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The chapter discusses the problem of global warming and climate change as one of global pollution with widest effects of global externality. It describes the characteristics of the green house gases (GHG), their composition and regional source wise distribution and shows how their accumulation in the atmosphere leads to the rise of global temperature and climate change. It then describes the physical and economic impacts of climate change with the consequent loss of GDP and economic assets. The chapter further examines the prospect of low carbon economic growth for abating climate change particularly in the Indian context. It also discusses the issues relating to the adaptation to climate change as some climate change would be inevitable in future. It finally addresses the institutional issue of collective action for mitigation and adaptation to climate change and concludes by describing India’s policy approach of defining the shared global responsibility in the context.

Lake Superior is one of the fastest warming lakes in the world, leading to enormous changes in its ecosystems and human communities. How might changing climates affect the mobilization of contaminants in the Lake Superior basin? How might those contaminants affect resiliency toward climate change? And what can we do about it?

John Wills begins this chapter by contrasting the place of the environment for Henry David Thoreau in the 1840s with its status in the early twenty-first century, in which the preservation of national parks sits alongside the heavy toll on the natural world caused by 150 years of industrialisation and commerce. Exploring the United States as a place of extremes and contradictions when it comes to environmental issues, the chapter focuses in particular on the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and related issues of global warming and energy consumption. Wills moves on to consider the growing environmental consciousness of the new century, green-branded commerce, the new commitment to green technology amongst major manufacturers, and national environmental policies. The chapter ends with a consideration of Al Gore’s environmental film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) as a contemporary take on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) for promoting the environmental message.

The Introduction lays out the stakes of the security society’s militarization of the environment, its orchestrating of “climate change war games,” and its connection to a long history of an increasingly foreclosing and aggressive pattern of thought that began during the enclosure movement’s privatization of nature and the co-constituent rise of “common law”—the legal system that erased the idea that humans were environmental inhabitants.

The cases explored here, namely the campaign to establish a sovereign Tibetan homeland and to reduce China’s greenhouse gas emissions, represented a third type of causal process—‘advocacy drift.’ In the former case, Beijing’s refusal to countenance the prospect of a ‘free Tibet’ and drive to protect its own territorial integrity created conditions under which the TAN splintered into a variety of factions. Some of these espoused the use of ‘any means necessary’ to effect the goal of an independent Tibetan state, while others, including the Dalai Lama himself, retreated from the original mission of the TAN and have instead sought greater cultural protection for Tibetans within a more multinational China. In the case of the global arming campaign, advocates of emissions trading abandoned that means of reducing China’s carbon outputs, and chose instead to work with an assortment of state agencies and NGOs to combat global warming on China’s terms. While the mechanisms at play in the intra-campaign changes described in this chapter differ, both call attention to the way in which states shape advocacy campaigns just as campaigns may influence state behaviour.

Heidegger argues that modern technology’s view of nature as stock or inventory is the outcome of Western metaphysics as “onto-theology,” in which Christianity played a central role. Lynn White offers a historiographical variant, claiming that our environmental problems, of which global climate change is perhaps most manifest today, derive from the putative Christian view of nature as subject to human dominance. This chapter argues that ancient Christianity, especially as articulated in the Orthodox East, has a far different view, from which we could learn today. Here nature is seen as manifesting divine energies (energeiai) that the purified mind (nous) can contemplate noetically, even though the divine essence (ousia) remains transcendent and mysterious. Western Christianity ignores this distinction. Beginning with Augustine (and culminating in Ockham) God becomes increasingly remote from creation. The analogia entis is a last, unsuccessful attempt to retrieve the divine immanence that has endured in the Christian East.

The pressure on planetary resources is substantially driven by increases in energy demands that have been mostly met by the combustion of fossil fuels. The basis of the warming in the troposphere is explained starting from the molecular structure of atmospheric components and their resulting rotational and vibrational spectra. From the absorptions in the infrared, the radiative efficiencies of atmospheric gases can be established. The residence times of gases in the atmosphere is explained on the basis of their atmospheric chemistry. Taking these factors together with atmospheric concentrations, the Global-Warming and -Temperature Potentials can be derived. The overall energy balance in the atmosphere is shown and the resulting net radiative forcing. The principle of the sustainability triangle is explained showing that reduction in radiative forcing may be achievable by a summation of contributions.

The conclusion critically examines one possible legacy for the relay of chemical image-making and its fusions with combustion-engine research examined in this book: the Anthropocene. Noting ways in which James Watt and British industrialism have figured in the historiography of an epoch of humanity’s influence on the global climate (and in critiques of the Anthropocene), the conclusion highlights the abiding, art-historical force of tools and concepts rooted in the work of Alois Riegl. Against persisting resistance within art history to interpretations privileging materials and techniques, it concludes by considering the contours and possibilities of an “elemental art history.”

The fourth chapter investigates the significance of gender in relation to global warming, arguing that a feminist response to climate change must not only challenge the ostensibly universal, transcendent perspective of big science and the hegemonic masculinity of impenetrable, aggressive consumption, but also the tendency within feminist organizations and NGOs to reinforce gendered polarities, heteronormativity, and the view of nature as a resource for domestic use. The chapter offers a politics of “insurgent vulnerability,” biodiversity, and sexual diversity as an alternative

We are stretched out along the Holy Nose trail, the five of us, clinging to the steep hillside above Chivyrkuysky Gulf. The trail has narrowed even further, and it struggles to get around big trees and through thick brush. Andrei is ahead, as usual, but not as far as before and at a more relaxed pace. Elisa and Chanda walk together, talking. James and I walk separately, not talking. Not not talking as in pissed off at each other not talking, just not talking as in keeping our thoughts to ourselves and being alone here not talking, which we both do a lot. Baikal inspires many things in many people, but it has not yet inspired in either of us the gift of gab. Halfway around the world, cut loose from everything and everyone we’ve ever known, we’re still the same old us—both reserved, contemplative, a little anxious, and more than a little self-conscious. We both have a hard time letting loose and opening up. We are eighteen years apart, we’re only half-brothers, but we’re very much alike, in ways that I’m only now beginning to recognize. In the early part of the trip, James played around with the recording equipment I’d brought, and when I listened back to his recordings later I was stunned to find that sometimes I couldn’t tell who was talking—him or me. And I’m a radio journalist, a guy who listens to his own voice for a living. I should know who’s me and who isn’t. It was more than weird. James and I had different mothers and separate childhoods, but listening to these recordings, I realized that our voices have the same tone and cadence, that we use the same peculiar idioms and even stop and start our conversations in the same way. That we don’t just talk alike but that in some basic ways we clearly even think alike. I still can’t figure out how this happened, but it’s probably why this joint venture is working so well. I would not have done this trip alone, and I don’t think I could have done it with anyone other than James.

To summarize very briefly: The risks of global catastrophe are greater and more numerous than is commonly supposed, and they are growing, probably rapidly. They are growing for several reasons: the increasing rate of technological advance—for a number of the catastrophic risks are created or exacerbated by science and its technological and industrial applications (including such humble ones as the internal combustion engine); the growth of the world economy and world population (both, in part, moreover, indirect consequences of technological progress); and the rise of apocalyptic global terrorism. And the risks are, to a degree, convergent or mutually reinforcing. For example, global warming contributes to loss of biodiversity, an asteroid collision could precipitate catastrophic global warming and cause mass extinctions, and cyberterrorism could be employed to facilitate terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction. Each catastrophic risk, being slight in a probabilistic sense (or seeming slight, because often the probability cannot be estimated even roughly) when the probability is computed over a relatively short time span, such as a year or even a decade, is difficult for people to take seriously. Apart from the psychological difficulty that people have in thinking in terms of probabilities rather than frequencies, frequencies normally provide a better grounding for estimating probabilities than theory does; frequent events generate information that enables probabilities to be confirmed or updated. The fact that there have been both nuclear attacks and, albeit on a very limited scale, bioterrorist attacks—which, however, resemble natural disease episodes, of which the human race has a long experience—has enabled the public to take these particular risks seriously. The general tendency, however, is to ignore the catastrophic risks, both individually and in the aggregate. Economic, political, and cultural factors, including the religious beliefs prevalent in the United States, reinforce the effect of cognitive factors (including information costs) in inducing neglect of such risks. The neglect is misguided. The expected costs of even very-low-probability events can be huge if the adverse consequences should the probability materialize are huge, or if the interval over which the probability is estimated is enlarged; the risk of a catastrophic collision with an asteroid is slight in the time span of a year, but not so slight in the time span of a hundred years.

In this conversation, Nobel Prize winner Mario J. Molina reflects on the ethical side of science. He explains how several decades ago, together with the scientist F. Sherwood Rowland, he predicted that human activity was endangering the ozone layer. They discovered the mechanisms which could bring about the destruction of the layer due to the continuous release of industrial compounds, such as the so-called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), into the atmosphere. Professor Molina relates how the issue with the ozone layer was the first example of a problem on a truly global scale for science and, as such, had to be tackled, because without the ozone layer, life on our planet would not have evolved as we know it. Education and training are proving a great help with how the present challenge of stopping or mitigating the daunting problem of global warming should be approached. In the dialogue, different courses of action for persuading both decision-makers and the public are proposed. It is however proving rather difficult to achieve and something which, according to Professor Molina, is also related to education.

During the past century, the standard measure for safeguarding the maintenance of biodiversity has been the establishment of protected areas in which consumptive uses by humans are minimized. Over the years, the design of protected areas has evolved from the creation of small refuges for particular species to the protection of entire ecosystems that are large enough to maintain most if not all their component species and that are mutually interconnected wherever possible. While many other, equally important, measures are now being contemplated and implemented (e.g., comprehensive land-use planning, sustainable development), protected areas remain the cornerstone of all conservation strategies aimed at limiting the inevitable reduction of this planet’s biodiversity (e.g., World Conservation Strategy, Caring for the Earth, Global Biodiversity Strategy). Existing protected rain forest areas suffer from an array of problems that reduce their effectiveness in a broad conservation strategy. They cover a scant 5 percent of tropical rain forest habitats (WCMC, 1992)— arguably not enough to forestall species extinction, especially since the proportions of areas protected vary appreciably from region to region. Protected areas are often not sited appropriately, and they are often too small to maintain the full diversity of their communities. They will in future be affected by external forces (Neumann and Machlis, 1989), such as changes in local climates caused by extensive deforestation, pollution, or fires emanating from outside; introduced exotic species; and global climate change, which in parts of the tropics will likely manifest itself as an increase in the frequency of long droughts. Fortunately, these existing and anticipated threats are being addressed in some countries and regions by measures such as integrated land-use planning, redesigning parks, and establishing corridors, although ecologists are concerned that not enough is being done (see chapter 3). These shortcomings of protected area networks are significant and need to be redressed, but human activities currently pose far more serious threats to protected areas.

Some places are just a place. Some places are a journey. Three days out of Vladivostok, the westbound Number One train lumbers across the Siberian outback like a team of driven oxen. The train’s nineteen hulking, crimson and blue cars creak and groan as they throw themselves forward at speeds not much different than when this track was hacked through half a continent of nearly impenetrable forest and bog in the days of the last tsars a hundred years ago. Three days aboard this beast-machine has gotten us deep into Russia, beyond a hundred ragged towns with names like Obluche, Zilovo, Spassk-Dalny, and Shimanovskaia, nearly every one of which, it seems, was established as a gateway to the mines and prisons of the tsars’ exile system or of the Soviet Gulag, and which generations later still seem more outposts than towns. Clusters of log homes and cabbage patches line the tracks, ashen concrete apartment blocks rise beyond, and doleful bands of kerchiefed women at each station peddle pirozhki and salted fish, unshelled pine nuts in newspaper cones, and hard-boiled eggs cradled in baby carriages. All are thinly tethered to Mother Russia by the lace curtains and flowers in every window, the stubbornly proud train stations, and these two thin steel rails. We’re three days deep into Siberia and, it seems, no place at all. Brown fields spread from the outskirts of the settlements, blotted at random intervals by abandoned and half-collapsed factories, and through the emptiness between passes an almost unchanging plain coursed by wandering rivers and deep thickets of dark pine and fir, wispy white birches, and larches glowing a brazen yellow. Dawn this morning revealed the regional capital of Ulan-Ude, the latest in a string of sullen cities of cinder blocks and smokestacks. This afternoon will bring us to the tarnished old imperial city of Irkutsk, first settled in the seventeenth century and later the destination of some of the luckier of the tsars’ exiles. We’re 3,700 kilometers west of the Pacific, 5,500 kilometers east of Moscow, 250 kilometers north of Mongolia, and south of nowhere.

A Friday in July . . . Boston is a tangle of cranes and earthmovers, half-built flyovers and half-dug trenches and a huge steel snake slithering along the narrowest of paths through the chaos—Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, weaving its way through the city’s $15 billion highway construction project known as the Big Dig and heading westward toward Albany, Cleveland, and Chicago. We’ve said our last goodbyes to the family, hauled our backpacks into our two-person sleeping compartment, and finally, after weeks of ever-more frantic preparation, begun to feel the rhythm of the world rumbling slowly by beneath us, the rhythm of our lives for the next six months. The train picks up headway as it groans past the hallowed green walls of Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox and the spiritual center of New England, the dense triple-decker blocks of the inner suburbs and the verdant lawns and oak groves of the outer suburbs. James and I sit across from each other, grinning slightly, both a little intoxicated by a cocktail of excitement, relief, and anxiety. Family, friends, work, school, daily antagonisms, and well-worn rituals are all receding physically if not yet mentally. Over the horizon ahead loom Alaska, the Pacific, Japan, Vladivostok, Lake Baikal, and 25,000 miles or so of who knows what else. But it’s no big deal, we tell ourselves. We’re heading home, just taking the long way. Just past dawn, west of Cleveland, we’re running two and a half hours late. Our sleeping car attendant, Fred, tells us that we lost time overnight to track repairs, slow-loading mail shipments, and freight trains. Once you start to lose a little time on this run, he says, you quickly end up losing a lot, because the tracks are owned by the freight companies, and their trains have priority. If an Amtrak train slips off schedule, it starts the kind of chain reaction of delays that have earned this train the nickname the Late Shore Limited. I ask Fred if we’re going to make our connection in Chicago. “Not if we keep stopping like this,” he says.

The road from Irkutsk to Lake Baikal, unlike the roads we traveled with Andrei approaching the lake’s eastern shore, is smooth, straight, and well maintained. But in the first snow of the Siberian winter, it’s almost impassible nonetheless, as it struggles on its arrow-straight trajectory to negotiate wave after wave of steep hills. Its stubborn course ignores the promise of an easier if somewhat longer approach were it to wander to one side or the other, dooming local residents to a treacherous journey for six months of the year, and it suggests the firm determination of a ministry chief in Moscow that the most direct road be built between the regional capital and the lake, no matter what. And in fact, I will learn after traveling this road that this is exactly what happened. In 1960, at the height of the cold war, the U.S. and the USSR brokered a deal for President Eisenhower to visit Russia. Included on his itinerary was to be a stop in Irkutsk, and a visit to Siberia’s famous lake, sixty kilometers away. There was no modern road between the two, so Moscow commanded that one be built, and it was—in just two months. But Eisenhower never came. Just before he was to depart, Gary Francis Powers’s U2 spy plane was shot down over Russia. The trip was canceled, and a new freeze settled over relations between the two adversaries. But, as imperfect as it is, the region did get a road between Irkutsk and Baikal, and after forty years local residents have gotten quite used to the sometimes white-knuckle ride. Over forty years, I might get used to it, too. The little white minibus into which James and Olga and I are now crammed with a dozen or so other passengers rises and falls like a roller coaster cart, except that this feels like even less sturdy and dependable transportation. Snow squalls are blowing through the Angara Valley, and when the bus isn’t being buffeted by gusts of wind, it’s straining to climb a slippery slope.

Employing a Stackelberg differential game approach, the chapter derives the carbon tax chosen by a climate coalition of resource consuming countries which purchase the fossil resource from a representative competitive resource supplier. The global climate coalition reduces the speed at which the global fossil resource stock is depleted over time to the socially efficient level by levying the Pigou tax on resource consumption. If the climate coalition is incomplete, the chosen unilateral carbon tax falls short of the Pigou tax. Furthermore, international carbon leakage undermines the effectiveness of the unilateral carbon tax in slowing down the speed of global resource extraction. Nevertheless, under the assumptions made, also the incomplete climate coalition is able to slow down the speed of global extraction to some extent because the chosen carbon tax is time-consistent, irrespective of whether the coalition is global or incomplete.

You wouldn’t see the asteroid, even though it was several miles in diameter, because it would be hurtling toward you at 15 to 25 miles a second. At that speed, the column of air between the asteroid and the earth’s surface would be compressed with such force that the column’s temperature would soar to several times that of the sun, incinerating everything in its path. When the asteroid struck, it would penetrate deep into the ground and explode, creating an enormous crater and ejecting burning rocks and dense clouds of soot into the atmosphere, wrapping the globe in a mantle of fiery debris that would raise surface temperatures by as much as 100 degrees Fahrenheit and shut down photosynthesis for years. The shock waves from the collision would have precipitated earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, gargantuan tidal waves, and huge forest fires. A quarter of the earth’s human population might be dead within 24 hours of the strike, and the rest soon after. But there might no longer be an earth for an asteroid to strike. In a high-energy particle accelerator, physicists bent on re-creating conditions at the birth of the universe collide the nuclei of heavy atoms, containing large numbers of protons and neutrons, at speeds near that of light, shattering these particles into their constituent quarks. Because some of these quarks, called strange quarks, are hyperdense, here is what might happen: A shower of strange quarks clumps, forming a tiny bit of strange matter that has a negative electric charge. Because of its charge, the strange matter attracts the nuclei in the vicinity (nuclei have a positive charge), fusing with them to form a larger mass of strange matter that expands exponentially. Within a fraction of a second the earth is compressed to a hyperdense sphere 100 meters in diameter, explodes in the manner of a supernova, and vanishes. By then, however, the earth might have been made uninhabitable for human beings and most other creatures by abrupt climate changes.