About climate goals

Minnesota, although failing miserably to attain legislatively mandated goals established in 2007 for greenhouse gas [GHG] reductions, has done an admirable job describing our failures. [Much as I would like to "blame the gummint,” the failure is a collective one.] If you want, you can find most of the details here.

Minnesota GHG  emissions and goals

Unfortunately, the federal government doesn’t provide nearly as clear a picture of where our nation is in reducing greenhouse gases, primarily, I believe, due to the regime that ruled US from 2016 - 2020. The current  administration has set a "new target for the United States to achieve a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels in economy-wide net greenhouse gas pollution in 2030...” Nowhere in the fact sheet preceding the announcement is  the 2005 level of GHGs specified, nor is the target announced in numerical terms. I believe that’s wrong.

A “little” digging on the internet provided access to an Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2005, in which the total GHG emissions are listed (Tg CO₂ Eq) as 7,260.4 Total and 6,431.9 Net Emissions (Sources and Sinks). So, one of my frst questions is “Does the Biden administration’s 50-52 percent reduction apply to Total or Net, or is the difference of 828.5 (11%) incorporated into the difference between 50% and 52%? The absolute numbers may not be critical in terms of saving the world, but for clarity, transparency, and credibility, they are.

The current issue of Sierra Magazine has an article by Paul Hawken, editor of Drawdown, that’s an excerpt for his latest work, Regeneration. Drawdown would be much more useful, in my opinion, if it actually tracked reality against the hypothetical reductions in GHGs it identifies. I’ll be  curious to see how much specificity is contained in Regeneration.

Global Warming

Margaret Gibson

Even so, it’s a cold spring

I unroll the map of the watershed, and my fingers trace the blue threads of the rivers

as I’d touch the veins on my throat

I chant kalmia latifolia.   pinus silvestris.   geum odoratissimum

as if I might travel once more the fresh land of the Choctaw and the Creek

as if the hooves of my horse, like Bartram’s, might splash red with the juice
             of the trampled berries

I fill the gas tank, chart the wobble of the earth, its tilt, the shape of its orbit

The words I taste—Milankovich, albedo—melt on my tongue like the Greenland
             ice sheet

Hear the beat of the drum?  That’s my heart

Come now let us reason together

Because the honeycreeper

Because a bag of bones on a museum shelf in Mauritius

Because clouds thicken like swamp gas in the marshlands

Because the fetus will not ripen

Because the relict trillium, and the tanager, and the wren

Because the solar flare of blackflies on our skin

Because malaria, because dengue fever

Because of the dieback and the auction block

Because the kestrel

Because the peach orchard is a memory of mildew, ash blue

Because the fetus will not ripen

Because earth everywhere is archipelago

Because I taste the words, and these words, these words they stick in my throat.

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