Now is the time to scream “Fire!” So writes Andrew Simms, the policy director and head of the climate change program at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) –– a “think and do tank” –– in an opinion editorial at the Guardian. Carbon Catalog has heard an even less conservative five year estimate from experts we’ve interviewed (see GreenFuel’s Isaac Berzin).

On the website onehundredmonths.com, conceived by the NEF and others, we can see a second-by-second countdown of one hundred months (8.3 years) until irreversible climate change sets in. While personal carbon offsetting and lifestyle change can play a small role in saving our planet from despair, Simms reasons that this is not enough. He outlines a list of tactics we need to take today. There is no time for stalling.

According to Simms, “in just 100 months’ time, if we are lucky, and based on a quite conservative estimate, we could reach a tipping point for the beginnings of runaway climate change. That said, among people working on global warming, there are countless models, scenarios, and different iterations of all those models and scenarios.”

Simms rationale for 100 months is outlined in the Guardian story. “But, even just before that point, there is still a one third chance of crossing the line,” he warns. Here at Carbon Catalog we are very concerned about climate change and do our best to help people navigate through the carbon offsetting options.

But voluntary carbon projects (like the offset projects we rate) are likely only to have an impact in the far (not near) future (learn more here). More pressing, says Simms, are the following steps:

• Avoid infrastructure that is fossil-fuel-dependent (such as the construction of new airports, coal-fired power plants) that lock us into patterns of future greenhouse gas emissions and radically reducing our ability to make the short- to medium-term cuts.
• Appeal to governments to stop defecting blame and responsibility: “It is wildly unrealistic to think that individuals alone can effect a comprehensive re-engineering of the [West’s] fossil-fuel-dependent energy, food and transport systems. The government must lead.”
• Governments should launch a Green New Deal, similar to the one launched in the UK last week, taking inspiration from President Roosevelt’s famous 100-day program implemented in the face of the dust bowls and depression.
• Rein in reckless financial institutions and use a range of fiscal tools, new measures and reforms to the tax system, such as a windfall tax on oil companies.
• Resources should be invested in a massive environmental transformation program that could insulate the economy from recession, and create countless new jobs.
• Overhaul a nation’s building stock, and tackle the city. First up, he says, remove the money of oil companies pouring into cities. Re-list these companies’ resources as “unburnable.”
• Instead of using vast sums of public money to bail out banks (because they are considered “too big to fail”), banks should be reduced in size until they are small enough to fail without hurting anyone.
• With oil prices wobbling around $130, there is a huge amount of unearned profit waiting for a windfall tax (companies made profits when it was $10 a barrel). Money raised would go towards a long-overdue massive decarbonization of our energy system.
• A rolling program to overhaul heat-leaking buildings and homes will massively cut emissions and tackle fuel poverty.
• Weaning agriculture off fossil-fuel dependency.
• The “one person, one car” on the roads, should be transformed to a variety of clean reliable forms of public transport. This should be visible by the middle of our 100 months.

Simms believes that if these steps are followed in the UK, the nation will be able to lead other western and developing countries. “But it will also leave the people of Britain more secure in terms of the food and energy supplies,” he says. “and with a more resilient economy capable of weathering whatever economic and environmental shocks the world has to throw at us.”

If Simms is right, we now have less than one hundred months. And the clock is ticking. What are you going to do about it?

::The Guardian
::BBC