Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, offers an analysis of the IPCC report with a view to U.S. domestic politics.
An excerpt from his New York Review of Books article (via Truthout):
... The most important news about climate at the moment may come not from the IPCC but from Washington. After twenty years of inactivity - a remarkably successful bipartisan effort to accomplish nothing - the first few weeks of the new Congress have witnessed a flurry of activity. A series of bills have been introduced by people ranging from California Representative Henry Waxman and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to Arizona's John McCain that would call for more or less aggressive carbon reduction targets. Some of the bills would set in place a "cap-and-trade" system that would set overall limits on emissions of carbon dioxide but would allow companies to freely buy and sell credits permitting them to emit certain amounts of it; this would produce a market for carbon-cutting measures.
The IPCC report doesn't call for particular reduction figures. It does, however, make clear that reduction in emissions must be quick and deep. There is no more optimistic alternative. Even if we do everything right, we're still going to see serious increases in temperature, and all of the physical changes (to one extent or another) predicted in the report. However, there's reason to hope that if the US acts extremely aggressively and quickly we might be able to avoid an increase of two degrees Celsius, the rough threshold at which runaway polar melting might be stopped. This means that any useful legislation will have to feature both a very rapid start to reductions and a long and uncompromising mandate to continue them. Sanders's bill, also endorsed by California's Barbara Boxer, who heads the relevant committee, comes closest to that standard. It calls for an eventual 80% cut in emissions by 2050. McCain's bill, cosponsored by one of his challengers for the presidency, Barack Obama, is somewhat weaker in its eventual targets. But the bargaining has barely begun, and in any event quick initial implementation of any cuts will be almost as important as the final numbers.
No one expects President Bush to sign such a bill. In fact, it was widely considered a minor miracle that he uttered the words "climate change" in this year's State of the Union address. (His limp proposal, centering on alternative fuels for some vehicles, was equally widely considered a dud.) What's happening now has much to do with positioning for the next presidential election, and the legislation that will eventually be passed and signed in 2009. What the IPCC report makes clear by implication is that that legislation will be our last meaningful chance: anything less than an all-out assault on carbon in our economy will be rendered meaningless by the increasing momentum of global warming. And of course by now our economy is only part of the problem. Though we use more energy per capita than any other country, the Chinese may pass us in total carbon emissions by decade's end. Even if we start to get our own house in order, we'll need to figure out how, with desperate speed, to lead an equally sweeping international response.
The only really encouraging development is the groundswell of public concern that has built over the last year, beginning with the reaction to Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore's movie. In January, a few of us launched an initiative called stepitup07.org. It calls for Americans to organize rallies in their own communities on April 14 asking for congressional action. In the first few weeks the website was open, more than six hundred groups in forty-six states registered to hold demonstrations - this will clearly be the largest organized response to global warming yet in this country. The groups range from environmental outfits to evangelical churches to college sororities, united only by the visceral sense (fueled in part by this winter's bizarre weather) that the planet has been knocked out of whack. The IPCC assessment offers a modest account of just how far out of whack it is - and just how hard we're going to have to work to have even a chance at limiting the damage.
McKibben's call for grassroots activism on the issue caught my eye because of this excerpt from a Feb. 21 Globe and Mail article:
Two decades ago, David Suzuki begged Al Gore to move to Canada and run for prime minister.
The two had been talking about global warming, and Mr. Gore's grasp of the issue sent shivers up Mr. Suzuki's spine. He was half-joking in his attempt to lure him north, but the future vice-president of the United States gave him a sobering answer.
"Don't look to politicians like me," Mr. Gore, then a U.S. senator, told Mr. Suzuki, a broadcaster and activist. "You have to sell it to the Canadian public. You have to convince them and show them there are alternatives, and get them to care enough and to demand that something be done."