http://www.blueridgeoutdoors.com/go-outside/climate-change-dont-blame-trump-look-mirror/
It’s been a tough week for environmentalists, or anyone who cares
at all about the environment and living in a world with a stable climate.
President Trump unleashed a new round of attacks on regulatory efforts to
reverse the certain global warming trends we are witnessing at this very
moment. His sweeping executive orders either killed or begin procedures to
negate every major climate change policy put in place under President Obama. It
was tough to even read the newspapers.
I’ll admit to suffering a bit of despair this week. I’m
angry, sad, disappointed, stunned. But here’s the thing: We can’t blame
President Trump for this mess; this is on us, the ordinary citizens of the
United States. It’s our fault. We have not created the political will to
advance the cause for reducing emissions to halt global warming.
The Yale
Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) does excellent work to
gauge the opinions of Americans about climate change. Recent studies report
that 70% of Americans believe that climate change is happening, and most us
believe that the changes are primarily human-caused. We believe the science and
we can see what’s happening, yet most of us don’t take concrete actions to do
anything about the problem. We think of it as affecting someone else, or affecting
people in the distant future.
A map
created by The New York Times, using
data from YPCCC, shows that in many regions of the country, Americans do not
believe that climate change will affect them personally. In the states from
Maryland to Georgia, almost every congressional district shows less than 50% of
the people believe that they will be personally effected by global warming.
However, in Western North Carolina, we just experienced a brutal late Fall of
extreme drought, which led to forest fires burning 45,000 acres of national forest land being
burned,
costing the U.S. Forest Service almost $37 million. (It is true that almost all of the fires
were set either purposefully or accidentally by people, but the conditions that
led to the severity of the fires were present because of the drought.) In
addition, areas on the coast are seeing more incidences of “sunny day
flooding,” and scientists contend that climate change is leading
to more frequent and bigger floods.
My wife handed me this quotation the other day, ascribed to
environmentalist Robert Swan: “The greatest threat to our planet is the belief
that someone else will save it.” I believe Mr. Swan nailed it, and I am at
least as guilty as the next person. I’ve known for years about the overwhelming
scientific consensus of increasing global surface and ocean temperatures on
Earth, and that scientists conclude that human activity is causing it, mostly
due to the burning of fossil fuels. But for years I did not take a single
action to affect change. I did not write or call my members of Congress requesting
that they act on climate change, and I did no public outreach, such as writing letters
to the editor of local newspapers. Like millions of other Americans, I just
assumed that someone else was taking care of this—Congress, President Obama,
the EPA, someone.
There has been some progress, most notably the Paris Climate
Agreement of December 2015, which went into effect on November 4, 2016. The
contribution of the United States was to be the Clean Power Plan, which aimed
to cut CO2 emissions from power plants by 32% below 2005 levels by
2030. Last week, President Trump began the process to undo the Clean Power Plan,
which never went into effect under President Obama, having been held up in
courts until now. The problem with using executive power to create policy is that these policies can be
relatively easily undone. What we need is bipartisan legislation, which, on the
surface, seems terribly unlikely.
It is on this point that I turn optimistic (some could say
naïve). There is some momentum on this issue, as some Republicans in Congress
have joined the cause for action on climate change. Notably, we have a 34-member
Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives, made
up of 17 Democrats and 17 Republicans, and a House resolution was signed
recently by House Republicans requesting conservative action to address climate
change. In February of this year, the conservative Climate Leadership Council,
led by Republican stalwarts George P. Shultz, James A. Baker III, Henry
Paulson, et. al, issued a proposal
to place a fee on carbon, which would lead to reduced carbon emissions over
time, transitioning us towards a low-carbon future with renewable energy.
The Citizens’
Climate Lobby (CCL) also advocates for a revenue-neutral, carbon fee and
dividend (CF&D) program, whereby fossil fuel companies pay a fee for the
carbon they extract, and then all the revenues collected are returned to
American households. I first attended a CCL meeting in December 2015, and I was
initially lukewarm on the proposal. After all, President Obama had this climate
change thing all taken care of with the Clean Power Plan, I thought. But I now
see that a bipartisan CF&D may be America’s only hope to be a positive
force, as the rest of the world works towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions
and transitioning towards renewable energy systems and a stable climate.
Now
back to you and me—this is where we can play a part. CCL’s tag line is “creating
political will for a livable future.” CCL, a non-profit advocacy group, works
to create political will through grassroots efforts, such as writing letters to
the editor to all newspapers in the country, actively lobbying every member of
Congress (Democrat, Independent, or Republican), and public outreach. We must create political will. After
all, as CCL Executive Director Mark Reynolds puts it, “Politicians do not
create political will; they respond to it.”
Here
are some concrete steps you can take to create political will:
· You can simply
start talking about climate change with your peers. A YPCCC study shows that
only about a third of Americans talk about climate change on a frequent basis.
· You can write a
letter to the editor of your local newspaper, which can be as simple as stating
that you support action on climate change, or are concerned about it.
· You can write or
call your three Members of Congress and request that they take action. (CCL
makes this easy; click here to write a personal email to
your representatives in just a couple of minutes, or to find phone numbers to
call.)
· You can join
thousands of other Americans in Washington, DC for the Peoples’
Climate Movement march on April 29.
Climate
change is affecting all of us now, and scientists tell us that it will get much worse. But we have time if
we act now. We can’t assume that someone else is taking care of this, because
they aren’t. Join thousands of other ordinary citizens to create the political
will for positive action, starting today. Let us together preserve all that is
precious to each of us for now and for future generations.
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