A remarkable survival plan – if survival is what we want . . .

While Climate Chronicles indulges in solo prose to warn of the impending Flood, fervently hoping to muster people to address climate reality, the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) (1) in the U.K. is building an Ark – for all of us if we have the sense to climb on board. Founded in 1973, CAT is a leading European environmental research and experimental station and community, and has grown from wind turbines hand-made from cloth and old car parts to a state-of-the-art (both low- and high-tech) leading edge planning and development center. I highly recommend visiting CAT’s informative and entertaining website.

In June 2007 CAT issued its ground-breaking report, Zero Carbon Britain (ZCB) (2), which outlines the elements of a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the U.K. to zero by the year 2027. While I maintain that 2027 is far too late, I readily admit that I am stubbornly insistent on the demands of physical reality – ZCB is tipping its hat to political “reality,” as irrelevant to the natural world though politics may be.

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“All of the time scales seem to be shortened now. . . . Things are on more of a hair trigger than we thought.” (1)

The rapid and accelerating alterations in climate make it clear that we have to change course. If we care about the future in any meaningful way we literally have no choice (see previous and future posts for more detail on collapse-laden choicelessness). This non-choice is both simple and extremely difficult: Zero Carbon Now (ZCN).

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If it ain’t fixable, don’t break it . . .

One of the recurrent quotable quotes in the climate biz goes something like “if we act now, we can avoid the worst effects of global warming.” Well, I went to my files to find a recent example for you – but I almost couldn’t. With the accelerating change observed in the past few months, the invocation of such optimism seems to be waning.

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Thanks, Mr. Clinton, but It’s Not the Economy!

Alas, We Can’t Go On Living This Way

The end is inevitable: our glut of cars, our thriftless air travel, our food shipped thousands of miles, our single-family houses and strip malls, our endless electronic gadgets, our toxic lawns, our monocropped farms. Exporting damage to our own impoverished communities and to third-world countries, whether it’s in the form of pollution, resource depletion or the chronically unconscionable exploitation of human beings (1), is over.

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Death, destruction and the end of civilization seem pretty inconvenient to me . . .

Thanks in no small part to the spectacular success of “An Inconvenient Truth” – which was built on years of foundational work by thousands of researchers, investigators and journalists, as well as Gore’s own study and writings over the years – the American public is rapidly awakening to the irrefutable existence of the climate crisis. That’s the good news.

Here’s the bad news:

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