If I were a political cartoonist, I would create a scene showing Uncle Sam with his head in his hands looking down at a sheet on his lap showing “2060 Climate Change Crisis,” and Donald Trump in a hazy background under a 2019 sign reading “I don’t believe it!” In large letters underneath would be the phrase “What were we thinking?"
Take out all the partisan bickering on important current issues and there remains looming, apart from nuclear holocaust, the most serious threat to our planet in the history of mankind. Recently released reports by the International Panel on Climate Change and others reveal that the situation is even more dire than previously predicted. The word “consensus” is inadequate to describe what is now near unanimity among climate scientists both as to existence and cause of the climate-change shroud enveloping the earth.
Clearly, the only way the problem can be addressed is by universal coordination and cooperation without delay to avert the crisis. That is why the Paris Climate Agreement, with its imperfections and inadequacies, was a monumental achievement for which the U.S. provided critical support. The U.S. also provided leadership by example through regulatory means, such as the Clean Power Plan and tightened automobile emission standards.
And then Donald Trump came upon us and essentially pulled the rug out from under the entire effort.
We now have a situation where nearly all nations in the world acknowledge that action must be taken to avert disaster, the glaring exception being the United States. Instead of providing leadership in addressing the threat, the U.S., under the current administration, has basically closed the valve, not only on emission standards but also on the advancement of research at the federal level.
Beneath these highly publicized actions, there is little more than uneasy indifference amongst the global population as a whole and the U.S. in particular. Developments in the form of renewable energy generation and utilization, state and local emissions control programs, activist citizen groups and individual conscientiousness are encouraging but insufficient cumulatively in implementing the timely remedial effort that is needed.
Inertia is entrenched by misguided sentiments that this is just a naturally occurring cyclical event, that human emissions are not the cause, that cold weather belies the premise, that responsive adjustments can be made as needed, and that last-minute innovative solutions will ultimately save the day.
But I get it, as to general public skepticism and inertia and procrastination in responding to the impending global crisis, myself included as I continue to drive an aging high-mileage SUV and use an air-polluting lawn mower. It is easy to feel that, like past nuclear brinkmanship, the problem will somehow go away before calamity ensues.
It will be difficult to cause a sea change in such attitudes as there will be no Pearl Harbor, no day of infamy, no sinking of the Lusitania or battleship Maine, to galvanize national resolve.
There are other ways for the procrastinating or opposing public to consider the issue. One might take a pause-and-hold gaze at a 10-year-old son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter, and visualize the distress they, and in turn their own offspring, will experience 40 years hence over severe weather events, huge wild fires, coastal flooding, population migrations and massive agricultural restructuring. How can we disregard leaving our descendants with an insidious climatic trend that potentially cannot be reversed?
On the brighter side, there is potentially a benefit to the U.S economy from a general mobilization. Although the overall economic structure of the country would be disrupted, particularly with respect to fossil fuels-based industries, a massive shift to construction and distribution of a new array of climate friendly products and infrastructure would provide an economic boost similar to that experienced in the early 1940s, when a shift from a stagnant domestic economy to a vibrant wartime industry transpired.
With all this in mind, one can only cringe at the possibility of four more years of U.S. intransigence in the face of hard science that worldwide aggressive remedial actions must be commenced now in order initially to slow and ultimately to halt and even reverse the human-induced over heating of the thin atmospheric blanket over planet earth.
We must have leaders who will motive the citizenry at large and other nations to accept the reality of the threat and join forces to avert world-wide calamity.
Clayton Parr
Clayton Parr, Draper, is a retired natural resources attorney.