Prism Webcast News

Cutting CO2 Emissions 80% by 2020 to Avoid Dangerous Climate Change

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 Source: USA
Posted in Global Warming | Tagged Global Warming

WASHINGTON, DC — Mounting concern about climate change was evident in Washington last week: On Monday, NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen warned a Congressional committee that the world is nearing a tipping point on global warming. On Tuesday, the committee was briefed on a National Intelligence Council assessment that redefines security to incorporate climate change and its effects. And on Thursday, testimony by Sir Nicholas Stern, former World Bank chief economist and author of a report detailing the enormous cost of waiting to act on warming, further buttressed these worries.

Yet despite the escalating concern and growing evidence of trouble ahead, the world does not have a plan to stabilize climate. On Wednesday, July 2nd, environmental analyst and author Lester Brown will hold a telephone briefing to present a blueprint to cut carbon emissions enough to avoid the most dangerous effects of climate change — 80 percent by 2020.

Brown, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient, says we do not need to go beyond ice melting to see that civilization is in trouble. While political leaders who recognize the need to cut carbon emissions to address global warming ask what is politically feasible, the Earth Policy Institute asks what is necessary. How much and how fast do we have to cut carbon emissions to save the Greenland ice sheet or the glaciers in the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, whose ice melt irrigates the wheat and rice fields of China and India during the dry season?

By systematically raising energy efficiency throughout the world economy, by largely replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, and geothermal energy for electricity and heating, by restructuring transport systems, and by planting billions of trees, we can stabilize climate. This alternative to business as usual, aka “Plan B,” also frees us from dependence on imported oil.

“We need to mobilize at wartime speed,” said Brown. “Cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020 will not be easy, but it may be the key to saving civilization.”