To the editor:
I support Bill Gerlach’s letter published last week in these pages, calling for action in response to the incontrovertible threat that is climate change. Here, I would like to add some further heft to his call.
In addition to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report Mr. Gerlach cites, a second report, the National Climate Assessment (NCA), a periodic report mandated by Congress and researched and coauthored by 13 federal agencies and departments (including the departments of Defense, Commerce, Interior, State, as well as NASA, the EPA, and more), was released by the White House this past Black Friday. The timing was not coincidental; the White House had hoped news of the report would get drowned out by the white noise of Black Friday shopping frenzy. And for obvious reasons: The report contradicts those who demonstrate little or no concern for climate change (even if in their heart they’re not so rock-solid in their conviction). Instead, the NCA report shows that without a substantial, sustained, and immediate reduction of greenhouse gasses, climate change will in one way or another disrupt all communities across the country, be it by overwhelming infrastructure, damaging health, reducing food production, degrading water supplies – the list goes on.
But perhaps those effects are too broad, too abstract to hit home. So let’s put the issue in terms all of us can easily understand: cost. The degree to which each of those effects is allowed to creep or perhaps crash toward worst-case-scenarios – and even the not-quite-worst-case scenarios are still pretty bad – more money will get siphoned from each of our wallets to compensate, if we can, for the damage done. And I don’t mean siphoned by “Big Government” (though Americans will look for the government to step in when disaster strikes). Rather, I mean siphoned as a cost of simply living our lives. As severe weather events increase in frequency and intensity, Americans will spend more money for protecting – and insuring -- our homes and communities; as respiratory illnesses and infectious diseases increase and spread, we will spend more money on our health; as topsy-turvy weather and steady climate change undermine predictable agricultural output, we will spend more money on food; and both locally and as a country, Americans will see an increasing destabilization of our economy, tossing jobs and businesses as two dice in a crap game played against a turbulent future. The NCA report warns that by the end of this century – not at the end of this century, by its end – we could lose hundreds of billions of dollars to our economy as a result of unchecked greenhouse gasses and more aggravated climate change. Ten per cent of our economy could be lost to climate change.
The bottom line is that taking action to slow and stall greenhouse gas emissions isn’t about saving the ice caps or the polar bears, it’s about saving a stable social and economic environment in which we have some chance of living out relatively peaceful, prosperous lives, lives that can be devoted to the traditional goals of raising families, caring for love ones, living well, and not lives shackled economically to overcoming the costly personal and communal catastrophes that both the IPCC and NCA reports confidently, alarmingly, point to.
If you are a parent of a young one, or a grandparent of a young one; if you, yourself are young, and hope to someday have a family of your own; or even if you couldn’t care less about “family” but do want to protect your investments, your home, your income; please -- learn more about both the IPCC and NCA reports, and heed their calls. They couldn’t be more clear or of greater concern.
In fact, the IPCC report concludes that if humanity hopes to avoid the worst that climate change might bring us, we, humankind, have until 2030 – eleven years – to get off of fossil fuels completely. That is our choice. Either we get of off fossil fuels, completely, or, climatologically and environmentally speaking, all hell will break loose. And then what? I don’t know about you, but I much prefer hell-free stability.
The technologies for getting us off of fossil fuels exist, today; what we lack is collective will. It is time that collectively we will it. Here, though, is the rub: Such a massive structural and economic transformation can’t be turned on a dime; we can’t wait until the eleventh hour of the eleventh year. We must start now, act now, act up loud and clear now, so that those at the helm of our economic culture – politicians, corporations, financial institutions – take bold, decisive, and immediate action now to get us out of fossil fuels, to avert this twenty-first century Titanic. I don’t know how to get them to do that. All I know is that, if there is any hope of securing the world as you and I now know it, our Warren, our Barrington, our Bristol, you and I must become we, and we must demand change from them. We must identify them, confront them, and compel them.
The clock is ticking.
Jerry Blitefield
Warren