No Talk and No Action  

Bill McKibben reports on "Why the Montreal climate summit was too painful to watch".

I've been to climate meetings in locales that stretch from Kyoto to The Hague, Mexico City to the Maldives. It would have been awfully easy to get in the old hybrid and drive two hours north to Montreal for the big climate-change confab that wrapped up this weekend -- if nothing else, it's a city I love deeply. But I couldn't bring myself to do it in the end. I knew it was going to be too painful to watch.

Too painful because, as it has since the issue first emerged, the United States was the one blocking progress. Thirteen long years ago, in 1992, as he was setting out for the Rio de Janeiro summit that launched the international negotiations on global warming, the first President Bush announced that he might be willing to talk about such things, but "the American way of life is not up for negotiation." That was tragedy; by now it's descended into farce.

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these are the years when we desperately need to be making progress. Eventually even we will have no choice but to start doing something about climate change. But each new issue of Science and Nature makes it clear that the important time is now -- that the climatic tipping point is nearer than we thought. More to the point, each passing year brings China and India further along their development path, using precisely the same raw material -- coal -- that we used to build our wealth. Five years ago, with incredible effort and investment, we might have nudged that trajectory in a very different direction; but last year, China added 65 gigawatts to its electric grid, twice as much as all of New England. And as that happens, the U.S. and China become each other's perfect excuse for inaction. "We won't do anything until China does." "How can we be expected to do anything if the U.S. won't even act?" Carbon dependent and co-dependent.

With demand for electricity steadily increasing but no room for new power plants, New York City is making pioneering strides in energy efficiency; even famously eco-conscious burgs like Seattle and Portland are taking notice. New York has switched over more than 11,000 traffic lights and walk signals to light-emitting diodes that use 90 percent less energy than conventional fixtures. It's replaced more than 180,000 energy-hogging refrigerators in public housing with much more efficient models.

The city is now legally required to purchase only the most energy-efficient cars, air conditioners, and copy machines; soon, computers will join the list. And Gotham's got one of the biggest fleets of hybrid busses in the country, as well as some of the first hybrid taxis. "Eventually what happens here starts to happen around the country," says the Natural Resources Defense Council's Ashok Gupta. "The market that New Yorkers provide is clearly an important factor in moving the rest of the country."