US – Thursday, September 2

The Heat Is On to Fix OUR Climate

 

“The simplest way of turning things around would be a carbon tax — but Republicans would call that socialism.”

 

Remember global warming? It seems like only yesterday that we were watching bits of Antarctica flake off into the ocean — not to mention even less-gripping sights, like Al Gore with a laser pointer — and worrying whether humanity’s love of SUVs and air conditioning was going to doom us to extinction by midcentury.

So now that everyone has loaded up on low-energy light bulbs and carries reusable shopping bags to the valet bike parking lot, how is the great experiment going? The good news: U.S. carbon emissions are expected to fall 5 percent this year. Unfortunately, that was mostly due to the lousy economy — it’s hard to burn fossil fuels when you can’t afford them — and they’re expected to rise again next year. Given that scientists say we need to cut emissions 4 percent a year to prevent such horrors as shellfish going extinct, the rainforests drying up and billions of people facing famine, that’s really terrifying.

The simplest way of turning things around would be a carbon tax — yes, it’d cost you money, but far less in the long run than building your own hurricane-proof dome — with, one hopes, some sort of bailout for low-income folk who can’t afford pricier gas and electricity. But Republicans would call that “socialism,” so Congress is instead pursuing a “cap-and-trade” scheme that would do half the job by much more confusing means. Yet still the Senate is threatening to kill it, as soon as it finishes putting a stake in health reform.

Meanwhile, we’re left with educational programs that try to make reducing CO2 a healthy lifestyle choice, like eating your vegetables. Unfortunately, it’s a lesson that seems to be sinking in slowly. On a recent visit to a climate change exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, I was reading a display about Japan’s “Cool Biz” program to set office air conditioners at 82 degrees when I realized I needed to leave — I was dressed for the summer heat, and it was freezing in the museum.

Rome, you might counter, wasn’t built in a day. But it did collapse in a century. Our clock is ticking.

– Neil deMause writes alternate Mondays in this space. He can be contacted at demause.net and on Twitter @neildemause.

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