Climate change: small is also beautiful

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/11/climate-change-small-is-also-beautiful

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It is easy to feel powerless in the face of global warming. Even the phrase itself is impersonal, while the science behind it is dense and its long-term implications still contentious. Now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is meeting in Berlin this weekend to present its draft proposals for mitigating the impact of warming, has woken up to the need to get both more specific and more positive. Big targets on emission reductions still matter, but there are lots of smaller ones too, ideas that could improve lives now as well as save lives in the future.

About time too. The IPCC had so successfully impressed us with the seriousness of the challenge and the scale of the actions required to tackle it that the default reaction is too often a helpless shrug at the futility of effort. The first two reports in the current series were in line with the past – gloom, followed by doom. Last September, the initial assessment said the evidence that some part of global warming was caused by human intervention was now "unequivocal". Last month, its second assessment warned of the "catastrophic" impact of warming on food security and biodiversity and the knock-on effects on communities competing for ever scarcer resources.

If emphasising the scale of the challenge is a disincentive, it is even harder to galvanise people and governments into action against the background noise of the climate change deniers who continue to be offered a voice out of all proportion to the evidence for their opinions. And perversely, the threat to energy security posed by switching to carbon-neutral electricity sources, as well as the cost to industry and individuals, present big political dilemmas – while the long-term nature of the challenge makes it all too easy to file it under "too difficult". Only the greenest converts clamour for higher electricity bills. So there are good reasons for making the problem feel more local.

Cities are one new focus for action. Greener cities, particularly those that are being built now to accommodate the great global migration away from the land, will make better places to live and stronger homes for the future. A billion people already live in cities that are at risk from rising sea levels and inland flooding. Insulation, solar panels and more thoughtful urban planning will increase resilience as well as reducing emissions. But old cities need greening, too. For several weeks across much of northern Europe, air quality has been so poor that vulnerable people were being warned to stay indoors. On Thursday, a report from Public Health England estimated that nearly 30,000 people a year die from the effects of traffic pollution: diesel particulates and nitrogen dioxide that are quickly absorbed into the blood stream. Setting more stringent targets – or at least meeting all the existing ones – would save lives. One of the best ways of doing it is to make UK cities genuinely bicycle-friendly. In the world's best biking cities, at least half of all journeys are made by bike. In London, of 30m each day, it is barely one in 50.

But the big picture is also offering reasons to be cheerful. Of all the excuses for doing nothing, the argument most often trotted out is that whatever contribution Britain, or even the whole EU, made to reducing carbon emissions would be more than offset by the rapid growth of coal-fired power stations in China. That fox may now be shot. Greenpeace is reporting that China is making plans for such a steep reduction in its reliance on coal by increasing energy efficiency and rapidly expanding its use of renewable energy that its carbon emissions could peak before 2020. It is not enough on its own. But the IPCC scientists' call for a trebling of the use of renewables takes on a new force if the world's fastest-growing polluter has made such a big move. One more reason, as Desmond Tutu argued on these pages yesterday, for every one to make their own difference.