Michigan LCV's Doug Glancy Blogs from COP16 in Cancun, Mexico
Michigan LCV Board Member Doug Glancy is in Cancun, Mexico, for COP16, the U.N. Climate Change Conference. The conference is an international event, with the potential for reaching a framework to fight global warming. Glancy, a senior consultant with the Carbon Trust, wrote this week that "It's Time to Move Beyond Sputnik Moments and Coors-Light Solutions."
"Since the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, environmentalism, especially in the United States, has largely been driven by Sputnik moments and Coors-Light solutions: catalyzing events that drove a call for silver bullet solutions.
"The events were emotional and tangible: a river on fire; a housing development built upon a toxic waste site; the explosion of a chemical plant in India; a massive hole in the planet’s figurative sunblock. These events drove the average citizen to call out for change because they could connect the crisis to own lives: most know water should not be on fire, want their children to be able to play outside without fear of what is in the soil or air, and know someone who has skin cancer. Hearing this call, those in power passed historic, silver bullet solutions such as the Montreal Protocol.
"The threat posed by climate change is precisely the opposite. It is long term, complex and not tangible in the typical sense. There isn’t going to be a Sputnik moment which convinces the body public that our reliance on decomposed dinosaurs imperils us and future generations. Unlike the substances banned under the Montreal protocol, there are no substitutes which can easily and inexpensively replace dino at the core of our global economic system."
Read the rest at the Climate Blue blog.
And see these previous blog posts by Glancy:
