There are no barricades on the road to ruin, but it's equipped with lots of speed limits, warning signs and stoplights. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) tracks over 500 internationally agreed goals for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing biodiversity loss, and numerous other environmental safeguards. In preparation for the upcoming Rio+20 Summit, UNEP announced this week that "significant progress" has been made on only four of the 90 most important of those environmental goals and objectives.
In releasing its report, the fifth edition of the Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-5), UNEP warned that "The world continues to speed down an unsustainable path." Its Executive Director, Achim Steiner, said "If current trends continue, if current patterns of production and consumption of natural resources prevail and cannot be reversed and 'decoupled,' then governments will preside over unprecedented levels of damage and degradation."
To those concerned about the environment and the long-term well-being of humanity, the lack of progress on these goals comes as no surprise. The dead hand of inertia that holds back progress on climate change negotiations also presides, with very few exceptions, over efforts to address every other environmental challenge.
The critical, unanswered question is what will it take to slow our progress on the road to ruin? If little is being done on 86 of the 90 most important environmental goals and objectives, what will it take to generate action?
Twenty years ago, when world leaders convened in Rio for the Earth Summit, 172 governments participated, with 108 sending their heads of state or government. Hopes were high that they were galvanized for action. The political rhetoric certainly rose to the occasion, even if the underlying political will was still lacking. The 1992 Rio declaration urged countries to "reduce and eliminate unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and promote appropriate demographic policies." It also invoked the precautionary principle, declaring that, "Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."
The delegates to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit declared in Agenda 21, which was ultimately approved by 178 governments, that, "Humanity stands at a defining moment in history." Some defining moment. In the past 20 years notable progress has been made in improving health and education in the developing world, but very little has been done to stop the degradation of the environment or to slow the depletion of the natural resources upon which our continued prosperity and well-being depends.
The hope is, although it's a fading one, that this month's Rio+20 Summit will re-engage the global community and steer humanity onto a sustainable path. With world population projected to climb from 7 billion to 9 billion or higher by 2042, and the world economy still on track to triple or quadruple in size by mid-century, the task of reconciling what we demand from the planet with what the planet can sustainably provide is daunting, if not impossible. Business-as-usual is just another name for the road to ruin.
The latest Living Planet report published by the World Wildlife Fund and the Global Footprint Network estimates that humanity is already using 50 percent more in terms of renewable resources than what the Earth can naturally regenerate. By their estimate, we will need 2.9 Earths by 2050 to sustain us. That's 1.9 Earths that we don't have.
Thirty leading scientists assembled by the Stockholm Resilience Centre have identified nine "planetary boundaries," which if crossed, could cause irreparable harm to the planet. They assert that we have already exceeded three of them: climate change, nitrogen loadings, and the rate of biodiversity loss. The other six -- ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone, aerosol loadings, freshwater use, land use changes, and chemical pollution -- are, to varying degrees, approaching a scale "where abrupt global environmental change can no longer be excluded."
Instead of attending another international convention, it sounds like these scientists need to stage what psychiatrists would call an intervention. But isn't that what the 1992 Rio Summit was supposed to accomplish? Wasn't it supposed to jar us to our senses?
The fault lies not with our scientists, but with our political leaders. When it comes to climate change and other environment challenges, Mitt Romney can plead ignorance, even if it's feigned. But what about President Obama? When he campaigned four years ago, Obama said that, "We can't just tell people what they want to hear, we need to tell them what they need to hear." If ever there was a time for straight talk about the challenges facing humanity, this is it. President Obama should go to Rio.
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I would like to think that people would limit their family size and spend their money on building an energy zero home rather than on entertaining themselves. That they would get around in electric or hybrid cars, instead of buying gas guzzling status cars That they would spend their leisure time tending their gardens by hand, instead of spending time and energy maintaining their estate type lawns and shrubbery. That they would buy locally produced food and crafted items instead of factory food and made by slaves electronics. That they would compost and recycle, instead of littering and filling our beautiful valleys with toxic trash. A few will, but most are addicted to the "good" life of pleasuring themselves with the consumption of fast food, entertainments and ever new/stimulating things. To become responsible stewards of the environment that allows for them and their children to live, is radical, socialist and terrifying, absolutely terrifying!!
So what will happen? War and more war and worse war. Financial breakdowns as lenders cannot be repaid. Inflation so that lenders can be repaid. More inflation because energy is increasingly more expensive in time and treasure to acquire. Starvation for the poorest, nutritional deficiency and denial of health care for the lower classes - decreased life spans for all but the upper 10 - 20%. Police state to protect the elites as the masses riot and die off.
Dramatically reduce fossil fuel usage. The best way to accomplish this is an environmental tariff or tax on products sold based on the environmental impact of manufacturing, transportation, sustainability, & recycling/disposal of the products. Tariffs or taxes for using fossil fuels to supply energy to manufacture or transport products should be high enough to discourage it's use.
Encourage innovation. A minimum of 10% of any product sold in a nation should be manufactured, mined, or grown in the nation it is sold in if at all possible. Having this 10% of inherent inefficiency built in the system will stimulate innovation. To maintain this 10% requires infrastructure. With infrastructure spread out across the world for every imaginable products the opportunity for innovation increases.The attempt to develop the product with the smallest environmental footprint will also increase innovation.
Governments should not forget it's place. Corporations job is to increase efficiency.
Governments job is to increase inefficiency!
I'll repeat myself, Governments works best when it increases inefficiency!
Taxing the Rich and giving to the poor in my opinion is self defeating in the long run and a poor system to redistribute the wealth.
The goal for government in a true capitalistic system is to create a strong middle class! This is accomplished best by making the system less efficient!
This is how we remain sustainable both on an economic level and an environmental level.
the blog or story of the issue was very good untill the end.
"The fault lies not with our scientists, but with our political leaders. When it comes to climate change and other environment challenges, Mitt Romney can plead ignorance, even if it's feigned. But what about President Obama? When he campaigned four years ago, Obama said that, "We can't just tell people what they want to hear, we need to tell them what they need to hear." If ever there was a time for straight talk about the challenges facing humanity, this is it. President Obama should go to Rio."
Mitt is nearly 14 yrears older than President Obama, he has had almost a full generation to observe the problem then President Obama!
You must have (turkey for Brains) to blame President Obama, unless you think he will be a two term President, and in that conclusion no one man can be blamed for global warming assisted by man. It has been going on sense aprox the year 1900.
Long Life to you and may your eternal sleep be not judged by your end to this blog or story.
Today’s college students are facing tuition fees that are almost six times higher than the tuition fees I paid to earn my college degree. Our public schools which served me well are experiencing a loss of funding and a resulting loss of staff that, in the end, can only hurt our next generation of students. Friends of mine are facing serious medical and financial hurdles today that were unheard of two generations ago. And the gap between the wealthy and the poor and lower middle classes of our society has been growing exponentially over the past decade and longer to the detriment of our society as a whole.
How did we deal with these issues years ago? Well for starters, when World War Two foisted incredible costs upon our nation, a majority of our nation’s wealthiest never batted an eye when called upon to pay a higher percentage of their large earnings to help us through our challenges.
The bill for shipping my daughters things was higher than either mine or my wife's college tuition!
that will allow the rich and powerful conventional opposition to curbing emissions, which presently feels threatened, defensive and adversarial, to become instead cooperative and de-villainized.
"There is no place called away!" A quote from University of Washington atmospheric chemist 
Dan Jaffe.
The workable solution is environmental tariffs or taxes based on the environmental impact of manufacturing, transportation, sustainability, and responsible recycling/disposal of all products sold.
We need to encourage local manufacturing and sustainability of products sold.
What scientist just aren't telling us is that we have already gone past the point of no return...if we stopped polluting this minute, it will still take hundreds of thousands of years for the planet to clean itself up.
"In for a penny, in for a pound" is the old saying...which we are applying to our environmental concerns...nobody wants to be the first to throw out their air-conditioners and clothes dryers...so we'll keep going just the way we are going...until something really bad happens, and the population decreases considerably and painfully for us, and whatever we share the planet with.
It's comforting to blame things that we have no control over for all of our environmental problems, but the grim reality is that WE are the cause...can't hide from reality. With 7B people on the planet...people who need to drink water, eat, build communities and use resources...do you seriously think that things don't get used up or polluted?
Two thing that that everyone on the globe could easily, and relatively quickly, do to ease the burden on the environment would be population control and cutting back on waste of our precious resources...easily and quickly...and inexpensively. Couldn't hurt to do that, could it?
Nuclear is also, statistically, as safe as solar and wind, far safer than oil and gas. Including the recent reactor failures in Japan, which aren't known to have killed anyone (more than 20,000 were killed by the tsunami, which was all natural and organic!), Three Mile Island, which killed nobody, and Chernobyl, which killed about as many people as die in car crashes in America every day . . . nuclear is statistically the safest power source in history. It doesn't even make the Top 100 causes of death. Worldwide, more than 100 million people will die this year. The odds are very excellent that none of them will die from nuclear power plant accidents.
Solar power only works when the sun shines. Wind power only works when the wind blows. Nuclear power works when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow.
The radiation you get from the Sun and the Earth's core almost infinitely exceeds the radiation you will get from nuclear power plants.
Yes, too much radiation will kill you, and too much aspirin will kill you, and too much food will kill you, and too much water will kill you, and too much time in the sun will kill you.
Your chances of dying from something are 100%. Your chances of dying from heart disease, cancer, or diabetes, are about 90%. Your chances of dying from radiation poisoning from a nuclear power plant or waste management accident are less than 1 in a hundred million.
We accept the common dangers that will almost certainly kill us, and we fear the rare dangers that will almost certainly never hurt us. We are very strange beasties, us humans.
But solar only works when the sun shines, about 1/3 of the time. And wind only works when the wind blows, about 1/3 of the time, and not everywhere. Batteries to store electricity? Just to electrify our cars and light trucks would require something like 150 million tons of electric car batteries, and that would require the mining, smelting, and refining of billions of tons of ore for the metals to make all those batteries, very energy intensive, with an enormous environmental impact where the mines are.
Nuclear power plants typically cost about $10 billion. We spend about $1 bil a day importing oil. Ergo, for what we spend importing oil, we could build three dozen nuclear power plants per year, and reduce the trade deficit as they come online and replaced imported oil, adding 30,000 job years to the US economy for every $1 billion cut from oil imports.
Nuclear power would enable the shift to a hydrogen fueled transportation economy, without mining billions of tons of ore to make hundreds of millions of tons of batteries, and without adding tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a car to pay for the batteries.
But we are hamstrung by our self-inflicted Nucleophobia.
Do a little more research. Our climate is always changing, has been cycling between Ice Ages and Global Warmings every 100,000 years or so, give or take ten thousand, for more than three million years. The last Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago. Over the next 4,000 years most of the glaciers melted, so much ice that sea level rose more than 400 feet, to nearly it's present level. Then, during the Holocene Maximum 8,000 years ago, the climate was about 2 degrees warmer than now, and has been on a long slow cooling trend since. During the last century, the climate has been snaking along with variations within a narrow range of about 1 degree, averaged worldwide. CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm to 380 ppm, an increase of 100 ppm, or 1 part per 10,000, but if you average the temperature over the last thousand years, it's been about the same; over the last 10,000 years, it's been cooler.
If the climate change cycle of the last 3,000,000 years holds, then sometime in the (geologically) near future, within a few thousand years, a few hundred, perhaps a few decades or sooner, we can expect to drift into another long Ice Age. Some climatologists think we have already passed the heat peak, and our journey into the next era of Global Cooling has already begun.
Once upon a time all the best scientists thought the earth was the center of the universe, and flat.
If you go to www.GlobalWarmingArt.com you will see good illustrations of Climate Change over the last 65 million years. You will see that the climate has been cycling between short periods of Global Warming and long periods of Global Cooling (ice ages) for more than 3 million years, with a Global Warming era approximately every 100,000 years. "Global Warming" began about 12,000 years ago, ending the last long Ice Age, when much of the northern hemisphere was glaciated, with what is now the Great Lakes Region, Michigan, Wisconsin, covered by glaciers up to 15,000 feet deep, or high, higher than any mountain in the contiguous 48 states. Seattle was under a half mile of ice, not so long ago.
The climate has always been changing.