Graciela Chichilnisky Is an Argentine American mathematical economist and an authority on climate change. She is a professor of economics at Columbia University.
The transformation of capitalism is unstoppable because we need limits on resources for humans to survive.
We need a transformation of the world economy and of how we use and share the Earth's resources. We are running out of time. We are truly at the point of no return.
Signs of a poorly understood but treatable house fire requires action, not inaction.
Changing the world's oceans to increase their uptake of CO2, as other geoengineering solutions propose, is equally dangerous, as the increased resulting acidity of the oceans kills tiny crustaceans, such as krill, that are the basis of the pyramid of life on the planet as we know it.
Political parties often take advantage of denial and fear in a moment of change. This is a well understood phenomenon that often leads to scapegoat-ism: blaming outsiders, such as immigrants, or racial and religious minorities. The phenomenon is behind Brexit and the violence in the political cycles in the US and EU.
We need to support our future instead of undermining human survival. Let's do it.
The new markets that arise from ecological constraints will dominate the 21st century economy, and so will markets for knowledge.
We are still learning how exactly the Earth reacts to increased CO2 and other greenhouse gases. We know it leads to warming seas which are melting the North and the South Poles, rising and starting to swallow entire coastal areas in the US and elsewhere, as the New York Times article documents.
Climate change is new and complex. We don't have all the answers.
The change in economic values created by the new markets for global public goods will reorient our global economy and under the right conditions can usher the satisfaction of basic needs of the present and of the future. This is what is needed right now.
Geoengineering means changing the Earth's fundamental large-scale processes.
CO2 from air can replace petroleum: it can produce plastics and acetate, it can produce carbon fibers that replace metals and clean hydrocarbons, such as synthetic gasoline. We can use CO2 to desalinate water, enhance the production of vegetables and fruit in greenhouses, carbonate our beverages and produce biofertilizers that enhance the productivity of the soil without poisoning it. Carbon negative technology is absolutely needed now.
The consensus is that climate change ranks along with nuclear warfare as the top two risks facing human civilization.
The first reaction to trauma is denial, then comes anger and finally, acceptance. I think the US is still between denial and anger, and I hope we will reach acceptance because almost perversely, right now, only the US has the technology that is needed for global economic change.
As difficult as it is to eliminate the risk of nuclear warfare, it requires fewer changes to the global economy than does averting or reversing climate change.
We are in the midst of the 6th largest extinction event in the history of the plant and the first caused by human action.
If nuclear warfare is believed to be somewhat controlled, then climate change is now the greatest threat.
Climate change is due to the use of energy for industrial growth, which has been and is overwhelmingly based on fossil fuels.
We know little of the consequences of the geoengineering process, such as spraying particles into the atmosphere that shade the planet from the sun's rays and could decrease its temperature. But this process is how dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth about 60 million years ago, by particles spewed by a volcano or a giant meteorite impact, and our species could follow suit.
We have used the majority of our carbon budget and we are already at dangerous levels of CO2 concentrations, about 400 parts per million. The levels were 250 before industrialization. So the problem is what we have done already and, therefore, what must be undone.