06.27.09

The Party in the Greenhouse

Posted in Current Events, Governance at 1:26 pm by diantus

The United States government finally passed a set of comprehensive environmental laws today.  In them, the nation will be forced to lower it’s emissions by 17 percent by the year 2020 and over 80 percent by the year 2050.  While I applaud the government for finally taking issue on a problem that scientific minds have been aware of for almost 40 years, I find the timidity of the bill not only appalling, but a sure-fire way to scuttle the effectiveness of this legislation.

Of course, I’m not the only one who views this as a “too little, too late” offering.  In the past year, two independent reports - one in the EU, and another in the United States - have suggested tat the damage to the atmosphere is now so great, the the coming decade promises to be something of a reckoning.  Worse, they also suggested that even if we were able to magically eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the level of buildup already in the atmosphere is so great that our dangerous downhill slide would be set to continue into the foreseeable future.

None of this should not serve as an excuse for people to do nothing.  We have a very serious responsibility to get to work on the creation of alternative energy sources, shifting habits as to reduce emissions and waste, and a duty to our children to ensure that the planet remain livable for a little while.  These things can be done, but we must accept that the future isn’t looking too bright just yet.  We will have to suffer through a continuing shift in climactic patterns that will continue to affect every facet of our existence, and need to start making allowances for that as well.

So the bill doesn’t go nearly far enough.  I can only hope that the effect of the various incentives and punishments within it will serve to accelerate the legislation’s effect.  Perhaps, once the initial push has been made, we will find that the process moves faster than the bill requires.  After all, the Obama administration recently allowed states to set their own emissions benchmarks if the national requirements were seen as to low for them.  If individual states decide to start beating the federal quota, it could be that this becomes the sort of low-pressure magic bullet needed to rebuild America’s dirty and outdated infrastructure.

Unfortunately, what bothers me the most about the recent US bill is not that it is less ambitious that what the world’s climate scientists would like.  It is the continuing pattern of willful ignorance on the part of our political establishment to address the problem seriously.  Instead of planning for the contingencies that climate change will bring and pushing for deep and meaningful reversal of pollution trends, they have offered up the minimum that could be called action.  All of this comes on the coattails of eight years that were completely lost in terms of social, scientific, and environmental public policy.  Today the problem is twice as serious as it was in 2000, and we are still far behind the curve when it comes to dealing with it.

Our lawmakers refuse to understand the problem.  On both side of the aisle, they are relying on that most devastating of all Reganesque political instincts - their guts.  When you rely on your gut instead of your head, you make stupid decisions.  Gut decisions are what inform drunk drivers that they did not, in fact, have one too many.  Our lawmakers should be basing important judgements on facts - not what they think might be right.  The should be reading books and journals - not imitating John Wayne.  This hyperreal politics of the intestines is getting us deeper and deeper into trouble.  It produced Iran-Contra, the Iraq War, Creationism in classrooms, Vietnam, the collapse of the great North American fisheries, and a veritable legion of major tragedies that could have been easily averted by someone looking at the facts on  the ground.  Unless we really start demanding Reason from our leaders, we are going to, as Al Gore so elegantly pointed out, boil ourselves in a beaker.

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