The Climate Crisis

World War III

Ron Dembro writes that real leaders of the recent past, like FDR and Churchill who responded to the threat of their time, would see the Climate Crisis for what it is today, our equivalent of World War III. And they would act accordingly.

It's true that what is now required is leadership, and the marshalling of forces. It requires leaders capable of explaining the nature of the crisis, what needs to be done and why, as FDR and Churchill did. It is more of a challenge in that regard because it's a new kind of crisis, and requires ways of thinking that the public is certainly capable of, but is beyond the masked oversimplifications they're used to in recent public discourse.

It requires political courage we haven't seen since Jimmy Carter took on the energy crisis of the late 1970s. Carter got the 55 mph speed limit enacted, which if it were in force today would save the U.S. more than a billion barrels of oil per year, more than the country imports from the Persian Gulf (according to Francis Slakey in the New Scientist.) Carter also mandated fuel efficiency standards in cars, whch account for the modest increase we have today, though without higher mandates in the quarter century since then, manufacturers have done little or nothing more, though the technology already exists to markedly increase fuel efficiency.

Carter called for energy efficiency and conservation, and corporations and the public responded. And it is a little known fact that in the years following, U.S. production of greenhouse gases fell.

But Carter was defeated for reelection, and the idea that his response to the energy crisis was responsible became part of the paralyzing myth of our time. Now leaders are frightened to death to ask voters to change their consumption or be in any way inconvenienced, even when faced with the inconvenient truth of the Climate Crisis. Yet when Californians were asked to conserve energy during the Enron power crisis, they did so with a speed and effectiveness that stunned professional observers.

Leadership or none, the Climate Crisis is not going away. In the past week, the National Center for Atmospheric Research issued a report finding that the number and feroicity of the hurricanes last year was overwhelmingly due to global heating of the oceans caused by greenhouse gases, and not chiefly the result of natural variations.

The National Academy of Sciences issued their Congressionally-mandated report, concluding that the planet is warmer now than for the past 400 years and probably much more, and that other factors--natural variations, volcano activity, etc. cannot account for the rise: only human activity. How many more such studies are necessary?

The effects of heating we're seeing today--the melting of glaciers, icepacks and permafrost; the storms, droughts and bizarre weather, the increase in the range of disease-bearing insects--is likely the result of greenhouse gases built up from the industrial past. As the effect of more recent emissions manifests, things will get worse. Not may, will. While we've been dithering, the buildup has accelerated. China and India are industrializing, but we're not exactly leading by example. Another study issued this week shows that in 28 of our United States, greenhouse gas emissions doubled from 1961 to 2001.