© 2006 Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London

Ernest B. Cohen, PE & Ph.D.

November 4, 2006

I first became concerned about sustainability around 1970. I had recently received a Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering, and I wanted to apply this discipline to the civilian economy, rather than the military. At that time, I was working as a Management Scientist for Atlantic Richfield in Philadelphia. I quickly realized that our advanced technical civilization, which gave us so many benefits, was entirely based on cheap and abundant fossil fuel. Obviously, there was a limited amount of these fossil fuels in the Earth's crust. At that time, it was estimated that we humans had about 250 years worth of petroleum and about a thousand years worth of coal. Even with those horizons it didn't seem to make sense to burn these resources up, leaving future generations to a subsistence economy.

Since then, the energy sustainability problem has shifted from "how much there is" to "how much can we burn before unacceptable climate changes occur." This short book, of under 200 pages, deals with "unacceptable climate change", from a human point of view, rather than a scientists. The first chapter describes the effects of warming on the Arctic. The second chapter deals with John Tyndall, a Irish physicist, who laid the foundation for the concept of "green house gases". The third chapter is mostly about a visit to a research station on the Greenland ice sheet, with digressions onto the possible shut down of the Gulf Stream (thereby freezing Europe), and the glaciers in Iceland. The fourth chapter discusses the effects of climate change on wild plants and animals. Some shift their range, while others go extinct because there is no nearby area with the proper climate for them. Chapter 5, in part II, Man, covers the abandonment of the Babylonian city-state of Akkad. Due to climate change, there was no rain, and therefore no crops, around 4200 years ago. As we noted at one of the SSAP conferences, "People can live without cars; they can't live without food." Chapter 6 describes projects in Holland to cope with expected changes in the water level: "Floating Houses". Chapter 7, "Business as Usual" discusses what must be done to avert the worst of climate change, and how far America is from any such program; which moves on to Chapter 8, "The Day After Kyoto". The Bush administration is not only dragging its feet with regard to any action, it is covering up the scientific consensus that American action is necessary to avoid catastrophe. Chapter 9, "Burlington, Vermont" deals with local action to fill the void left by the deliberate inaction of the Federal government.

The meta-problem is that by the time global climate change is widely recognized, proposed solutions can't be implemented to avoid the catastrophe. Between inertia in many systems, including the social-economy, and several feedback loops, the temperatures will continue to rise for decades, and possibly even centuries, after we limit the release of green house gases.

The six page last chapter, "Man in the Anthropocene" concludes with this warning: "As the effects of global warming become more and more difficult to ignore, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

This book is required reading for any activist who wants to avert the doom as forecast. That is what inspired us to form SSAP, and what SSAP is all about.

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