DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Climate change won't wait for
Obama By Bill McKibben
Change usually happens very slowly, even
once all the serious people have decided there's a
problem. That's because, in a country as big as
the United States, public opinion moves in slow
currents. Since change by definition requires
going up against powerful established interests,
it can take decades for those currents to erode
the foundations of our special-interest
fortresses.
Take, for instance, "the
problem of our schools". Don't worry about whether
there actually was a problem, or whether making
every student devote her school years to filling
out standardized tests would solve it. Just think
about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of
pundit throat clearing, the Carnegie Commission
published "A Nation at Risk,"
insisting that a "rising tide of mediocrity"
threatened our schools. The nation's biggest
foundations and richest people slowly roused
themselves to action, and for three decades we
haltingly applied a series of fixes and reforms.
We've had Race to the Top, and Teach for America,
and charters, and vouchers, and… we're still in
the midst of "fixing" education, many generations
of students later.
Even facing undeniably
real problems - say, discrimination against gay
people - one can make the case that gradual change
has actually been the best option. Had some
mythical liberal Supreme Court declared, in 1990,
that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the
backlash might have been swift and severe. There's
certainly an argument to be made that moving state
by state (starting in nimbler, smaller states like
Vermont) ultimately made the happy outcome more
solid as the culture changed and new generations
came of age.
Which is not to say that
there weren't millions of people who suffered as a
result. There were. But our societies are built to
move slowly. Human institutions tend to work
better when they have years or even decades to
make gradual course corrections, when time smooths
out the conflicts between people.
And
that's always been the difficulty with climate
change - the greatest problem we've ever faced.
It's not a fight, like education reform or
abortion or gay marriage, between conflicting
groups with conflicting opinions. It couldn't be
more different at a fundamental level.
We're talking about a fight between human
beings and physics. And physics is entirely
uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn't
care less if precipitous action raises gas prices,
or damages the coal industry in swing states. It
could care less whether putting a price on carbon
slowed the pace of development in China, or made
agribusiness less profitable.
Physics
doesn't understand that rapid action on climate
change threatens the most lucrative business on
Earth, the fossil fuel industry. It's implacable.
It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and
translates it into heat, which means into melting
ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And
unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse
it gets. Do nothing and you soon have a nightmare
on your hands.
We could postpone
healthcare reform a decade, and the cost would be
terrible - all the suffering not responded to over
those 10 years. But when we returned to it, the
problem would be about the same size. With climate
change, unless we act fairly soon in response to
the timetable set by physics, there's not much
reason to act at all.
Unless you
understand these distinctions you don't understand
climate change - and it's not at all clear that
President Barack Obama understands them.
That's why his administration is sometimes
peeved when they don't get the credit they think
they deserve for tackling the issue in his first
term in office. The measure they point to most
often is the increase in average mileage for
automobiles, which will slowly go into effect over
the next decade.
It's precisely the kind
of gradual transformation that people - and
politicians - like. We should have adopted it long
ago (and would have, except that it challenged the
power of Detroit and its unions, and so both
Republicans and Democrats kept it at bay). But
here's the terrible thing: it's no longer a
measure that impresses physics. After all, physics
isn't kidding around or negotiating. While we were
discussing whether climate change was even a
permissible subject to bring up in the last
presidential campaign, it was melting the Arctic.
If we're to slow it down, we need to be cutting
emissions globally at a sensational rate, by
something like 5% a year to make a real
difference.
It's not Obama's fault that
that's not happening. He can't force it to happen.
Consider the moment when the great president of
the last century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was
confronted with an implacable enemy, Adolf Hitler
(the closest analog to physics we're going to get,
in that he was insanely solipsistic, though in his
case also evil). Even as the German armies started
to roll through Europe, however, FDR couldn't
muster America to get off the couch and fight.
There were even the equivalent of climate
deniers at that time, happy to make the case that
Hitler presented no threat to America. Indeed,
some of them were the same institutions. The US
Chamber of Commerce, for instance, vociferously
opposed Lend-Lease.
So Roosevelt did all
he could on his own authority, and then when Pearl
Harbor offered him his moment, he pushed as hard
as he possibly could. Hard, in this case, meant,
for instance, telling the car companies that they
were out of the car business for a while and
instead in the tank and fighter-plane business.
For Obama, faced with a congress bought
off by the fossil fuel industry, a realistic
approach would be to do absolutely everything he
could on his own authority - new Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, for example;
and of course, he should refuse to grant the
permit for the building of the Keystone XL tar
sands pipeline, something that requires no
permission from House Speaker John Boehner or the
rest of congress.
So far, however, he's
been half-hearted at best when it comes to such
measures. The White House, for instance, overruled
the EPA on its proposed stronger ozone and smog
regulations in 2011, and last year opened up the
Arctic for oil drilling, while selling off vast
swaths of Wyoming's Powder River Basin at
bargain-basement prices to coal miners. His State
Department flubbed the global climate-change
negotiations. (It's hard to remember a higher
profile diplomatic failure than the Copenhagen
summit.) And now Washington rings with rumors that
he'll approve the Keystone pipeline, which would
deliver 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest
crude oil on Earth. Almost to the drop, that's the
amount his new auto mileage regulations would
save.
If he were serious, Obama would be
doing more than just the obvious and easy. He'd
also be looking for that Pearl Harbor moment. God
knows he had his chances in 2012: the hottest year
in the history of the continental United States,
the deepest drought of his lifetime, and a melt of
the Arctic so severe that the federal government's
premier climate scientist declared it a "planetary
emergency."
In fact, he didn't even appear
to notice those phenomena, campaigning for a
second term as if from an air-conditioned bubble,
even as people in the crowds greeting him were
fainting en masse from the heat. Throughout
campaign 2012, he kept declaring his love for an
"all-of-the-above" energy policy, where apparently
oil and natural gas were exactly as virtuous as
sun and wind.
Only at the very end of the
campaign, when Hurricane Sandy seemed to present a
political opening, did he even hint at seizing it
- his people letting reporters know on background
that climate change would now be one of his top
three priorities (or maybe, post-Newtown, top
four) for a second term. That's a start, I
suppose, but it's a long way from telling the car
companies they better retool to start churning out
wind turbines.
And anyway, he took it back
at the first opportunity. At his post-election
press conference, he announced that climate change
was "real," thus marking his agreement with, say,
President George H W Bush in 1988. In deference to
"future generations," he also agreed that we
should "do more". But addressing climate change,
he added, would involve "tough political choices".
Indeed, too tough, it seems, for here were his key
lines:
"I think the American people right
now have been so focused, and will continue to be
focused on our economy and jobs and growth, that
if the message is somehow we're going to ignore
jobs and growth simply to address climate change,
I don't think anybody is going to go for that. I
won't go for that."
It's as if World War
II British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had
declared, "I have nothing to offer except blood,
toil, tears, and sweat. And God knows that polls
badly, so just forget about it."
The
president must be pressed to do all he can - and
more. That's why thousands of us will descend on
Washington DC on President's Day weekend, in what
will be the largest environmental demonstration in
years. But there's another possibility we need to
consider: that perhaps he's simply not up to this
task, and that we're going to have to do it for
him, as best we can.
If he won't take on
the fossil fuel industry, we will. That's why on
192 campuses nationwide active divestment
movements are now doing their best to highlight
the fact that the fossil fuel industry threatens
their futures.
If he won't use our
position as a superpower to drive international
climate-change negotiations out of their rut,
we'll try. That's why young people from 190
nations are gathering in Istanbul in June in an
effort to shame the U.N. into action. If he won't
listen to scientists - like the 20 top
climatologists who told him that the Keystone
pipeline was a mistake - then top scientists are
increasingly clear that they'll need to get
arrested to make their point.
Those of us
in the growing grassroots climate movement are
going as fast and hard as we know how (though not,
I fear, as fast as physics demands). Maybe if we
go fast enough even this all-too-patient president
will get caught up in the draft. But we're not
waiting for him. We can't.
Bill
McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at
Middlebury College, founder of the global climate
campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the
author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on
a Tough New Planet.
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