Let’s talk about it

The planet is heating up. Do we want to talk about it? Most people don’t, it seems. They’d rather ignore it, as if it will then go away.

I understand how they feel. I feel the same way sometimes. If it weren’t for my job, I probably wouldn’t think about global warming as much as I do. But every day I receive reports in my inbox reminding me that it’s real—and getting worse.

This week I received an article on a report released toward the end of international climate talks held in Bonn, Germany. It revealed that the planet is heading to a temperature rise of 3.5 degrees Celsius, and likely more, by the end of this century, despite an international agreement to keep the increase to two degrees.

A 3.5-degree increase may not seem like much, but it would create conditions not seen on the planet for millions of years. We’ve gotten glimpses of what those conditions might be like with the extreme weather events—especially droughts—we’ve experienced lately.

The pledges countries have made to reduce carbon emissions have been inadequate. Worse, the countries haven’t fulfilled their pledges, and at Bonn they failed to reach agreement on further pledges.

It’s not as if we don’t know what to do. “It’s clear we have the technology, know-how, and ability to meet this challenge, but we’re missing the political will,” Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told a reporter for Inter Press Service. Too many entities are thinking “me” instead of “we.”

That lack of will is playing out in the debate over Canadian tar sands. As James Hansen, the NASA scientist who since 1988 has been warning about global warming, pointed out recently in The New York Times, “Canada’s tar sands … contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history.”

If we were to add to global carbon-dioxide production by burning this stuff, he writes, “eventually … the level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. … Civilization would be at risk.”

Near-term, he says, “things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought. … More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.”

Hansen proposes a remedy: impose a gradually rising carbon fee collected from fossil-fuel companies, then distribute the money to all Americans on a per-capita basis each month. This would increase the cost of oil but also dramatically reduce its use, unlike the current subsidies that encourage more extraction through mountaintop removal, tar sands, hydraulic fracturing and deep-ocean and Arctic drilling.

We can’t ignore global warming. The only way we’re going to turn it around is by putting pressure on our political leaders. We owe it to the future to do so.

Robert Speer is editor of the CN&R.