350 - Is it the Most Important Number on Earth?

By Michael E. Zimmerman

In November, 2008 Mother Jones published an essay by well known environmentalist Bill McKibben: “The Most Important Number on Earth."  McKibben, author of The End of Nature, maintains that in the past year climate scientists have demonstrated that we are facing “the oh-my-lord crisis you drop everything else to deal with…”  Claiming that we may have already reached the “tipping point” in global warming that may lead to “the collapse of human society as we have known it,” McKibben cites a recent paper by James Hansen  et al. which calls for reducing CO2 from its current 385ppm to 350 ppm.  For McKibben, this is the most important number on Earth.  Above 350ppm, he warns us, “we can’t rule out a sea level rise of 20 feet this century.”  (I would add that in the overheated climate change debate, almost nothing can be “ruled out.”)

In my view, 350 is not the most important number for most people, because most people do not rank global warming as their most important concern.  Even in the USA, recent polls show global warming as last on the list of what Americans regard as environmental concerns. Economic concerns top virtually all polls. 

Let me list some other numbers for consideration as “most important.”  Readers may have their own most important numbers. 

• 11,000--ballpark figure for how many nuclear weapons that the USA and Russia still possess (Source)
• 1 million--number of people who die from malaria every year (Source)
• 300-500 million--number of people afflicted with malaria every year (Source)
• 33 million--number of people living with AIDS (Source)
• 2 million--number of people who died from AIDS in 2007 (Source)
• 36 million--number of people who die from hunger every year (Source)
• 10--world’s ten worst pollution problems (Source 1, Source 2)

While acknowledging without hesitation McKibben’s important contributions to environmentalism, I think he has gone a bit over the top in this essay.  He offers the analogy of someone who, having been told by his physician that he has entered the cholesterol “danger zone,” knows that he must “clean the cheese out of the refrigerator and go cold turkey.”  Presumably, the people he has in mind are inhabitants of advanced industrial societies--and those aspiring to be such societies--who use vast amounts of fossil fuels.  For McKibben, the energy equivalent to going cold-turkey would include: no more new more new coal plants, a cap on the amount of carbon the USA can produce, and an international agreement that requires China, India, and everyone else to do the same thing.  Oh, and a rapid switch to $10 per gallon gasoline.

McKibben freely admits that achieving these extraordinary goals in a very compressed time frame “requires a new kind of politics.  It requires forging a consensus that this toughest of all changes must happen.  The consensus must be broad, it must come quickly, and it must encompass the whole earth--they don’t call it global warming for nothing.”  (My emphasis.)  The Internet, we are told, will enable us to arrive at this global consensus.  McKibben adds, however, that we have only until the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Meeting to forge a global treaty that will “get it right.”  As he notes, “Once the ocean really starts to rise, dike building is pretty much the only project.”  In short, we are doomed.

There are good reasons why policy makers have begun to regard such counsels of despair with a jaundiced eye.  In his blog Prometheus (February 7, 2009), Roger A. Pielke, Jr. argues that the political consensus about climate policy is collapsing, because policy makers are realizing that it is unrealistic to expect that CO2 can be stabilized at 450 ppm.  That such expectations are already in the realm of “fiction and fantasy” does not prevent some environmentalists from calling for even more impossible attainments, while confusing the relationship between science and policy-making.

McKibben tells us that the global political consensus necessary to institute his policies will not be reached by political debate, give and take, and messy democratic compromises, but instead because this is “what the physics and chemistry of the situation dictate.”  Instead of engaging in value-laden discourse regarding the best course of action to take in challenging circumstances, we are supposed to let nature do the talking and instructing: “Permafrost, notoriously, refuses to bargain,” McKibben observes.

From the standpoint of integral ecology, McKibben allows the right-hand, third person scientific perspectives to dominate, indeed, to shut down discourse drawn from left-hand, first- and second-person perspectives.  Moreover, in emphasizing the potential dangers from future anthropogenic climate change, McKibben joins many other current environmentalists in neglecting current problems that are at least as threatening as climate change. 

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(This post is a revision of one that originally appeared on Prometheus).