Have you heard? In 2007 a record-breaking number of U.S. babies—nearly 40 percent—were born to single mothers. But the stat that’s not making headlines, writes Julia Whitty for Mother Jones, is the one we ought to heed: 2007 also holds the title for most babies born annually in the United States ever, period. That’s 4,317,119 bundles of joy.

According to a study published in Global Environmental Change, which Whitty cites, every American baby “costs” six times a parent’s own carbon emissions. “The bottom line is that absolutely nothing else you can do—driving a more fuel efficient car, driving less, installing energy-efficient windows, replacing lightbulbs, replacing refrigerators, recycling—comes even close to simply not having that child,” she writes.

Assuming perpetuation of the standard U.S. lifestyle, true indeed. But Whitty mitigates her argument with a final stat: “In comparison, under current Bangladeshi conditions, each child adds 56 metric tons of CO2 to the carbon legacy of the average female.”

And in a snap, we’re back where we began. Our spiraling global population is part of the climate equation, no doubt. But sitting heavy on the scales is a disparity in consumption so vast that a single U.S. newborn can be charged with 169 times the environmental havoc as a Bangladeshi infant. So much for the innocence of youth.

Plainly speaking, there’s got to be a way to combine consideration for how many people with how much each individual consumes—before nudging the door open to preposterous scenarios where the childfree American can consume with impunity, or carbon-light countries encourage their populations to boom without concern.

As Utne Reader’s publisher Bryan Welch writes in our Jan.-Feb. 2009 issue: “Conservation alone cannot save us from ourselves. With the right combination of imagination and common sense, though, we can begin to address a hard reality: that although the world can always get better, it’s not going to get any bigger.”

Sources: Mother Jones, Global Environmental Change

Image by normanack, licensed under Creative Commons.

Writing for New Internationalist, climate activist Danny Chivers delivers an accessible roundup of several major climate change proposals on the table for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December. (A longer version of the story is available on his blog.) His article focuses on climate justice, rating each framework on its fairness, effectiveness, and current level of support among world leaders. Cheeky analogies cut through the wonk to illustrate each option for addressing climate change.

The proposal with the most support is the grandfathering of Kyoto targets, which would require industrialized countries to reduce emissions to a certain percentage below their 1990 levels. According to Chivers, “It’s a bit like a group of wealthy tourists and destitute refugees have survived a plane crash and are stranded on a mountain. They decide to ration out the food based on how much each person ate in the week before the crash—the more you ate per day back then, the more food you get now.”

Chivers prefers Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs). Under this method, carbon targets for each country would be set based on how much money its citizens make and how much greenhouse gas they produce. In Chivers’ analogy, “It’s a bit like a city is razed to the ground by alien invaders. The people who escaped unscathed because they lived in solid houses built from money they stole from the aliens (thus provoking the attack) are expected to take on most of the rebuilding work. The people who had left the aliens alone, stayed poor, and lived in rickety houses that collapsed on them during the attack are allowed to recover in hospital before joining in the work.”

As for carbon credits: “It’s a bit like handing control of the Earth’s vital natural systems over to a bunch of grinning Wall Street traders. Oh no, wait: it’s exactly like that.”

In an exhaustively researched piece on extreme weather in a time of global financial crisis, Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch connects all of the dots he can find and admonishes the mainstream media for not doing the same.

"You can search far and wide without stumbling across a mainstream American overview of drought in our world at this moment," writes Engelhardt. "This seems, politely put, puzzling, especially at a time when University College London's Global Drought Monitor claims that 104 million people are now living under 'exceptional drought conditions."

"We're now experiencing the extreme effects of economic bad 'weather' in the wake of the near collapse of the global financial system," he notes, wondering what might happen if the economic crisis "long enough to meet an environmental crisis involving extreme weather? What will happen if the rising fuel prices likely to come with the beginning of any economic "recovery" were to meet the soaring food prices of environmental disaster? What kind of human tsunami might that result in?"

Read the entire piece: What Does Economic 'Recovery' Mean on an Extreme Weather Planet?

Source: TomDispatch

Image by  suburbanbloke , licensed under Creative Commons. 

The Seventh Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues kicked off this past Monday at UN headquarters in New York—and one of our Utne Reader library favorites is there: Cultural Survival, publisher of 2007 Utne Independent Press Award nominee Cultural Survival Quarterly, is co-hosting a roundtable discussion on Thursday about indigenous language revitalization.

Language revitalization might appear at odds with the session’s green theme—“Climate change, bio-cultural diversity, and livelihoods: the stewardship role of indigenous peoples and new challenges”—but Cultural Survival argues endangered indigenous languages are warehouses of human knowledge regarding connections to the environment. (No, we’re not talking about the pervasive myth that Eskimos have innumerable words for snow. Read Language Log linguist Geoffery Pullum’s rant on that misconception here.)

As Cultural Survival executive director Ellen Lutz explains in a press release: “Future generations of all peoples will need to rely on the worldviews contained within Native Hawaiian, Native Alaskan, Native American and other indigenous peoples’ languages to adequately address threats to the global environment, including climate change and critical reductions in biodiversity.”

The session isn’t open to the public, but you can read more online about Cultural Survival’s Endangered Native American Languages Campaign.

—Julie Hanus

With so much information available on the internet, many people stick to websites they agree with. Liberals tend to read liberal blogs, and conservatives read conservative ones. Techies interact with other techies, and artists with other artists. If you want to see the new Michael Moore movie, Amazon.com or Netflix can suggest dozens of other anti-war, anti-corporate films. People can spend a lifetime surfing the web, and never have to confront a dissenting point of view.

This kind of filtering and self-selecting isn’t new, but it’s getting more extreme. “As a result of the Internet,” University of Chicago professor Cass R. Sunstein writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “we live increasingly in an era of enclaves and niches — much of it voluntary, much of it produced by those who think they know, and often do know, what we're likely to like.” These niches reinforce similar points of view, creating what Sunstein calls “enclave extremism.”

Extremism isn’t always a bad thing, according to Sunstein. Abolitionists and civil-rights activists were extremists in their time. Problems arise when the reinforced point of view is wrong. Global-warming deniers can find plenty of “evidence” on the internet that environmentalism is a fraud. Sunstein writes that a lack of dissent can also lead to “mutual suspicion, unjustified rage, and social fragmentation” if left unchecked.

—Bennett Gordon

A new tool in the fight against global warming might be hopping around the Australian outback. A recent report (PDF) by Greenpeace suggests that using kangaroos, instead of cows, as a source of meat could make a substantial impact on Australia’s carbon footprint. Eating cuddly marsupial for dinner might sound unnatural to Americans, but kangaroo has been a part of Australian cuisine from time immemorial. It fact, the practice fits perfectly with many established ideas of green living: eat local, free-range meats; raise animals that help sustain the land; cultivate indigenous plants and animals. Most importantly, according to Greenpeace, kangaroos don’t release as much methane gas as cows do.

—Morgan Winters 

(Thanks, Shameless Carnivore.)

Electing the top science blog of 2007 should have interested only the nerdiest sector of humankind—who else would care about the wonky overlap between blogs and science? But no, throw in global-warming denialists, zombie vote robots, and a lot of name-calling, and what seemed like an average everyday blog contest became the bloody front line in a battle between the conservative and liberal blogospheres.

The players are Steve McIntyre, creator of Climate Audit, a site that fact-checks scientific claims that global warming is caused by humans; Phil Plait, an astronomer who writes about science and amateurish astronomy at the blog Bad Astronomy; and the 2007 Weblog Awards, the “world’s largest blog competition” that garners more than 500,000 votes each year.

Buoyed by strong support from the conservative blogosphere, Climate Audit surged forward early on (votes were tracked by a running tally on the Weblog Awards site). This was at least in part because Climate Audit, with its distinct anti–global warming slant, was being trumpeted by conservative blogs like NewsBusters. So, the only rational response was to have bastions of opposing blogs—like BoingBoing, Think Progress, and a host of science blogs—to urge their readers to vote for Bad Astronomy, which was running second. Voters on both sides used computer programs called “bots” to mechanically and repeatedly vote for the blog of their choice. (Whenever you have votes, it seems, you’ve gotta have hanging chads.)

The votes ballooned to unprecedented levels, and for a long while, Bad Astronomy and Climate Audit ran neck-and-neck. But no matter who emerged the winner, the contest was compromised: The Best Science Blog wouldn’t really be the best, or even the most popular, but rather the blog whose side had mustered up the most efficient robot voting program.

Two people managed to stay somewhat above the fray. McIntyre and Plait—the actual blog writers—took the brouhaha in good stride, and decided to share the award between the two of them. Which is a nice ending to an acrimonious process.

—Brendan Mackie

The struggle to stop global warming has suffered a major setback. Again. But this time it's the Brits' fault. The UK government, which had previously set ambitious plans to cut its reliance on nonrenewable energy, is already scheming to wriggle out of its commitment in the next couple of days. From the Guardian:

Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show that [prime minister] Gordon Brown will be advised today that the target Tony Blair signed up to this year for 20 percent of all European energy to come from renewable sources by 2020 is expensive and faces "severe practical difficulties."

The news doesn't bode well for the worldwide environmental movement. If a country whose people clearly support environmentally friendly policies can't get its act together to switch to renewable energy, then the United States, China, and other massive polluters with powerful contingents that don't even believe in global warming are just that much less likely to green up. —Brendan Mackie