George Monbiot -- author of Heat: How To Stop The Planet From Burning -- talks with Democracy Now! about the climate crisis, and why even the most progessive governments aren't doing enough.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, you mention in your book that even those countries that are supposedly most advanced in this, Britain and some of the other countries in Europe, in terms of their goals, are still way below what they need to be, in terms of national goals, to be anywhere close to achieving a rollback in greenhouse emissions.
GEORGE MONBIOT: That’s correct. And what we see now, even in the most progressive governments as far as climate change is concerned, is that they're giving up on the key climate change target, which is preventing global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees centigrade, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above a pre-industrial level.
Now, this is a critical target, because if you get beyond that point, that's when the positive feedback start to begin. That's when the biosphere, the world’s natural systems, begins to produce far more carbon dioxide, far more methane. It begins to absorb less of the carbon dioxide, which we produce, and that is a point beyond which we can't do anything more about it. Two degrees of global warming, centigrade, leads automatically to three degrees, because of positive feedbacks. Three degrees leads automatically to four degrees. Once we get to that point, we wash our hands of it. There's nothing more we can do. So we must not get to that point. That is a critical thing. We can't allow two degrees centigrade of warming to happen. To have a high chance of preventing that from happening requires a 60% global cut in carbon emissions by 2030. ...
AMY GOODMAN: George Monbiot, on the issue of a speech you recently gave, where you talked about the axis of evil: George Bush, John Howard of Australia, and Stephen Harper of Canada.
GEORGE MONBIOT: Yes, the axis of evil on climate change. These guys have got together to make sure that there is no effective international action now taken on climate change. OK, there wasn't any being taken anyway, partly because of the US gutting of the Kyoto Protocol before, but --
AMY GOODMAN: How did Gore and Clinton gut it?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, they -- I mean, it has to be said that, of course, they were being pushed very hard by Congress and by powerful industrial interests, so I can't blame them entirely for what happened. But they introduced all these caveats and clauses and these get-out clauses, things like the clean development mechanism, which said you don't have to change your carbon emissions at home, you just pay somebody else to do it. And they played up to the other nations which didn't want to make serious commitments, and they made sure that even if Kyoto were to be implemented fully, which is not being implemented fully, it wouldn't make any really significant difference to cutting carbon emissions. They knew that you had to go much, much further than Kyoto went, if we were to have that cut. And knowing that, they didn't push it in the direction it needed to be going. In fact, they held it back.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you about China. Clearly, the Chinese take a position: hey, you folks in the industrial world have to first get your house in order before you tell us about getting our house in order. But on the other hand, China right now is the manufacturing center for the industrial world, in essence, in terms of the amount of increased industrialization going on there. What's going to happen and what do you think needs to happen in terms of negotiations with China over climate change?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, the first thing I’d say is, before we point the finger at China, just bear in mind that the average emissions of carbon dioxide per person in China are 2.7 tons per year; in the United States, they are twenty tons per year. So it would be the height of hypocrisy to say it’s those damn Chinese who are responsible for this problem.
So saying, China is rapidly emerging as an enormous emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. It's rising very fast, and it will overtake the United States probably in November this year as the world's primary emitter. So there's no question that it needs to be brought into an international mechanism to cut those greenhouse gas emissions and that it has to be brought in as an equal, not as a country which is told what to do by other countries, but as an equal partner in the development of a foundation for cutting climate change, which is actually going to work.
The first thing that needs to happen if that is to take place is for the rich nations, which have already enjoyed the benefits of the massive use of fossil fuels, to show that they are serious about cutting their contribution to carbon emissions. Otherwise, China just turns around and says, “Well, you've had your fun. What about us? Why can't we have ours?” And it's absolutely essential that what is done now is that we break this perfect circle of finger-pointing, where the North Americans point to China and say, “We can't do anything. It’s those guys over there who are causing the problem,” and China points to North America and says, “We can't do anything, either. It’s those guys who are causing the problem.” That's what they're both saying at the moment, and we need to break that. And we can only break that through international leadership shown by the United States, by Europe, by the other developed regions of the world.
AMY GOODMAN: George Monbiot, what has to happen at the G8 meeting in Germany?
GEORGE MONBIOT: We have to establish there a target for cutting carbon emissions, which actually reflects what the science says, rather than what the politics say. It doesn't matter what the politicians say about what can and can't be done. The atmosphere doesn't care about that. As far as the atmosphere is concerned, it's not concerned. It's a collection of gases. And if all they're going to do is add to that gas by spouting off a lot of hot air, it's not going to deal with the problem. They have to look at what the scientists are saying about the cut which is required, and they have to then establish that as their target: by 2030, a 60% global cut.