Wednesday, December 12, 2012, has come and gone, and the world survived. However, climate change has blustered this year, causing record-setting harsh weather around the globe. Flooding in Australia, China, and monsoon-prone Bangladesh, and extreme drought in Brazil and the central United States, followed in the eastern half of that country by megastorm Sandy, occurred during the first eleven months of the year. Another tsunami belted Japan's east coast near Fukushima and killer typhoon Bopha ravaged the Philippines even as delegates met in Doha, Qatar, for the UN's international summit on climate change.
Dismal expectations
Expectations of the conference were occasionally hopeful, but mostly pretty low. Tension grew as the talks went on and stalemate continued, leaving many issues unresolved. On the last evening, after a one-day extension of the talks and before a few welcome surprises on Saturday (December 8), NPR called the likely outcome of the negotiations "at best, very modest."
BBC News went even further that night, quoting Tafline Laylin's Friday article for Inhabitat, which characterized the summit as ending in "colossal failure," or "a colossal #FAIL" in twitter. Both media giants jumped the gun with their stories, because Saturday brought a little more progress and consensus on some important issues. Still, many characterized the coda as weak and the gains as too few, perhaps too late.
"This gloom has an upside," the editorial board of the Christian Science Monitor proclaimed on Monday. "It is reinforcing attention on the ways that individuals are banding together to combat global warming.... [It adds] to the momentum toward solutions at the local level, where values on the common good are more easily shared."
"Small is Beautiful"
The idea of using individual, local, municipal, and regional responses to enable macro-change harks back to the "Small is Beautiful" movement of the early 1970s. Then, economist Ernst F. Schumacher championed a sustainable economy attained through solutions of appropriate scale. The Times Literary Supplement rated his book Small Is Beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered among the 100 most influential books published since the mid-20th century.
As if echoing Schumacher's central theme, the Monitor editors continued in Monday's commentary, "Individual, voluntary decisions in energy use can make a cumulative difference on climate change far greater than government mandates....They rely on people making moral choices, ones that see a greater good in not emitting gases that can harm others. Any rules about energy use need to be built on shared values embedded in a community."
Thus, the more that climate conversations on a United Nations scale bog down, the more evident is the need for local action, the editorial concluded.
Even in the United States, which has dragged its feet on commiting to global solutions, a bottom-up approach is emerging. Thirty of 50 states have climate action plans. More than 1,000 municipalities do as well. For instance, in May the U.S. Conference of Mayors recommended green action in American urban centers. Its resolution urged Congress to "protect and increase funding for bicycle and pedestrian programs in the next transportation reauthorization law.”
Smaller-scale energy use, especially as individual solutions drop in price and become more widely available, may well result in a herd effect that would enable impressive carbon emission reductions from the bottom up.
A powerful example
Take, for example, modernization of the family cookstove. Over a third of the world's households, mostly in the less-developed and developing areas of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, cook food by burning wood, biomass, or charcoal in open fires or inefficient primitive stoves.
The immediate solution to environmental pollution in these areas has nothing to do with a massive subsidized plan for changing fuels, however. Rather, it involves replacing the cookstoves with low-cost, low-polluting appliances. A 2009 hypothesis about retiring 150 million inefficient units in India revealed potential savings of 1-2 megatons of CO2 (mostly in short-lived greenhouse pollutants) per 10 million people per year, as well as substantial local health benefits.
In the Global Burden of Disease Study, published Wednesday, Kirk R. Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author of today's summary article in The Lancet, noted that "smoke from cooking fires... [is] the largest environmental threat to health in the world today.”
Household air pollution from cooking with solid fuels kills 3.5 million people annually, and outdoor air pollution caused by this type of cooking kills another half-million.
The UN Foundation's Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, launched in 2010 by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has been working with public, private, and nonprofit partners to allow 100 million households--equivalent to two-thirds of those in the India study--to adopt clean, efficient cookstoves by 2020.
Other recent applications
"Small is beautiful" solutions, in the aggregate, have helped people of the world untangle some of their thorniest environmental quandaries.
- For instance, Germany achieve 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour (50% of its electric power) from rooftop and local solar one day in May of this year.
- An independent multi-year LED street lighting trial in 12 of the world’s largest cities reported in June an energy savings of up to 85%.
- As well as powering businesses, wind turbines purchased by individual contributions are now providing light and HVAC for small communities.
Wave generators and run-of-river hydro plants have also begun to serve customers on a micro scale. Green roofs are renewing New York City's air, and oysters may soon improve water quality in the Hudson. Even current interest in nuclear applications now leans toward mini-reactors supplying smaller amounts of energy on a much less expensive, and potentially less catastrophic, point-source basis.
Using local, bottom-up solutions and feedback to grid appropriately could help alleviate the economic wars that have divided climate change negotiations for decades. As well as reducing environmental emissions, it can serve commercial and industrial needs. Perhaps most satisfying, the "small is beautiful" approach re-empowers individuals, communities, and small business in more ways than one.
Award-winning science writer Sandy Dechert covered the UNFCCC meeting in Qatar for Examiner.com. (See companion articles recommended here.) Sandy has also reported on public health and environmental ramifications of the 2012 U.S. elections and extreme weather disasters over the past few years.
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