I went back to the original McKibben article and also read over the first several posts in response. It’s a real challenge to pull out of the ozone or CO2 haze some hook or catch-phrase that will stick in the mind. Looking for something that could serve the purpose is at the heart of the article, yes? And the first post, a song, goes right at the challenge. And bravo!

Even so, there is something under the surface I wonder about. (This could be a long-ish post.)

First of all that number, 350 ppm of CO2, might not be so magical. Returning to that level only gets us part way back to geologically historical levels. Why not 320? 292? Anyone interested can search a bit and find the basis for the lower figures in various articles, published over many years.

Second, there is ample controversy over what the consequences of the present levels, above 350, will bring. And about what the mitigations of cap-and-trade or other emissions restructuring will actually accomplish. One estimate, by the same UN crew that got the Nobel along with Gore last year for its findings, is that the reductions under cap-and-trade as proposed by McCain and Obama would only delay arrival at a certain INCREASE in global temperature by a couple of years, and would cause a global rise of 0.4 degrees celsius by the end of this century. (I’ll give a link to an article in the next paragraph.)

I’m not certain that a 0.4 degree rise is NOT still quite serious but, without wanting to spark a shouting match, I do wish to encourage informed consideration of these aspects. Today there is an article in the Guardian by Bjorn Lomborg – if it’s permissable here is the url: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/03/climatechange.usa?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews – titled McCain, Obama, and Hot Air – that I recommend.

Lomborg is new to me and I’m not quite sure how to take what he has to say, but in detail he makes thoughtful points. One is that cap-and-trade only addresses the emissions side of the problem, and he thinks the benefits won’t repay the costs. If he’s right, we should be looking elsewhere. He would instead invest heavily in technologies for zero carbon energy PRODUCTION – wind, solar, wave, and so on.

But more interesting still is his placement of the CO2 problem in context with other priorities which include reduction of poverty, AIDS, and more. The article says it very well and if you look around a bit there are other places where Lomborg states his case.

Maybe the ‘WHAT’ that we face (high CO2 levels) is only AS IMPORTANT as the ‘WHY’ (historical factors that got us here) and – even more to the point – the ‘HOW’ to go on from here. If, as one poster wrote, agreement on what is a dangerous cholesterol count is hard to come by, and the specifics of what CO2 at 350 will mean are also debatable (but only in detail, please note I consider the situation IS grave), then it should be worthwhile to work out a strategy based on something else. Too. In addition.

That could be to find an image or catch-phrase that ignites the imagination by showing ‘sexy’ the kinds of win-win solutions that put us in a better place, and above all at the point of origin: by HOW we produce the energy we use, rather than by what we do about it AFTER the waste we produce becomes WHAT we have to worry about. Doing so, for the US especially, would go a long ways to restore faith in American leadership and moral strength, too.

More and better systems for zero-carbon energy production are in development. Many are, to me, surprising to see, especially in their esthetics. There are wind turbines, and not all the huge, horizontal propellers, that are – wow – quite beautiful to look at! There are strong improvements in protecting birds and animals at the same time, and in efficiency at many levels. Same for solar, where some of the new hardware, besides promising to become competitive with coal and other old-wave sources, look and feel sexy. Approaches to wave energy and – who knows? – are very intriguing, deserve to be pushed hard.

So this post is running long, and there is something else of importance I wish to add, even though I’ve pushed it clear down here in hopes that will signal my sense of its importance, but of its rank as secondary to the argument of this forum. ‘Argument’ that is, in the sense of the Italian word ‘argomento’ or main subject. I encourage anyone to keep looking around, be informed, armed, and bring that added context into this discussion, which is an important one, and difficult enough.

. A word on civility and acceptable content .

A series of posts, here, which began with one of my own, have turned into a shouting match and become uncomfortably personal. I accept my role in that downturn of spirit. I’m not certain where the the confines of manners might be in a forum such as this; is it not acceptable to voice disagreement? To indicate what appear, from the writer’s perspective, to be errors or inconsistencies, in the reasoning or argument of another poster? And what to do, when the content or the tenor of postings crosses some line of acceptability of a moral or spiritual character?

If someone posted a call, literally stated, to pick up guns and kill people who had names beginning with letters in the second half of the alphabet, it would be obligatory, I hope, to object, if not to call the police. What prompted me to intervene has not, I want to stress, of that explicit nature, but it was and is a matter of seriously loaded and objectionable content. I used the word ‘obscene’ early on. I don’t call the police over obscenity (unless it accompanies physical threat) but I do note it, at least, and object, when appropriate.

My post, I think it was 33, was in response to what were ambiguous but loaded declarations in a preceding post. I thought at the time that the poster may have been joking, or even ‘trolling’ but no matter, the way it came across, on reflection, was that the matter was serious enough to deserve my response. If the poster had been joking, then I, too, was joking in the manner of my framing of my reply.

But I don’t think this is a matter of a joke, and that, as I have written before now, disturbs me. It would disturb me to hear anyone speaking, in a public place, in such phrases; surely in a written discourse in a public forum such as this one, the effect, and the gravity, are of like kind. I can’t just walk away from it, although I have no stomach to ‘confront’ (do note the quotes) the individual who wrote the lines that bother me. And, if the silence from others here on the same matter is an expression of better judgment, that is, if you all see what I see and choose the path of letting it go in the nonce, then I salute you and say, you are right, and why am I caught up in this way?

But just in case there is more to the story, I will point back to the same poster’s most recent message. It contained lines to the effect that the writer would celebrate the deaths of – not quoting but recalling from memory here – masses of humanity in natural catastrophes following human-caused climate change.

What that says to me is that we have a person who would throw a party on the graves of those who died during Katrina, or the Indonesian Tsunami, the Chinese earthquake (not sure either of those can directly be tied to global warming, but where there’s a will there’s a way…). It’s easy to induce and infer that the writer of that post would cheer the deaths, on all sides, in Iraq, since they devolve from our thirst for oil. And, retrospectively, the Holocaust, which resulted in part from geopolitical and economic disruptions as the Post-WWI order shifted. In fact, that writer, it seems safe to say, would go back and smile at the Armenian Genocide during WWI, too. Those were events that arguably took place in the context of post Industrial Revolution changes, political and environmental.

I may be accused of putting hard words in someone else’s mouth, so let me be clear. I follow a trail here, based on what the poster has written in this forum. Not once but several times, tightening the focus of what he has had to say each time. I’m not amused. If the point was to draw in someone like me and have the occasion to gloat at this successful button-pushing, I yield! You know who you are, you have succeeded!

I sleep well. I’m not losing lunch over this, but, to repeat, it is important. I would not accept having these statements read out within my community, my church, my university, my atelier d’arte.

Of course there is one more facet of this, at least. I can’t guage very well the poster’s motive. In that, I must cut some slack, as they say, and leave allowances for what I don’t know to be the case. But do take notice, one and all: while I stand up and reject the notions proposed, as I denounce their substance with all of my strength, I allow them to be expressed. Forever.

As I am doing now.