What's 350?

What’s 350?

I’ve been asking my friends, “Does the number 350 mean anything to you?” Even though there have been a couple of articles in The Taos News and a local conference on climate change, some of my friends knew nothing about it. So I took it upon myself to inform them.

I didn’t know about 350 myself until a couple of weeks ago when I wrote a story on it for Enchantment Magazine, the household organ for Kit Carson Electric Co-op of which I am one of 29,000 members. The number 350 means 350 parts per million (ppm) that scientists agree is the safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Right now we are pushing 387. (For the full report, see the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): www1.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/index.htm. The main activity of the IPCC is to provide at regular intervals Assessment Reports of the state of knowledge on climate change.)

On October 24^th, 2009, a day of “climate awareness,” was observed in over 181 countries around the world. I went to www.350.org to see the slideshow of events and learn more about it. Here were photos of people displaying the number 350 in ingenious ways: an aerial photo of people lying head-to-heel across a football field, their bodies forming the number; a surfer coming in on his board holding up a card with 350; a bungee jumper plunging off a building toward a target of 350; children in classrooms with hopeful grins holding up 350; a courageous lone woman in Iran standing in front of a bare wall holding up 350; a parade of people in India, crowds in China, Australia, Britain and France, smaller groups in other countries such as Malaysia and Africa. Not to mention big cities in America: San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C. The enthusiasm and hope in their faces brought a lump to my throat.

Some of the thrust for worldwide education is thanks to our former vice president, Al Gore, winner of an Emmy for “An Inconvenient Truth” and winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He personally trained 3,000 volunteers to go around the world and spread the word about the potential dangers of climate change and possible solutions. (See www.climateproject. org.)

Here in Taos we observed 350: International Climate Awareness Day with a panel discussion in the morning and, in the park in the afternoon, a giveaway of 350 pumpkins and 350 compact fluorescent light bulbs. An aerial shot of the bight orange pumpkins that were arranged in 350 would look great in the www.35.org slideshow.

The morning panel included some well-informed and righteous people like Tod Thompson from the New Mexico Energy and Minerals Department, Carol Miller, Chairwoman of the Solar Finance Committee, Bill Brown of The Climate Project, Erik Schenkler-Goodrich of Western Environmental Law Center and Luis Reyes, the CEO of Kit Carson Electric Cooperative.

Most of the discussion revolved around how to conserve energy, get off oil and coal and make the transition to clean, green power. Of course there are obvious things we can do such as weatherizing our houses and changing light bulbs, building greenhouses and going with wind and solar energy wherever possible, but it’s going to take more than that. I was not surprised to hear that the generation of fossil fuels is subsidized by hidden taxes to the tune of $75 billion a year while renewable energy only gets $12 billion. Why is that? Perhaps because even in our area where the UNM-Taos campus is powered by a solar array and many people are environmentally aware, less than five percent of our co-op members have signed up to buy blocks of green power. Our energy generation station, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, will generate more green energy if we convince them that there’s a demand.

Reyes said right now 70 percent of our electricity comes from coal. He was concerned about the rising cost of gas, oil, and electricity, and cap and trade agreements that are being argued in congress. “Green energy is not expensive. Forty cents per 100-kilowatt hours equals two dollars per month.” If 29,000 co-op members each bought one block, what a powerful message that would send to our legislators and to Tri-State.

With one million member-consumers across Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming, Tri-State also generates renewable energy in several ways: hog methane biomass production in Nebraska; Colorado hydro plants at Crooke Falls, William’s Fork, Lemon Dam, Vallecito, Ouray, Coal Creek and Jackson Gulch, and wind turbines in Wyoming. Looking ahead, in northeastern New Mexico Tri-State and First Solar are planning to build a 30-megawatt power plant that will utilize a solar field of 500,000 two-by-four foot photovoltaic modules. The Cimarron I Solar Project will be one of the largest solar photovoltaic facilities in the world.

During the question and answer period, participants wanted to know how we could get Obama to attend the Copenhagen conference on climate awareness in December. Carol Miller said that the U.S. is responsible for a huge amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and we should shoulder a large part of the responsibility. “So if the U.S. president doesn’t go, what kind of a message are we sending to the world?”

Indeed! The United States was the only developed country that refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol treaty that was adopted by consensus in 1997 and ratified in May 2002. According to www.environment.about.com “The Kyoto Protocol is an amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international environmental treaty intended to bring countries together to reduce our collective greenhouse gases and to cope with the effects of temperature increases that are unavoidable after 150 years of industrialization.”

After the election, Obama said, “If you want something done, make me!” If you want to tell our president, “Get on the jet to Copenhagen. You go, guy!” you can sign a petition on www.care2.com.

P.S. I know there is an ongoing argument about whether or not the earth is warming and is it our fault? I also know that Northern New Mexico has been in drought for the past ten years, that thousands of piñons have died, that we have been plagued by forest fires, that the aspens are threatened by winters too warm to kill insect invasions and disease. I can’t do all the research on climate change myself, so I go to sources I trust--the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona and Sierra Club. One of their sources is the IPPC.

P.P.S. This just in from www.algore.com: “President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled next month.”

What’s at stake here? The whole planet. Many agree that right now we have all the technology we need to make the transition. The only thing lacking is our collective will.