Simple numbers

We're wrapping up Speth and turning to McKibben this week in Environmental Ethics. We should take another look at the former's "manifesto" and the latter's "new math":

"Our politicians are constantly invoking America’s superiority and exceptionalism. True, the data is piling up to confirm that we’re Number One, but in exactly the way we don’t want to be—at the bottom. These deplorable consequences are not just the result of economic and technological forces over which we have no control. They are the results of conscious political decisions made over several decades by both Democrats and Republicans who have had priorities other than strengthening the well-being of American society and our environment..." Gus Speth, America the Possible: A Manifesto

"When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers..." Bill McKibben, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math | Politics News | Rolling Stone 

And then let's get on with McKibben's Introduction in The Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing About Climate Change, followed by Hansen's "Statement" and IPCC's "Summary"...