It was on June 23rd in 1988 that the then head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, first informed a congressional hearing in Washington DC that there was a global warming trend that could be pinned to human activities. He advised that immediate action needed to be taken to halt the certain dangerous slide towards a changed world.
His words to Congress mark the birthday of our battle to avert global warming, an annual event that is not something to celebrate.
At the time, there was a flurry of intense discussion about the indiscriminate use of natural resources and calls for a revitalization of global environmentalism in concert with a growing effort to share resource development across the North-South economic divide. The last issue had been brought to the fore by both the Brandt Report on the economic gap between developed and developing economies [1] and the UN’s Brundtland Commission report of 1987, which coined the term “sustainable development.”
It seemed that the world was finally ready to broach both environmental and development issues that many had long been fighting for. The two movements shared terminology and theories, most notably the idea of sustainability as a triad that considered economic, social and environmental factors for their combined impact on developing and preserving ecosystems and societies into the future
But other global issues took and continue to take precedent. The successful popular movements in Poland, East Germany and other countries under Soviet influence in 1989 seized global attention and resulted in unabashed victory cries from the West. The perceived triumph of capitalism and western consumerism provoked a wave of global economic changes that championed free trade and a global economic movement that culminated in both NAFTA and the WTO in 1993 and 1995.[2]
As Naomi Klein points out in This Changes Everything, these economic and political developments took place in a forum that was pretty much oblivious to the environmental and development movements. She writes that the two key global challenges at the turn of the millennium “seemed to actively pretend that the other did not exist, ignoring the most glaring questions about how one would impact the other.”[3]
The result is that the globalization of consumerism and industrialization has brought unprecedented development to economies such as China, Brazil and India, as their domestic economies grow and industrial exports increase. But at the same time, worldwide carbon emissions have increased by over 30% since 1990.
Which brings us to climate change’s 28th birthday. We certainly haven’t been giving the issue much positive and constructive attention, and now it is has grown up to take on a life of its own.
[1] Commissioned by the World Bank in 1977
[2] North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization, which replaced GATT (the UN General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade)
[3] Klein, 2014 p. 76
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