Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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xii preface
Global 2000 Report (Barney, 1980). The authors catalogued in great
detail the scientifi c evidence about declining ecosystems, climate
change, and species loss, along with measures necessary to move
the country toward sustainability. But we chose to evade reality
and sought refuge in the slogan that it was “morning in America
again.” Three decades later it is twilight, and we live with the
ecological, economic, political, and social consequences of our
own making.
Second, in the “long emergency” 2 ahead leaders will need an
uncommon clarity about our best economic and energy options.
Some choices being proposed by well-funded and highly organized
lobbies would commit the nation and the world to courses
of action that will lead to unfortunate and irreversible consequences.
They will need to understand their relative costs, risks,
and benefi ts, including those over the long term, to avoid making
decisions that lock us in to policies that we—or our children—
will someday sorely regret. There are better possibilities that
would go a long way toward solving the underlying causes of our
problems. But knowing which is which requires that they recognize
the difference between the structure of problems and their
coeffi cients—the rate at which they get worse. In other words,
they need to understand the difference between Band-Aids and
authentic cures, and that requires that we better understand otherwise
obscure concepts like feedback loops, leads, and lags, which is
to say how the world works as a unifi ed system (Meadows, 2008).
They must see, in other words, the many connections between
climate, environment, prosperity, security, and fairness. In this perspective,
climate destabilization is not an aberration but a predictable
outcome of a system haphazardly created in the dim light of
a dangerously incomplete image of reality.
The results are increasingly clear: even were we to stop emitting
heat-trapping gases quickly, we will still experience centuries
of bigger storms, larger and more frequent fl oods, massive
heat waves, and prolonged drought, along with rising sea levels,