After years of droughts, fires, floods, diseases, and the humanitarian crisis at our southern border, Americans are beginning to understand that Global Warming is real and all around us. This year, hurricanes in the Gulf and along the East Coast, forest fires in the West, and record rainfall are presenting us with yet more lessons that cannot be ignored. Man-made global warming is taking our nation apart piece by piece, destroying our nation’s infrastructure, the bone and sinew of our culture, faster than we can replace it.
If the climate emergency were a movie, then this decade has been the promo. Unfortunately, this crisis is real and all of us are directly affected either with the loss of homes, livelihoods, and security, or by scarcity of goods and services, inflation, and worry. Our entire nation is feeling the emotional strain that uncertainty brings. This stress causes illnesses such as heart disease, addiction, violence, and suicide. It destroys the fabric of a person’s life, infects their family and community, and ultimately weakens our nation.
These conditions are getting worse, faster than many thought possible. And it’s happening around the world. It is happening here. Some areas will suffer more than others but all of us will feel pain. The climate emergency is global and local, there are no safe havens.
Science has been warning us for almost 50 years that our actions have the power to alter our climate, resulting in world-wide disruption and hardship. Science has also provided ample evidence about the cause, greenhouse gases (GHGs) that trap heat in our atmosphere, part of which is absorbed in our seas and land. These gases, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) are the products of burning fossil fuels, coal, gas, and oil. Recently, carbon-based bio-fuels have been added to this list. Science has clearly shown us that we must quickly stop the use of fossil and carbon-based fuels and, in the case of fossil fuels, leave them in the ground. This will lessen the severity of the crisis while we implement more farseeing solutions that will return us to a more stable climate.
That is, if we have the will to unite and act aggressively to make our society sustainable and compatible with the processes of the natural world. It is a massive, long-term mission that will take generations. It will need a financial commitment equal to the effort required.
The climate emergency impacts all aspects of our lives. We must deal with both the causes and the consequences of our addiction to fossil and carbon-based fuels. Science and technology can provide the tools for mitigating GHGs. But that is only one part of our crisis. The other is how to handle the massive disruption to our society caused by climate change and the dislocation caused by the actions that must be taken. Do we turn our backs on the growing numbers of Americans cast adrift when they lose their homes and communities? Do we look away from the people whose jobs will disappear as we build a new sustainable society? Can we trust business-as-usual Capitalism to heal our society? No, we can’t. We are in this situation due to, in part, fundamental failures of our economic system. This emergency requires a holistic approach where the focus is on protecting people, removing GHGs and pollution, and transforming the US into a viable society.
Any of us could become a climate refugee. After the fires and the smoke clears revealing a blackened landscape or, the wind and rain stop and the land is now under water, what options does a person have? A day earlier they had a home, job, and membership in a community. They had purpose and identity. Then in only a few hours they are transformed into a displaced person, adrift and suffering from emotional trauma.
This year, across the US, Americans have been reduced to climate refugees. Our entire nation has become a disaster zone in one form or another. No place is safe. Try to imagine what others are going through. All your possessions are gone. You’re living in temporary housing, perhaps with family or friends, or a school gymnasium, tent city, motel, or FEMA trailer. You are isolated because power and communications have been destroyed. You can’t access your bank account or credit cards, so you rely on the efforts of volunteers and people across the country to provide food, clothes, and shelter. You are left with daunting questions. Where do you try to rebuild your life and future? Do you stay or go? Regardless, recovery will be hard.
For the rest of us who have been lucky enough to be spared from these disasters, we too have a life changing question to answer. What do we do? Do we continue what we’ve done in the past, provide aid and comfort piecemeal while we proceed business-as-usual? Or do we act to end the worsening cycle of destruction? To do nothing leads to our assured destruction while choosing to work together provides us hope and a path towards a more sustainable future. It won’t be easy but it is doable.
What do we do? There are two simultaneous paths we need to follow. The first, which we are very good at, is to build stuff, like an alternative energy network that is far less vulnerable to disruption. And, to clean up the immense amount of existing pollution which we continue to generate. The second, is to build a robust Human Infrastructure, social safety-net, that provides support for all Americans through these turbulent times. A key to our survival is creating and maintaining a stable society. The fragmentation of our society by racism and greed undermines our efforts. Business-as-usual would choose the use of force as a solution but history has shown that violence crushes progress, ultimately failing while making the situation worse. However, the Human Infrastructure plan would address these centuries-old racial and social injustices.
Human Infrastructure provides a more equitable, just, and long-term result. We have neglected many Americans, failing to provide them the educational, economical, medical, and social support that is required to participate in the American Dream. The expansion of existing programs and the creation of others to address the unique challenges facing us is essential. Healing our nation is critical to healing our climate. The US is becoming a disaster zone. It isn’t unreasonable to say that many American families will suffer significant loss because of climate change. We would be wise to consider Biden’s Build Back Better Plan as a down payment on an insurance policy for the US and our world.
We have few options left and doing nothing is not one of them. In the past, our leaders and others around the world have failed to meet this threat head-on, preferring inaction and half-measures. On September 23, 2019, Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate activist, stood before the United Nation’s Youth Climate Conference and excoriated the attending world’s leaders for their complete abdication of their responsibilities to deal with global warming. As she said, “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and childhood.” [1]
The COP26 climate conference has, once again, been long on promises but short on hard and fast deliverables. The wealthy nations continue to promise financial aid to poorer, less developed countries, but have failed to make good on previous pledges. Even at the end of the conference, the vested financial interests of certain nations, including Australia, China, India, Russia and the US take precedence over Global Warming. The fossil fuel industry has defeated meaningful actions such as the phasing-out the use of coal and setting strict limits on GHG emissions. “The U.N. climate talks ended in Glasgow with nothing decided that would slow greenhouse gas emissions through 2030. One activist declared ‘the whole system is broken.’ ”. [2]
The challenges we face today are varied and complex. They cannot be solved with business-as-usual thinking, which unfortunately is what is being offered. Nor can traditional economic assumptions provide the foundation needed to adapt to the new world that is materializing around us. If we are to survive as a nation and as a species, we must act bravely, decisively, to confront the disaster we have created.
How did we get to this point? Since the 1970s, Scientists and Activists have been raising the alarm more and more urgently as research exposed the growing threat. At the same time the fossil fuel industry began a deadly campaign of misinformation and lies to block critical action. [3] They pushed for more exploration, drilling and mining to maximize their profits. All the time, they knew what they were doing and that the long-term effects would be catastrophic. Others like the auto and financial industries ignored science and public action, preferring business as usual and higher profits. It is only in the last few years that the financial sector has started to factor in the tremendous risks that come with climate change. The entrenched auto industry, after decades of burying electric vehicle technology, has finally begun to produce electric cars. They’re just several of decades late.
We are not blameless. Each of us must share responsibility for where we are now. The industrialized world, particularly the US, is addicted to cheap energy and cheap goods. Witness the uproar around the rising cost of energy for transportation, power generation, and heating and the ripple effect on prices of goods. Many of us want to increase fossil fuel supplies to drive down prices. This only hides the problem. It sabotages our efforts to dramatically reduce our use of carbon-based fuels which are the heart of global warming.
We Americans want change but are unwilling to change ourselves. Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. In this case, change won’t kill us but not changing will. We would be wise to turn toward speeding up the implementation of alternative power and adapting to our new world.
The cheap goods, energy, and services we want are based on a robber economy that ruthlessly chases profits and perpetual economic growth. The cost of extracting natural resources is reduced by ignoring the damage it causes to environment and people. Likewise, waste at a product’s end of life is ignored, thrown away, and transferred to taxpayers to pay the bill. The real cost of our prosperity is offloaded onto our environment in the form of pollution of the air, land, and water. The people that have borne the burden of this filthy practice are those least able to do anything about it; people of color, poor, disabled and elderly. These folks are the canaries in the coalmine where we all live.
The passing of the bipartisan Infrastructure Bill demonstrates that most Americans understand that our society, our economy, are woven together by physical systems that promote the Common Good. Roads, highways, bridges, state of the art communications, clean drinking water, and waste disposal keeps us connected and healthy. However, this is only a portion of our national infrastructure. Infrastructure Lite rebuilds and updates what we already have. It does not significantly move us forward in our fight for survival.
Build Back Better is the critical element needed to change the suicidal path we are on. If we want to mitigate the effects of global warming and if we want to build a healthy, just society, the only available option available is through the Build Back Better Bill.
- Read Greta Thunberg’s full speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit; Greta Thunberg; NBC News; 09/23/2019 ↑
- COP Negotiators Demand Nations do More to Curb Climate Change, but Required Emissions
Cuts Remain Elusive; Bob Berwyn; Inside Climate News; 11/14/2021; ↑ - Exxon: The Road Not Taken; Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman Jr., David Hasemyer, Lisa
Song; Inside Climate News; 10/28/2015; ↑