Past the point of no return?

This is probably accurate:

In fact, there is a perfectly good reason developing countries are unwilling to act on climate change: What they are being asked to do is more awful than climate change’s implications–even if one accepts all the alarmist predictions.

Consider what would be necessary to slash global greenhouse-gas emissions just 50% below 2000 levels by 2050–a far less aggressive goal than what the enviros say is necessary to avert climate catastrophe. According to U.S. Chamber of Commerce calculations, even if the West reduced its emissions by 80% below 2000 levels, developing countries would still have to return their emissions to 2000 levels to meet the 50% target. However, Indians currently consume roughly 15 times less energy per capita than Americans–and Chinese consume seven times less. Asking them, along with the rest of the developing world, to go back to 2000 emission levels with a 2050 population would mean putting them on a very drastic energy diet.

The human toll of this is unfathomable: It would require these countries to abandon plans to ever conquer poverty, of course. But beyond that it would require a major scaling back of living standards under which their middle classes–for whom three square meals, cars and air-conditioning are only now beginning to come within reach–would have to go back to subsistence living, and the hundreds of millions who are at subsistence would have to accept starvation.

I think I may agree with this point: we are too far down the slippery-slope of climate-change for curbing consumption to be enough to effectively combat the changes. We might be past the point of no-return here.

To avoid calamity, I believe we will need a technological revolution (coming in the form of a multi-front effort to increase carbon-free energy production, geo-engineering global cooling efforts, &c.).

But what we can do with consumption-curbing efforts is buy ourselves more time. If we can slow the pace of warming, we increase the chances of finding technological resources to help our efforts.

Her conclusion, which essentially amounts to sitting on our hands, is utterly backwards and false:

So what should climate warriors do? Right now the only certain way to save lives is by calling off this misguided war on climate change. If and when climate change promises to claim more casualties than poverty and starvation, the world will begin heeding their calls. If, however, these climate-change casualties don’t materialize, there would have been no need to act in the first place. Either way, the world has far more immediate and scarier problems than climate change to address right now.

We cannot abandon pushes to slow/stop climate change. That is suicide. To say we have to stop all efforts on this huge issue because there are other huge issues going on in the world simultaneously, is both misguided and cowardly. We can rub our stomach and pat our head at the same time–and in this case, we need to.

The real issue here is a failure to acknowledge that, going forward, our economy and our environmental policies and outlook are going to be intertwined. For example, examining the real cost of burning carbon on society as a whole. One of the ways to address this problem is to tie the real cost of carbon to the way it is priced in the market place.

The issues of poverty, food production/dispersion, and the environment are more intertwined than Dalmia acknowledges. And a failure to acknowledge this, and to address it as a three-headed but singular problem (there are actually more heads on this hydra than that–foreign policy, for example), is to failure to form the comprehensive, cohesive strategy necessary to take a crack at these globally-scaled issues.

(Danke: Patrick Appel)