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Walk. Take public transport. Use a
reusable cloth bag, not plastic bags for shopping. These are consistently
repeated doable messages Indonesians and people throughout the world will
get on March 23.
On that Saturday night, the 60 minutes from 8:30 to 9:30 pm will be Earth
Hour 2013. Office buildings, hotels, malls, street lights and private
houses switch the power off to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
During Earth Hour 2012, one million Indonesians got in the act in 22
cities, 255 communities, 77 schools and four universities. Now in its
fifth year in Indonesia, this world movement calls on supporters to go
beyond 60 minutes of planet saving action.
“I will if you will” is the global tagline. To instill the public with
the Earth Hour message, WWF Indonesia has posted a video on YouTube. Just
search for EarthHour2011Indo. It shows young men and women in turn
holding a blackboard with wording in chalk. “I walk to work,” declares
one. “I take public transport,” exclaims another. “I care for the plants,”
beams another.
The tools used to make these declarations are in themselves an implicit,
subtle call for behavioral change: chalk on wood-based blackboard, not
chemically-based magic markers on also chemically-treated whiteboards.
Indeed, as the single most significant community act on climate change
worldwide, Earth Hour should be a time of reflection about where we are
now and where we still have to go. Where we are now is that the Earth
Hour campaign has generated greater public awareness on climate change.
But the policies, programs and international agreements are still not
enough to insure Earth is a safe place for our grandchildren to live in.
Where we have to go is to governments finding common ground for a legally
binding global agreement on carbon reduction. That is one goal. The “I
will if you will” mantra should also be ingrained in the thinking of
political leaders and policy makers.
With a changed mind-set for a common purpose, they should be able to
speed up the glacial pace of climate talks. The longer the delay for
meaningful, far reaching decisions, the more precious and scarce time
becomes. Time lost cannot be recovered.
Rachmat Witoelar, the President’s special envoy on climate change and
Indonesia’s chief delegate to the annual United Nations Conference on
Climate Change, constantly airs his pique on American refusal to accept
an international legally binding agreement.
The US is the one major developed nation that did not ratify the 1997
Kyoto Protocol that obliges advanced economies to reduce carbon
emissions. However, at a journalism workshop on climate change in Batam
on Jan. 22, the former environment minister was optimistic that the US
would make tangible moves after Barack Obama’s inaugural address.
“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the
failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some
may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid
the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more
powerful storms,” Obama told the US Congress on Jan. 21.
One early response by Obama was on March 4. He nominated Gina McCarthy,
an experienced regulator well-grounded in clean air issues, as
administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Obama also named
MIT physicist Ernest Moniz, a proponent of cleaner energy resources, as
energy secretary.
With these nominations, it seems that Obama is serious about following
through with his pledge to use executive orders and his unilateral
authority to reduce climate change if legislation continues to stall on
Capitol Hill.
Reducing climate change means reducing human-induced carbon emissions.
Even if the US and all nations subscribe to a global legally binding
agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2020, this move
alone may not be enough. Another move should be changing the energy
systems of big fossil fuel consuming countries.
Economics professor Jeffrey Sachs offered two ways to counter climate
change in a column in The Jakarta Post on March 2, but neither has been
employed on a large scale.
Solution 1 is to shift massively from fossil fuels to renewable energy,
especially wind and solar power. Solution 2 is to capture carbon dioxide
emissions for storage underground. But this technology, called carbon
capture and sequestration (CCS) is not yet proven on a large scale.
To support these two solutions, Sachs proposes a tax on CO2 emissions in
all regions of the world that starts low today and increases gradually.
Part of the tax revenue should be used to subsidize new low carbon energy
sources like wind and solar power.
The bottom line is that everyone, who wants Earth as their place to live
for all posterity, will need behavioral change. Everyone means government
leaders and policymakers, fossil fuel interests and land developers, NGOs
and forest communities, today’s and tomorrow’s schoolchildren, civil
society as a whole.
That is the intent of Earth Hour — to preserve the good Earth. Nobel
Prize in literature winner Pearl S. Buck perhaps could not agree more. ●
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