We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change
Al Gore

Al Gore
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Editorial Note:
The following
article was first published at
“The New York
Times”, in February 27, 2010. Its
original title is
“We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change”.
From a theosophical
viewpoint, it indicates the variety of
Karmic difficulties
for a short term action which would
make it easier to
undergo the present planetary transition.
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“…We can create
conditions that make
large and
destructive consequences inevitable
long before their
awful manifestations become
apparent: the
displacement of hundreds of
millions of climate
refugees, civil unrest,
chaos and the
collapse of governance in
many developing
countries, large-scale crop
failures and the
spread of deadly diseases.”
It would be an enormous relief
if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that
we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive
measures to protect human civilization as we know it.
Of course, we would still need
to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global
oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the
world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year
overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to
develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other
renewable sources of energy - the most important sources of new jobs in the
21st century.
But what a burden would be
lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day
look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely
ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead
celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major
National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge
mistake.
I, for one, genuinely wish
that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the
danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two
mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22
years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is
still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of
global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere - as if it were an
open sewer.
It is true that the climate
panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered
glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided
to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In
addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed
that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from
climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the
British freedom of information law.
But the scientific enterprise
will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the
overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth
noting that the panel’s scientists - acting in good faith on the best
information then available to them - probably underestimated the range of
sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is
disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in
Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.
Because these and other
effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to
identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was
seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global
perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were
first measured 130 years ago.
Similarly, even though climate
deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming
in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were
the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.
The heavy snowfalls this month
have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is
a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures
have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting
significantly more moisture into the atmosphere - thus causing heavier
downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the
Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for
the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.
Here is what scientists have
found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat
from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants -
especially carbon dioxide - have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the
burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased
over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are
melting - and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and
more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are
getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity
of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures
is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species
extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.
Though there have been
impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of
individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and
local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate
at which these emissions are increasing - much less reduce them.
And in spite of President
Obama’s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global
leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to “take note” of an
intention to act.
Because the world still relies
on leadership from the United States, the failure by the Senate to pass
legislation intended to cap American emissions before the Copenhagen meeting
guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of even the minimum needed to
build momentum toward a meaningful solution.
The political paralysis that is
now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the
Senate - not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care
reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.
This comes with painful costs.
China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming
pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States
passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an
effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of
Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in
hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the
world community was paralyzed.
Some analysts attribute the
failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution - arguing that
a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place.
Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the
world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.
But there are two big problems
with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would
be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized
carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of
a global market-based policy - supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral
tax policies - is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The
fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give
up.
Second, we should have no
illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the
world to adopt a completely new approach. The lags in the global climate
system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly
reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make
large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful
manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of
climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many
developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly
diseases.
It’s important to point out
that the United States is not alone in its inaction. Global political paralysis
has thus far stymied work not only on climate, but on trade and other pressing
issues that require coordinated international action.
The reasons for this are
primarily economic. The globalization of the economy, coupled with the
outsourcing of jobs from industrial countries, has simultaneously heightened
fears of further job losses in the industrial world and encouraged rising
expectations in emerging economies. The result? Heightened opposition, in both
the industrial and developing worlds, to any constraints on the use of
carbon-based fuels, which remain our principal source of energy.
The decisive victory of
democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of
philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a
unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of
market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to
mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy
sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve
most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the
operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist
adversary we had just defeated.
This period of market
triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about
global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context
in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market
fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the
possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous
dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.
Over the years, as the science
has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business
plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have
become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest
regulation - just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of
cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to
diseases of the lung and the heart.
Simultaneously, changes in
America’s political system - including the replacement of newspapers and
magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication - conferred
powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened
advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now
present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and
divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a
potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to
label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the
marketplace.
From the standpoint of
governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an
instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the
truth about the climate crisis - inconvenient as ever - must still be faced.
The pathway to success is
still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of
doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing
a cost for global warming pollution. The House of Representatives has already
passed legislation, with some Republican support, to take the first halting
steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions.
Later this week, Senators John
Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are expected to present for
consideration similar cap-and-trade legislation.
I hope that it will place a
true cap on carbon emissions and stimulate the rapid development of low-carbon
sources of energy.
We have overcome existential
threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes
doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.”
Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is
required; and the public must demand that they do so - or must replace them.
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Al Gore was the vice president
of the United States from 1993 to 2001.
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