Since the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, we have witnessed international efforts to change the trajectory of our climate crisis. The process and the results have been frustrating, disappointing, and ineffective. We have seen large-scale international negotiating efforts fail to bring about a comprehensive international climate change mitigation and adaptation plan. I feel that continuing these efforts is important, but is beginning to look futile as the years of inaction pile up.
Twenty years of negotiations has led to very little actual change - the Kyoto Protocol has been largely ineffective in actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and in several months that treaty will expire, with nothing to replace it as of now. Twenty years' worth of relative inaction in climate-change-land has had devastating consequences for the trajectory of our future. The effects of global warming are now locked in for the next 50 years, as Mark Hertsgaard discusses in HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. Even if we cut our worldwide carbon emissions to zero as of today (obviously impossible), the amount of greenhouse gas already in the atmosphere will continue to wreak havoc on the climate system. In order to lower the parts per million to below the 350ppm threshold for a livable world, major changes need to happen NOW. So, what do we, the concerned public, do when our countries' leaders won't agree on a path forward?
I will be doing a series of posts on what we must do at the local level to start a movement that will:
- lower carbon emissions now, instead of waiting for an international treaty while the problem gets worse
- prepare our communities for the locked-in climate changes to come
- make our leaders unable to ignore climate change and finally act meaningfully on national and international levels
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