A Sense of Urgency

A lot of precious time has been wasted before addressing the climate crisis--so much that the crisis was not averted, it's here, though just beginning.   For awhile the science wasn't exact enough for a scientific consensus as exists today, though reasonable political leaders might have erred on the side of taking even the likelihood of a climate crisis seriously enough to act.  In the past decade or more the science has been overwhelming, but oppositional politics and media took hold, with decreasing relevance to the facts and the issue.

So today the Republican party is in lockstep opposition to any acknowledgement  let alone action on the climate crisis.  That partisan political stance means for one thing that a formal international treaty on mutual actions to address the climate crisis would almost certainly fail to achieve the 67 votes in the U.S. Senate required by the Constitution to ratify it and make it law.

Other countries also have their own political problems in achieving such a treaty.  Now it turns out that negotiations are well underway for an international agreement next year that will not require a Senate vote.  The agreement would be in part based on existing treaties, and in part on voluntary compliance via "name and shame."  The NY Times:    

"Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts."

Jonathan Chiat has a very good column on the rationale for this effort--mostly that the dimensions of the crisis require taking the risk.  The problems are too serious and coming too quickly to dither anymore.  With the usual steps forward and back, an international sense of urgency nevertheless is growing.

  The US politics however are pretty interesting.  There's reporting that many congressional Republicans know there's a crisis that has to be addressed but politically can't afford to recognize it, lest they be primaried by the zealots they've been nurturing. Chiat observes: "Given the seriousness and urgency — you can’t un-melt a glacier — the broad way to think about climate politics is that Republicans have ceded the field completely."

There's also the question of the effectiveness of "voluntary" compliance, although there is really no third party way to enforce a treaty anyway.  Much of what needs to be done relies on trust, and some key observers believe that past guidelines have resulted in progress.  Chiat:

"Center for American Progress fellow Peter Ogden, the former White House National Security staff director for climate change and environmental policy, points out in Foreign Affairs that the Copenhagen summit, which failed to produce a binding treaty, “was actually a turning point in international climate talks,” and has produced significant carbon reductions."

Key to such an agreement working are the carbon regulations that the Obama administration has begun. With a rapidly growing clean energy sector, these will begin to change the game.  Chiat concludes:

"If the regulations actually deliver, encouraging the market to find inexpensive ways to switch to cleaner fuels, and to save money through conservation, then the incentive to revert back to unregulated carbon emissions will be small. Doing so might even impose new costs on businesses that had adjusted to Obama’s regulations.

If the Republican warnings prove true — if compliance costs run beyond projections, if foreign countries refuse to cooperate, if the Earth does not continue to warm, if Americans are shivering in the dark, then there will be opportunities for them to win elections and go back to dumping carbon into the atmosphere for free. The risks on the opposite side dwarf those possibilities."