"If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We need to go far — quickly."
-- African proverb quoted by Al Gore in his Nobel acceptance speech
Eighteen months ago, 12,000 climate delegates descended on one of my favorite places in the world, the Indonesian island of Bali, a place that actually measures up to a good portion of its reputation as paradise. At least in my opinion. Many delegates didn’t see things that way. They only grudgingly shed their business attire for batik shirts when they discovered their complaints about the lack of enough air conditioning in the pricey tourist and conference region known as Nusa Dua were not going to change the situation. How could anybody properly discuss climate change with sweat pouring down her back like the gushing moulins of Greenland’s melting ice?
If air conditioning is part of the must-have for any place you call paradise, then you can understand the predicament delegates had. Because in 2007 Bali didn’t and still doesn’t have electrical capacity to provide basic needs of the population at large, much less handle the load of "enough air conditioning" for tourists. Indeed, all of Indonesia – population 240 million – has 36,000 megawatts of installed electric power. The United States, with 305 million people – has nearly 1,100,000 installed megawatts.
Bali powers its air conditioning and everything else with electricity delivered via undersea cable from next-door Java. The plant that generates this power burns coal. Five years ago, the Ministry of Finance in Jakarta approved a plan to lift the country’s electrical capacity by nearly a third – 10,000 installed megawatts – by 2010. Six new coal-fired power plants were slated. Indonesia is not going to meet that deadline. Not even come close. But two of those coal burners are now up and running.
Since 2000, in the United States, more than 200 coal-burning electricity-generating plants have been proposed. Public, financial and environmental pressure have put an end to more than half of these before they got past the drawing board stage. But 12 of them are now operating, 27 are under construction, 7 are near construction and 13 have finished the permitting procedure. Another 44 coal-fired plants have been announced.
Worldwide, in the past nine years, some 900 coal-fueled electrical plants have been proposed in the developed and developing world. Plants that, besides creating other troubles, add to the burgeoning atmospheric greenhouse gases that the dripping delegates in Nusa Dua were in town to discuss how to control. Their work was preliminary – merely setting the stage for negotiations taking place this year in Denmark. Ultimately the nations they represented will have to decide whether they are going to cut through the conundrums and the bullshit and take the drastic action needed to keep an inevitably bad situation caused by anthropogenic climate change from being worse.
Because, contrary to Al Gore’s remark, in this matter of global warming, nobody can go quickly alone. We are all, rich and poor, developed and developing, riding on what the second wave of the environmental movement so rightly labeled, spaceship earth. It all comes down to what we are willing to do. How much future GDP, how much consumption, how much comfort we’re willing to surrender to deal with what is the greatest human-caused crisis since our ancestors first meandered out of Africa 100 millennia ago.
For those of us in the developed world sipping cooled drinks in the cooled air of our dwellings wondering where we might go tonight in our cool horseless carriages, a big question underlying what was discussed in Bali and will be discussed in Copenhagen this December is whether we’re willing to give up some portion of our prosperity so that the kids of the maid at the spa in Nusa Dua can also have air conditioning and a computer and convenient transportation. For Balinese – and Chadians, Amazonians, and rural Chinese – the question is what portion will they yield of their dreams of being megaconsumers, just like the Americans, Europeans and Japanese they see on their televisions.
Big questions for all us 6.5 billion rank-and-file human beings is how much we’re willing to accept that 10 billion of us are soon going to be living on spaceship earth unless attitudes change, and how much are we willing to invest in changing those attitudes. Big questions for the human ruling class is how much it is willing to back off from its millennia-old privileges and move boldly to do something benefiting everyone.
Big questions for Americans is whether we’re willing to confront the oligarchs of that ruling class to compel the surrender of some sovereignty to a treaty that commits us to take tough climate change action. Are we Americans willing to be good-faith players and make our nation a positive role model in cooperating to ameliorate this crucial global problem? Or will we shrug while Exxon Mobil and the rest of Big Energy continues to be an aggressive obstacle? The diluting of the deeply flawed Waxman-Markey legislation, which will surely be diluted even further in the Senate, is an indication that the United States is not willing to be a good role model in this matter. Instead, too many of our leaders are willing only to tweak the old paradigm instead of overturning it. And, face it, too many of us are the same.
There are also other big questions, peripheral to, but concomitant with how we approach global warming.
For example, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment released four years ago noted that 60 percent of earth's ecosystems are being used at a rate exceeding their capacity, and that the growing global population is going to make this worse. Here are some excerpts:
Ecosystems and Human Well-Being:
There is established but incomplete evidence that changes being made in ecosystems are increasing the likelihood of nonlinear changes in ecosystems (including accelerating, abrupt, and potentially irreversible changes), with important consequences for human well-being. ...
The degradation of ecosystem services is harming many of the world’s poorest people and is sometimes the principal factor causing poverty. ...
The challenge of reversing the degradation of ecosystems while meeting increasing demands for their services can be partially met under some scenarios that the MA considered, but these involve significant changes in policies, institutions, and practices that are not currently under way. ...
Ecosystem degradation can rarely be reversed without actions that address the negative effects or enhance the positive effects of one or more of the five indirect drivers of change: population change (including growth and migration), change in economic activity (including economic growth, disparities in wealth, and trade patterns), sociopolitical factors (including factors ranging from the presence of conflict to public participation in decision-making), cultural factors, and technological change.
The truly key questions to ask – the answers to which form the crucible in which all the answers to all the other key questions must be tested – is whether our political leaders are finally serious about going far and going quickly on global warming. And whether we – Americans, Chinese, Balinese, Danes – are serious about making them get serious if they fall short.
The outcome at Bali certainly was discouraging. Perhaps it would have helped had some of the delegates – say one from each of the 188 countries in attendance – taken the two-hour trip eastward from Nusa Dua along the coast to Candi Dasa. Pronounced chán-di-dassa, Balinese for "Ten Temples," it’s a little dot on the eastern horn of crescent-shaped Amuk Bay about two-thirds of the way to Bali’s easternmost tip. The village’s story is our planet’s story.
When the tide comes in at Candi Dasa, the concrete sea wall causes a rent in the water. At night the sea wall can look as black and solid as granite, and in the early misty morning light, pearly as a shell. By day, it is a blackened, rippling scar, an ugly reminder of what it replaced.
For divers and tourists eager to escape the madding crowds, the white sand beach at Candi Dasa was a hidden paradise until the early 1980s, when developers saw the potential to turn the eastern part of Bali into a lucrative enterprise along the lines of the five-star hotel chains that claimed Nusa Dua a decade before. Candi Dasa, it was hoped, could be turned into another of those spots where visitors can live in luxury, isolated from the native population except for field trips and ceremonial dances, getting premium service and exotic, but still familiar food. Nusa Dua was carefully planned for that crowd. Today, some Nusa Dua hotels even plant rice crops purely for the esthetic beauty of the green and golden stalks bending in the wind. Crops that are never harvested for food. All artificial since Nusa Dua was before this theme-park approach always too dry for growing rice.
Candi Dasa was a different story. It had always been a fishing village, with little farms, some rice, peanuts, and coconut groves. Surrounding it were older, smaller villages like Bug-Bug, some of them with cultural roots predating the arrival of the Hindus. The fishermen subsisted nicely with what they took from the sea, and what they grew on the shore and in the nearby mountains. Then came the promise of M-O-N-E-Y. Candi Dasa would be the next Nusa Dua, everyone said. It was going to be big, and exclusive, and even Balinese people, not just foreign investors, could make a lot of cash.
Those that owned land next to the shore sold it for what they thought were incredible prices. New enterprises opened up that seemed to promise a good livelihood for even those who had no property to sell.
To build the hotels, the developers needed cement, and for that they needed lime. Best local lime source? The coral beds that made up the reef. Balinese who had never held jobs outside of family fishing or farming or handicrafts now could earn tens of thousands of rupiahs each day filling baskets with coral, which was free for the taking. One-cubic-foot basket could be traded for the equivalent of 12 cents.
In their narrow boats, lit with hurricane lamps, the villagers paddled or walked out as far as they could at low tide, sometimes at 2 a.m., to pick the coral.
In this way, by hand, basket by basket, and by the villagers themselves, the reef was destroyed, and with it the white sand beach. Unbroken by the reef, the waves took two years to eat away at the shore, transforming what was once a 2-foot drop to a wide beach into a 10-foot cliff ending at the water’s edge.
Disappointed investors drew up a plan to save the beach and finished destroying the area’s prospects for becoming a mini-Nusa Dua. Pillions and piers were built every 50 meters to hold back the sea. The wrecked reef, reconstituted as concrete octagons, now achieves that. But the beach is gone and will, it is said, take 25-30 years of natural restoration before it extends as far as it did in 1985. Although there are a couple of luxurious four-star accommodations with their air-conditioned bungalows and infinity pools, the really big hotels never materialized.
The fishing isn’t as good as it used to be either. People who sold their land – much of it now unused and held by absentees – have long since spent the money and their previous livelihoods have disappeared. Only about two-thirds of the Balinese of Candi Dasa and its surrounds today have electricity. And it’s unlikely those without it will get more soon. Because that coal-fired capacity being added will be headed for those hotels in Kuta and Nusa Dua and the other tourist metropolises of Bali so foreigners can stay cool in the tropics while forgetting the stress of their jobs and troubles of the world.
The good news is that Indonesia appears ready to shift direction, at least slightly. While no coal burners are set to be eliminated yet, the second phase of the project, with another 10,000 megawatts proposed, has planners looking seriously at geothermal power, a massive resource in that volcanic land.
Come December, the climate delegates in Denmark will be a long, long way from Candi Dasa. But they ought to remember what happened there.
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The full schedule for DK GreenRoots Eco Week is here.
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An earlier version of this essay appeared in December 2007