon" existence. I did it the first time around, so I'm sure I can do it again.

(Thanks to Sam Smith's alternative news digest Undernews for alerting me to the Climate Progress and Pentagon reports. Undernews is delivered free to my email inbox several days a week (prorev-subscribe@topica.com). It can also be read as a blog.)

--Julian