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350, and save the sea otters, too

On Saturday, more than 5200 events took place worldwide, all of them promoting the number 350: understood as the upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are already above. The slideshow on the website gives an amazing display of actions that took place. Altogether, the action day seems to be a huge success, mobilizing an incredible number of people and raising awareness.

For example, in Berlin several hundred people, climate pirates, gathered, all disguised as Angela Merkels to push the German chancellor towards progressive climate policies.

This and similar actions were reported by newspapers all over the world. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times gives voice to critical opinions who point out that the number 350 is unrealistic and only promotes fatalistic attitudes. Others think that focus should be on ways towards climate protection rather than arguing over numbers.

Both opinions are justified but, to some extent, miss the point.

Given the risk of very high damage to humanity, it is a questionable attitude to aim for a target that leaves Bangladesh drowned, so to speak. In fact, this is itself a fatalistic position which seems intellectually hard to justify. Though the 350 target is very ambitious, it might be not impossible. The two camps arguing for either 350 ppm or less ambitious targets are motivated more by belief systems that frame model assumptions rather than hard facts – and it may be impossible to know precisely.

It is true, that the 350 campaign provides no precise solutions. However, you can probably ask any climate activist, and she or he can come up with a list of legislation and actions that lead the path towards climate protection. There is not so much a knowledge barrier ¹, but there are political barriers. In the words of the current US president in the context of the current US climate legislation (also this Saturday): “The closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we’ll hear from those whose interest or ideology runs counter to action.”

He also gets the fatalistic thing right: “There is also another myth we must dispel, And it is one far more dangerous than any attack made by those who wish to stand in the way of progress – and that’s the idea that there is little or nothing we can do.

“That is the pessimistic notion that our politics are too broken and our people too unwilling to make hard choices. Implicit in this argument is the sense that we’ve lost something important   that fighting American spirit, that willingness to tackle hard challenges and the determination to see those challenges to their end.”

The point of the 350 campaign seems to raise awareness and increase political pressure towards action, and that may be exactly the right thing to do.

There is still an argument against the 350 number: It is a number!

Number target are always one-dimensional and reduce complex circumstances to something overly simply. Focusing on narrow numbers invites gaming behaviour, i.e. where agents just head for numerical targets, and ignore the context. For exam ple, we don’t want to protect our climate by clouding our skies with air pollutants. In other words, it is not only about ppm levels, it is about sustainability. In that sense, leaving space to live for happily raging sea otters may be alright, too.

_{(1) and neither are cost the real barrier, but this is a different issue}

Posted by Felix Creutzig on October 25, 2009 3:18 AM | Permalink