Mark Twain is said to have observed: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
Replace “weather” with “climate,” and Twain’s aphorism assumes ominous significance today. Aside from the usual know-nothings, warnings of human-related climate catastrophe are ubiquitous — from world-famous scientists to high school kids.
Last December, for instance, Sir David Attenborough, the British naturalist, implored delegates from 200 nations to the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Katowice, Poland, to recognize that “the collapse of civilization and the natural world is on the horizon.”
Closer to home, but no less eloquently, a letter from three Amherst Regional High School juniors in the March 19 Gazette stated: “We’re scared. We’re scared because we are the heirs of a neglected planet. Across the world, governments are choosing current profit over a liveable Earth. … We have 11 years to cut carbon emissions by 45 percent — otherwise, by the time we’re 30, the planet will be condemned to stronger floods, droughts, and heat, and hundreds of millions will fall into poverty.”
Climate change is no longer a “future threat” to be left to our grandchildren’s generation to confront (along with trillion-dollar budget deficits, domestic terrorism, and “modernized” nuclear arsenals). The planet is now experiencing more frequent, more intense, and more costly disasters associated with anthropogenic climate change in the forms of prolonged drought, wildfires, intensified hurricanes, coastal and river flooding and extreme temperatures. At the global scale, the last four years have been the hottest on record.
Warmer ocean temperatures and melting of polar ice sheets are beginning to raise sea level and inundate portions of coastal cities worldwide. Deglaciation of mountainous regions threatens water supplies and hydropower generation for hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Europe, western Latin America, and the Pacific Northwest. Extraordinary droughts threaten water supplies for agriculture and for major cities including New Delhi, Cairo, Mexico City, Beijing, Sao Paulo, Cape Town, Jakarta, Istanbul, and Los Angeles.
As climate change renders vast areas of the globe uninhabitable, mass population migrations and competition for water, arable land, and living space will heighten the likelihood of armed conflict, either conventional or nuclear.
Last October, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) called for drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to keep global mean temperature at or below 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. It called for cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030 (as cited by the Amherst student letter), followed by a goal of “net-zero” carbon emissions by mid-century.
But global carbon emissions rose by 2.7 percent in 2018 rather than decreasing, strongly driven by increased fossil fuel combustion in China and India, whose carbon emissions rose by 4.7 percent and 6.3 percent, respectively. The European Union achieved a modest decline in carbon emissions of 0.7 percent, but the United States, discharged 2.5 percent more carbon in 2018 than in the preceding year.
The world thus faces a crisis unprecedented in human experience. It is long past time for “somebody to do something about it.” The 2015 Paris Agreement was an important step, as was the 1987 Montreal Protocol to limit hydrofluorocarbons (as reinforced by the Kigali Amendment that took effect this past January).
But even if the national goals established in the 2015 Paris Agreement are met, the rate of warming would be slowed but not reversed: global mean temperature by 2100 would still reach a lethal 3 degrees C above preindustrial levels, or worse. And infamously, the Trump administration — now joined by Brazil — defies science and common sense by defying efforts to forestall further climate collapse.
As though combating climate change is not daunting enough in itself, there are demands to add social and economic issues to the climate change agenda. Chapter 5 of the October 2018 IPCC report is devoted to “Sustainable Development, Poverty Eradication, and Reducing Inequalities.”
While climate change unquestionably worsens poverty, inequality, and other social problems, the issue of how to “raise all ships” through climate action is lost in a fog of bureaucratese. For example, “This chapter considers the broad and multifaceted bi-directional interplay between sustainable development, including its focus on eradicating poverty and reducing inequality in their multidimensional aspects, and climate actions in a 1.5°C warmer world.” Got it?
The Green New Deal resolution introduced in both houses of Congress on Feb. 7 proposes a broad agenda of social and economic re-engineering to be achieved under (non-existent) policies to combat climate change.
It calls for a “10-year national mobilization” to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers,” while creating “millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States,” including universal health care, housing, education, and “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States.”
As political theater, the GND may help stimulate a “national conversation” on climate change, as the New York Times observed. But it may also undermine its own purpose by fostering complacency that “something is being done.” The GND was pasted together in haste and contains no detailed proposals for legislation or other policy measures.
Supporters of GND describe it as “aspirational,” but it is too late for day-dreaming. Furthermore, it stirs political divisiveness just when a bipartisan response to the climate crisis is urgently needed.
The original New Deal did not set out to remake American society. It arose to confront one central crisis facing the nation: economic collapse. Three years into the Great Depression, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. writes: “For a moment, all bets were off, all antagonisms adjourned; Americans, it seemed, had to work together or else they would founder together.”
While it lasted, that moment of shared dread yielded the 1932 Democratic landslide and the “Hundred Days” of emergency legislation following the inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Once begun, the New Deal would expand, evolve, and sometimes contract as political support for its many initiatives rose or declined.
But without first confronting the economic meltdown, the broader achievements of the New Deal like social security, rural electrification, and the minimum wage would not have occurred.
The central issue today is “the collapse of civilization and the natural world” due to climate change, as Attenborough warned the delegates at Katowice. The United States must reassert its leadership in forging a global response to the climate crisis, or all other aspirations are moot.
Rutherford H. Platt is an emeritus professor of geography at UMass Amherst.