Another UN Climate Change Report …and Other Recommended Reading

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Following closely on the the better-publicized IPCC Report, another UN-related group, the Scientific Expert Group on Climate Change and Sustainable Development, yersterday released Confronting Climate Change: Avoiding the Unmanageable and Managing the Unavoidable. It’s well worth reading, despite the authors’ naïve advocacy of emissions trading as a solution.

”Two starkly different futures diverge from this time forward. Society’s current path leads to increasingly serious climate-change impacts, including potentially catastrophic changes in climate that will compromise efforts to achieve development objectives where there is poverty and will threaten standards of living where there is affluence.

“The other path leads to a transformation in the way society generates and uses energy as well as to improvements in management of the world’s soils and forests. This path will reduce dangerous emissions, create economic opportunity, help to reduce global poverty, reduce degradation of and carbon emissions from ecosystems, and contribute to the sustainability of productive economies capable of meeting the needs of the world’s growing population.

“Humanity must act collectively and urgently to change course through leadership at all levels of society. There is no more time for delay.”

Download the Full Report (PDF – 13 MB) and/or the Executive Summary (PDF – 3 MB) at http://www.unfoundation.org/SEG/


Other recent posts of note:

A Video Interview with Megan Quinn (Life of Riley)

Quinn is the author of “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil,” which appears elsewhere on Climate and Capitalism.

Michael T. Klare. Global Warming: It’s All About Energy (Zmag)

”Global warming is an energy problem, and we cannot have both an increase in conventional fossil fuel use and a habitable planet. It’s one or the other. We must devise a future energy path that will meet our basic (not profligate) energy needs and also rescue the climate while there’s still time. The technology to do so is potentially available to us, but only if we make the decision to develop it swiftly and on a very large scale.”

Ben Courtice. ‘Clean Coal’ Is Smoke And Mirrors (Green Left Weekly)

”Non-CO2 emitting alternative energy generation methods such as geothermal and solar-thermal are available right now, and yet massive amounts of government research money continue to flow into an unproven technology like carbon geosequestration and into “clean coal” PR exercises for the coal companies.”

China Needs An Ecologized Socialism. An Interview With Dale Wen (Focus on the Global South)

“Taking advantage of lagging implementation of environmental laws in China, many western Traqns National Corporations have relocated their most polluting factories into the country and have exacerbated or even created many environmental problems. For example, Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta, the two Special Economic Zones where most TNC subsidiaries are located, have the most serious problem of heavy metal and POPs (persistent organic pollutants) pollution.”