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THE CLIMATE CHANGES, POLITICS STAY THE SAME

On June 18^th New York inaugurated the latest signpost on the road to our demise: Deutsche Bank’s massive Carbon Counter. Like the ever-escalating National Debt Clock, it is a macabre monument to our collective failure to address a serious problem. 

Across the street from Madison Square Garden, the carbon clock is a 70-foot-tall real-time digital tally of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) that are altering the earth’s average surface temperatures. For calculation purposes, potent GHGs, such as methane, nitrous dioxide and halocarbons—all of which are would be comprehensively regulated for the first time by the enfeebled Waxman-Markey bill—are converted into their equivalent metric tonnage of carbon dioxide (CO2), the most common GHG. The science behind the numbers came from mathematicians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Deutsche Bank is offsetting the emissions from the counter’s energy-efficient LED technology.

The billboard is intended to publicise the fledgling Climate Change Advisors group at Deutsche Bank, and spur greater public interest in a low-carbon economy.  But while Deutsche Bank has been duly lauded for this Carbon Counter and related “Know the Number” campaign, the number it is publicising is mind-numbingly large. When the clock was first set spinning under dour and drenching clouds (ones that Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, noted are more likely to soak the New York skyline if current emission trends continue), the number started at a record-breaking 3.64 trillion metric tons of CO2, and immediately began increasing at a rate 800 tons per second. The sleek counter notes that “climate change affects everyone,” but without some points of reference (eg, projected degrees of warming or rises in sea level), it is difficult for the layperson to know what this means. The billboard has earned mixed reviews from passers-by, reported the New York Daily News. "I don't really care," said a 21-year-old chap named Brian Johns.