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Counting carbon, counting food

Storms and floods, heat waves and drought became more frequent, in our own environments and through the global media. Whatever the result of the inconclusive talks at K¯benhavn — and whatever the progress made during the subsequent talks, in Cancun — the onus is on cities and provinces to take stock of their settlements, natural resources and populations and plan accordingly.

Typically, cities and provinces are bad at such planning. They are good at conjuring new ways to earn money and attract capital, bad at understanding human habitation and ecosystems. Much of that inability (it’s a learned inability, for it is anthropologically unnatural) is a result of believing in a world economic system that considers growth to be a constant, when in fact biological systems—all of them— exist only within a set of limits.

Contemporary economics has refused 
to recognise these limits, for a very good reason. If it did, it would collapse. Instead environments are collapsing, but conventional economics proceed as if the environment is a bad debt that can be written off. The truth is different. Contemporary economics has been a basket case of decaying ideas since the early 20^th century, and deserved to have been thrown out along with such ideas as war and racism early in the last century.

The good news is that more and more people and organisations are recognising this truth, and are deciding to do something about it. In towns and villages small groups of citizens with ideas and the will to do some work are forming: some last, most do not. Many do no more than spread a message in an entertaining and engaging way.

For most people their participation in a campaign about environment, social justice, climate change, human rights or fair trade is limited to reading an email and clicking a link to an online petition.

Some go a step further and write a letter/email to a local politician, perhaps collect some signatures too.

Some go even further and organise an event around a theme, at a neighbourhood school or sports centre, getting friends and co-workers together, and having some community fun too. They figure out how to cut emissions: planting trees, installing efficient light bulbs (look at what Bangladesh did last week, millions of CFLs) and using bicycles more.

It’s at that point that social movement begins, and that’s the point which is becoming more and more common to see these days. It’s important because that’s how genuine progress will take place.

There are, of course a very large number of new organisations, non-government organisations, foundations, think tanks and advocacy groups doing full-time work on climate and a variety of other issues. They are in a different league compared to the weekend eco-warriors who round up families and go off on a nature trail eco-study. For the organised groups have a budget, staff, run campaigns and can easily get the ear of politicians and bureaucrats who matter. The others, the villagers and neighbourhood groups, can only use people power to be heard, so that’s what they do.

Both have to co-exist, to count carbon and to count food in ways that make sense to them. We have seen a lot of community-level organising around the ‘350’ theme. What’s 350? That’s parts per million, for those who still don’t know, which is the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere thought to be the upper limit for global warming to be reversible by us humans.

Without local organising, we won’t be able to build movements large or loud enough to push politicians, bureaucrats and industry to take real climate action. A strong and vibrant climate movement will create the political space for local champions to lead and help implement innovative climate solutions from the ground up.

They will be needed urgently. The summer of 2010 has already proved disastrous for crops in China, Russia, Pakistan, sub-Saharan Africa, mid-western USA and Australia. Staple foodgrains are set to become both scarce and expensive.

Prices for basic farm commodities— wheat, corn, and soybeans—are actually somewhat higher in August of this year than they were in August of 2007 at the start of the record-breaking 2007-08 run-up in grain prices that led to food protests and riots in some 30 countries. Meanwhile, it’s now being estimated that Russia could lose nearly 30 million tons of grain this summer.

“The global balance between grain supply and demand is fragile and depends largely on climate,” said Lester Brown, the founder and President of Earth Policy Institute (in 1974 he founded the hugely influential Worldwatch Institute).

“With 80 million more mouths to feed each year and with increasing demand for grain-intensive livestock products, the rise in temperature only adds to the stress. If we continue with business as usual on the climate front, it is only a matter of time before what we are seeing in Russia becomes commonplace.”

Just what has happened in Russia?

The country has suffered the longest unprecedented heat wave. “We have an archive of abnormal weather situations stretching over a thousand years,” said Alexander Frolov, the head of the Russian Meteorological Center said this week.

We’re now in a climate in which the once-in-a-hundred-year event has become the once-in-a-thousand-year event. That’s why political wrangling will get us nowhere—it’s local or nothing.

Rahul Goswami is a development policy analyst who lives in Berlin, Germany, and Goa, India