Opinion Youre going to regret it
...Regret letting fast-talking anti-science types cause you to shrug off climate change,that is....
When I first heard on Thursday that Democrats in the US Senate were abandoning the effort to pass an energy/climate bill that would begin to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming and promote renewable energy that could diminish our addiction to oil,I remembered something that Joe Romm,the climateprogress.org blogger,once said: The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.
Alas,so are the rest of us. I could blame Republicans for the fact that not one GOP senator indicated a willingness to vote for a bill that would put the slightest price on carbon. I could blame the Democratic senators who were also waffling. I could blame President Obama for his disappearing act on energy and spending more time reading the polls than changing the polls. I could blame the Chamber of Commerce and the fossil-fuel lobby for spending bags of money to subvert this bill. But the truth is,the public,confused and stressed by the last two years,never got mobilised to press for this legislation. We will regret it.
Weve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Natures operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so. Fasten your seat belts. You cannot sweet-talk Mother Nature. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No,Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry,biology and physics dictate. Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what were doing.
Since I dont have anything else to say,I will just fill out this column with a few news stories and emails that came across my desk in the past few days:
n Just as the US Senate was abandoning plans for a US cap-and-trade system,this article ran in The China Daily: BEIJING The country is set to begin domestic carbon trading programs during its 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015) to help it meet its 2020 carbon intensity target. … Putting a price on carbon is a crucial step.
n As we East Coasters know,its been extremely hot here this summer,with records broken. But,hey,you could be living in Russia,where ABC News recently reported that a heat wave,which has lasted for weeks,has Russia suffering its worst drought in 130 years. The BBC reported that to keep cool at lakes and rivers around Moscow,groups of revellers can be seen knocking back vodka and then plunging into the water. The result is predictable 233 people have drowned in the last week alone.
n A day before the climate bill went down,the CEO of one of the nations biggest utilities e-mailed to say that if the Senate would set a price on carbon and requirements for renewal energy,utilities like his would have the price certainty they need to make the big next-generation investments,including nuclear.
n The last word goes to the contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham,who in his July letter to investors,noted: Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for … what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports,by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible conspiracy theory: the fossil energy companies,driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits,encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I,for one,admire them for their PR skills,while wondering,as always: Have they no grandchildren?
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