On Earth Day 2008, A Surreal Debate on the Planet

The Washington Post’s lead Outlook article for Earth Day 2008 asks “How much are we willing to spend to save the planet?” Supposedly the hot topic in political circles, it simply begs the much larger question – what’s the alternative?

Like most of the political debate on climate change – the little of it that we hear – the Post’s analysis of the “high cost of fighting global warming,” tries to put an economic price tag on the market concept currently favored in Washington.  (In this case a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, a “solution” that has already failed in Europe).  Yet it does so, like all go-it-slow advocates, without any real discussion of the myriad economic benefits of a green, renewable energy economy.  And, most critically, it never bothers to explain the catastrophic cost of continued inaction.

Words like “flooding” – like what happens in our basements, right? – and the ambiguous phrase “great costs” are brought up.  Yet flooding in the context of global warming means the complete loss of many of our coastal cities with sea level rise.  What is the “cost” of the destruction of New York, Miami and downtown Washington, D.C.?  Already we are seeing record droughts and food shortages around the world, either caused or exacerbated by global warming.  What is the cost of massive crop failure, and the hunger and starvation of hundreds of millions of people around the world – including right here in the U.S.?  What is the cost of a city like Atlanta simply running out of water, as it is now in danger of doing due to the prolonged drought in the Southeast?

The debate on whether or not we can afford to stop global warming, on whether that priority can fit in our market economics, is utterly surreal, and in itself a deadly delay.  To call climate change “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen,” as the World Bank’s former chief economist did, has nothing to do with its effect on world Gross Domestic Product.  Climate change is a market failure because its catastrophic implications expose our radical delusion that the environment is a subset of our economy, when in fact the exact opposite is  and always has been true.  Nature does not participate in the market.  The rapidly vanishing polar ice caps and record droughts don’t give a damn what the coal and oil industries are willing to pay for a ton of carbon emissions, and we ignore this reality at our own ultimate peril.

Simply put, we don’t have 50 or 100 years for our markets to sort this problem out.    The short term profits of the carbon industries will be a tragically irrelevant statistic if entire cities are lost to the ravages of climate change.  We either make profound changes in how we live, eat and produce energy to live in harmony with the earth that supports us, as quickly as we can, or our much-vaunted economy and civilization will be swept aside like so much underbrush in one of the record forest fires we’ve been having.

The good news is that all of these changes are possible.  Check out the Issues page to find out how, and the Take Action page to see what you can do.  We even have much of the money we need, if Congress would stop throwing away billions of dollars every day on the occupation of Iraq, and on the half-trillion dollar plus military budget.  

But simply knowing that the technology exists is not enough, and simply waiting for the current Congress to do something about it will not save our planet.  We must, as a society, as Americans, mobilize now to confront the climate crisis, on every front and in every way we can – including electing members of Congress who will fight for what’s needed, if those now in Congress refuse.

Because the alternative is eco-catastrophe, and the resulting collapse of our civilization.  And who wants to pay that price?

The Battle Over Coal Plants

Coal-fired power plants are among the greatest threat to our climate, producing 40% of the carbon emissions in our nation.  Movement leaders from NASA climate scientist James Hansen (who is speaking in Washington D.C. on April 22, Earth Day) to former Vice President Al Gore are saying they need to be shut down in the strongest possible terms, even going so far as to recommend nonviolent civil disobedience to stop new plants and close the old ones.  Coal mining is also one of the most dangerous and environmentally destructive practices ongoing today, one that rips off mountain tops and destroys the valleys below to get at the raw material.

A national conversion to clean, renewable energy is necessary to replace the energy generated by these coal-fired plants, and the policies being promoted by this campaign – policies that I will unceasingly fight for when elected to Congress – can make that conversion happen.  But the new coal plants slated for construction must be stopped, and there is a broad movement coalescing around that urgent goal.  

And let’s be very clear: coal miners and other workers in this field must be fully supported in the transition to clean energy – no one can be left behind.  But our energy policy cannot be dictated by an industry and lobby that cares only about greater profits, regardless of the personal and planetary devastation it causes.

For an article on the movement against coal plants, click here.   

For an article on the environmental devastation caused by coal-mining , click here.

The Democrat-Controlled Congress: Making the environment – and global warming – worse

Biofuels such as corn ethanol have been hyped as the green, renewable alternative to oil.  But most of the hype has been from agribusiness as it angles for billions of dollars in federal subsidies.

The science has been slow to come out, but the reality is now clear and stark: biofuels are a bio-disaster.  Time magazine puts it succinctly and correctly in the cover article of its April 7 issue, “The Clean Energy Myth:” what biofuels are doing is driving up the price of food, polluting our environment, and making global warming worse — all while we pay for it.

While most biofuels, and corn ethanol in particular, actually take nearly as much energy to produce as they yield when pumped into a gas tank, the larger issue is that growing food crops for fuel results in the destruction of forests in places like Brazil and Indonesia as governments and farmers seek to cash in on the new business – the same forests that are some of the last major carbon storehouses on our planet.  (Deforestation is now one of the leading sources of carbon emissions.)

Biofuels also drive up the price of food in a world already filled with hunger and starvation – author George Monbiot has gone so far as to label them a crime against humanity for this reason — and many of them are terrible for the environment even without their huge contribution to global warming.  Corn is one of the most fertilizer-intensive crops, and a large amount of that fertilizer washes into local water sources.  Right here in Maryland, it is already being estimated that the the hundreds of thousands of new acres of corn being grown for ethanol will make it impossible to clean up and revitalize the Chesapeake Bay, a process that is already years behind schedule.

Yet politicians, including most Democrats in Congress, are selling the myth that corn ethanol is an answer to global warming, and the Democratically-controlled Congress has mandated billions of gallons of biofuels be produced by 2020, with dramatically increased subsidies and support to the industry.  Could this have anything to do with the influence — and money — that agribusiness wields on Capitol Hill?

Don’t get me wrong, I love corn.  I could live on the stuff from July through September, and farmers themselves should get all the government support we can muster.  As we encounter global warming induced droughts and floods in the years to come, there will be no more important members of our society than those that grow our food.  But food should not be grown for fuel, and the answer to our transportation needs is electric vehicles and mass transit — not another destructive corporate boondoggle being shoved down our throats by a compliant Congress.