Moving Beyond Kyoto

New York Times We – the human species – have arrived at a moment of decision. It is unprecedented and even laughable for us to imagine that we could actually make a conscious choice as a species, but that is nevertheless the challenge that is before us. Our home – Earth – is in danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings. Without realizing the consequences of our actions, we have begun to put so much carbon dioxide into the thin shell of air surrounding our world that we have literally changed the heat balance between Earth and the Sun. If we don’t stop doing this pretty quickly, the average temperature will increase to levels humans have never known and put an end to the favorable climate balance on which our civilization depends. In the last 150 years, in an accelerating frenzy, we have been removing increasing quantities of carbon from the ground – mainly in the form of coal and oil – and burning it in ways that dump 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours into the Earth’s atmosphere. The concentrations […]

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