Where is the U.S.?
Basking in the warm days and cool evenings of my favorite time
of year reminds me again how lucky we are to live where we do. The
angle of the fall sun lights up our tawny hills in a different way.
The tomatoes are at their sweetest.
Life is good.
Where is the U.S.?
Basking in the warm days and cool evenings of my favorite time of year reminds me again how lucky we are to live where we do. The angle of the fall sun lights up our tawny hills in a different way. The tomatoes are at their sweetest.
Life is good.
Then the Monday newspaper comes along and there goes a perfectly good mood. Newspapers carried reports of a major British study that indicates failure to act against global warming will create an economic disaster that will suck up 20 percent of the world’s income.
World food supplies will be devastated, causing widespread death and turning hundreds of millions into refugees.
The report was commissioned by the British government. The most effective course, it said, is a global cooperative effort that may cost up to 1 percent of the planet’s gross domestic product. British officials promised immediate action, even thought the country produces only 2 percent of the global output of greenhouse gases.
The response from Washington, D.C., was measured to say the least.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the lead federal agency linked to global warming study, had no comment on the report. The Bush administration came to awareness of the issue of global warming a little late, and still has not agreed to international cooperation.
The numbers outlined in the British report are startling. Greenhouse gases are 54 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution, and could be double the rate as soon as 2035. That would create an average temperature rise of 9 degrees by the end of the century.
The result would be melting glaciers, rising floodwaters, and – ironically – droughts brought on by the loss of snowpack that meters out much of the world’s water supply. Rising sea levels could displace as many as 200 million, and 15 to 40 percent of the world’s species could face extinction.
And it’s not a “someday” scenario. The report makes it clear that failure to act will create the catastrophic domino effect it describes within our children’s lifetimes, if not our own.
The good news is that we can change this course, and we can do it for a tiny fraction of what failing to act will cost.
“The report sets out I think very clearly that this is not just an environmental issue, or even just an economic issue, but it is a security issue,” British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett was quoted as saying. “There are some people all over the world who still believe there can be some kind of trade-off between economic and climate security. I think this report knocks [that notion] on its head.”
It’s easy to think that we’ve solved our pollution problem in this country. A drive down the freeway reveals clean burning cars. Smokestack industries have been cleaned up. It’s easy to think of it as a problem only among emerging nations racing toward industrialization.
But as clean as we’ve gotten, emissions of greenhouse gases in the United States soared by nearly 16 percent from 1990 to 2004. The reason is because we use so much energy in our daily lives. If we are to save ourselves globally, the U.S. has to be at the table.
