My latest op-ed is in today’s Christian Science Monitor. (Here and here.) I think it has a suitably year’s-end feel to it. The title is America: Step up on climate change; Global warming is the nuclear issue of our age.
Okay, I realize that climate change is not exactly like nuclear weapons. But here is how I end the piece:
- Climate change now looks set to be the same kind of touchstone issue in global politics that nuclear weapons has been since 1945. As with nuclear weapons, the threats posed by climate change know no national boundaries. They could, in some circumstances, threaten all of human life. As with nuclear weapons, good-faith international cooperation is a must if the climate problem is to be brought under control.
The people of the rest of today’s richly interconnected world will be monitoring Washington’s performance carefully. How will Americans and our leaders respond?
The rest of it is a longer explanation of why the US– government and people– have to engage in good faith in the two years of global negotiations on environmental issues that will be flowing from the recent Bali conference.
In better faith, that is, than at the time of the 1999 Kyoto agreement… Back then, the Clinton administration fought tooth-and-nail for terms in the agreement that were extremely favorable to the US– and then returned back to Washington and made zero effort to get the agreement ratified by the US Senate. And the chief US negotiator at the time was…. Al Gore. And the person who was Chairman Pro-tem of the Senate at the time was…. Al Gore.
And now, Al Gore is the darling of the environmental community and has gotten (half of) a Nobel Peace Prize as a great environmentalist. So the world turns, eh?
Anyway, read the whole piece and tell me what you think.
Have you read “Collapse” by Jared Diamond? I found it a little depressing, a little motivating. If you think about what will happen if the whole world attempts to attain US standards of living, with US inefficiencies, it seems very very likely that it won’t work — we’ll run out of fish, or clean water, or oil, or energy, or totally blow it with GHGs, or all of those things. The depressing part is that people will simply trudge on in the same doomed rut, till things fall apart — like the Easter Islanders, like the Scandinavian settlers in Greenland. We’ve got to have a good hard look at how we live, and figure out what we’re doing that is sustainable scaled up to the whole world (or perhaps, “merely” India and China), and what is not, and either give up or fix the unsustainable bits.