James Fallows, a wonderful writer and blogger for the Atlantic, is not one to panic, but when it comes to the ice at the roof of the world — upon which hundreds of millions of people depend — he sounds scared.
Here's his post from today, on what Obama should be talking about on his trip to China, but isn't:
Thirty years from now, the most important aspect of Barack Obama's
interaction with China will be whether the two countries, together, can
do anything about environmental and climate issues. If they can, in
2039 we'll look back on this as something like the Silent Spring/Clean
Air Act moment in American history, which began a change toward broad
environmental improvement. If they can't….Today the Asia
Society's "China Green" project ran a full-page ad in the New York
Times — good to see support for the print media! — and launched
another online display dramatizing why such cooperation matters. This
one is called On Thinner Ice
and documents the accelerating disappearance of the glaciers on the
Tibetan plateau that feed nearly all the major rivers of Asia.
(Previous Asia Society displays on this topic here.)
The "On Thinnner Ice" video is very good, about eight minutes long, but being the impatient sort that would rather read than sit and watch, I'm going to link instead to one of the featured speakers in the mini-doc, China expert Orville Schell, and a piece he had in August in The New York Times.
He makes the same point Fallows does, from the other side of the problem:
President Hu, by promising this week to try to cut carbon dioxide
emissions per unit of gross domestic product and to increase the share
of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption, signaled his
willingness to act. China can’t solve this problem alone, and President
Obama’s scheduled visit to Beijing in November presents an opportunity
to forge a bilateral alliance on climate change. After all, the ice
fields in the majestic arc of peaks that runs from China to Afghanistan
are melting in large part because of greenhouse gases emitted thousands
of miles away.
It's called The Thaw at the Roof of the World.
Sadly, Obama seems to feel he cannot raise the question, because Congress won't follow his lead.
Seems we the people need to lead on this issue…by reducing our carbon footprint, and thus showing that we care about the planet. So argues TreePeople founder Andy Lipkis argues in his most recent post.
Kit Stolz 