The Environmental Movement Awakens - by Joe Romm

Powerful but simple organizing ideas matter, especially for the public arena, and even more so for sustainable movements.  One of the central ideas of the new environmental push is that 2°C (3.6°F) total warming from preindustrial levels — associated with CO2 levels in the air of about 450 parts per million (ppm) — isn’t a “safe” level at all.  Again, the science has become increasingly clear on this point, as I discussed last year.  But the idea of limiting total warming to 1.5°C — and getting back to 350 ppm — was specifically embodied and advanced in the name team McKibben chose for their group, 350.org.

So it is significant achievement that in Paris 190 nations unanimously committed to an ongoing effort of increasingly deeper emissions reductions aimed at keeping total warming “to well below 2°C [3.6°F] above preindustrial levels” — and then went even further by agreeing “to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”

At the same time, the big enviro groups like NRDC deserve a great deal of credit for revitalizing the idea that the Clean Air Act (CAA) was meant to protect us from all forms of dangerous pollutants — which absolutely includes CO2.  After all, without the CAA and the resulting EPA Clean Power Plan, team Obama would probably not have been able to make a strong enough CO2-reduction target for 2025 to achieve the game-changing November 2014 climate deal with China.

The U.S.-China deal, more than anything else, enabled last month’s successful climate deal, since it was the first time a major developing country — in this case, the major developing country and the world’s largest CO2 emitter — agreed to constrain emissions.  That opened a floodgate of commitments from virtually every major developed and developing countries, which were essential to making the Paris agreement work.
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The environmental movement still has much to do to prove its potency — truly successful movements transform the public debate and politics.  We will find out during the 2016 election cycle whether the movement can translate its renewed potency into enough votes at the ballot box to preserve and expand its recent gains.

Read more at The Environmental Movement Awakens