Houston, We Have One Big Problem

Image via Wikipedia…with a million interlocking solutions. That is the future ahead of us. To get to the other side, as Andrew Revkin points out, we’ll need to change how we see the story, not as a linear problem or single issue but with globally and historically comprehensive circumspection. Here’s an except from a recent presentation to Columbia University’s school of Journalism by Revkin:

Q. Obviously climate change is the biggest story on your plate right now, but looking ahead what do you see?

A. My coverage has evolved. Climate change is not the story of our time. Climate change is a subset of the story of our time, which is that we are coming of age on a finite planet and only just now recognizing that it is finite. So how we mesh infinite aspirations of a species that’s been on this explosive trajectory – not just of population growth but of consumptive appetite – how can we make a transition to a sort of stabilized and still prosperous relationship with the Earth and each other is the story of our time. Read more at Worldchanging.com

And as if to provide evidence of our leaders’ tendency to persist in monocular vision of things to come, the UN’s head of climate change issues a warning of Old School approaches to that important matter:

“POZNAN, Poland — The world must avoid a ‘cheap and dirty’ fix for the economy that could undermine the fight against global warming, the U.N.’s top climate official said on Sunday. Yvo de Boer said the world risked a second financial crisis if governments reacted to economic slowdown by building cheap, high-polluting coal-fired power plants that might then have to be scrapped as climate impacts hit. … ‘I hope that the second financial crisis is not going to have its origins in bad energy loans,’ he said. Short-sighted investments could lead to a need to build new low-carbon solar or wind power plants in 10-20 years.