Solutions?

What needs to happen to help the planet is for the dominant countries to all agree upon and enforce environmental protections/standards. All corporations would be required to put those standards ahead of profits. Much more severe penalties (a percentage of gross profits - even shutdown of aggressors) would have to be imposed to enforce those standards and protections. Unfortunately - the corporations have too much power over governments.

Richard Heinberg figures it's up to people at the local level - to do what we can.

Some snips from MuseLetter #212 / January 2010 by Richard Heinberg

The main points of the Copenhagen Accord are easy to summarize:

• Industrial countries must list their individual emissions reductions targets, and less-industrialized countries must list the actions they will take to cut emissions by specific amounts.
• All countries must accept a transparent system for monitoring their emissions.

• Poor countries will be paid to prevent deforestation.

• Wealthy nations will establish a fund (growing from 30 billion dollars per year to $100 billion per year by 2020) to help poor and vulnerable nations adapt to climate change.

• Signatory nations accept a goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.

• The Accord creates a Technology Mechanism to accelerate development of low-carbon technology, but supplies no details.

...the Accord’s implementation could turn out to be a joke. The document says nothing about how voluntary targets are to be achieved—whether through carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, or other mechanisms. And, as climate scientist James Hansen has pointed out tirelessly during the past few months, cap-and-trade programs, unless set up and managed flawlessly, can easily be “gamed” by fossil fuel producers by buying phony offsets while continuing to increase total emissions.

In summary, the discussions in Denmark took place in a conceptual fantasy world in which climate change is the only global crisis that matters much; in which rapid economic growth is still an option; in which fossil fuels are practically limitless; in which a western middle class staring at the prospect of penury can be persuaded voluntarily to transfer a significant portion of its rapidly evaporating wealth to other nations; in which subsistence farmers in poor nations should all aspire to become middle-class urbanites; and in which the subject of human overpopulation can barely be mentioned.

Once again: it’s no wonder more wasn’t achieved in Copenhagen.

...If all of this sounds shamefully self-interested and corrupt, just put yourself in the shoes of a high-level politician. No would-be leader who fails to promise economic growth is taken seriously to begin with, so the only politicians we have are ones committed to producing growth. Those who succeed at this are rewarded; those who fail are sidelined and forgotten.

...The same could be said for other crises mentioned above. It’s not enough that national governments can’t get together to solve climate change. They can’t solve economic meltdown, peak oil, water scarcity, soil erosion, or overpopulation either. Yes, there are individual nations like Tuvalu that can muster a decent policy on one issue or another. Denmark is probably the shining example among industrial nations: it has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 14 percent since 1990 while maintaining constant energy consumption and growing its GDP by more than 40 percent. But these are the rare exceptions, and apparently destined to stay that way. We have no global means of dealing with the toxic debt that is strangling the world economy. We have no agreements in place to prevent the death of the oceans. There is no global policy to avert economic impacts from fossil fuel depletion. There is no worldwide protocol to protect the precious layer of living topsoil that is all that separates us from famine. There is no effective global convention on fresh water conservation.

This is not to say there is nothing that can be done about these problems. In fact, there are organizations and communities in many nations doing path-breaking work to address each and every one of them. Some examples:

• Agronomists at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, led by Wes Jackson, have for years been patiently developing perennial grain crops capable of feeding billions without destroying topsoil.

• The city of Zurich has decided through popular vote to become a 2000-Watt society. This means cutting energy consumption from the current 6000 Watts per person to one-third that amount over the next three or four decades. This was evidently a response both to climate change and the problem of energy security.

• Here in Sonoma County, California, a Go Local Co-op has formed; it’s an extension of the national organization, Business Alliance for a Living Local Economy (BALLE). One of its projects is “Sustaining Capital”—a community cooperative capital formation model that, if successful and replicated widely, could end local economies’ dependence on Wall Street banks.

• At Sunga in Madhyapur Thimi, Nepal, a community-supported project has built a water treatment plant based on reed-bed constructed wetlands that also serves as the main source of irrigation for farmers in the region.

These are just a few items out of hundreds, maybe thousands that could be cited. But, in aggregate, are they enough? Obviously not—even in the estimation of the folks who are doing this admirable work.

To summarize: three factors—the need for resilience, the lack of effective policy at national and global levels, and the tendency of the best responses to emerge regionally and at a small scale—argue for dealing with the crushing crises of the new century locally, even though there is still undeniable need for larger-scale, global solutions.