[Dialogue] Finally, Fired up over Global Warming

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Thursday, August 24, 2006 by the Boston
<http://www.boston.com/news/globe>  Globe 

Finally, Fired up over Global Warming 

by Bill McKibben

 

You've seen or heard of Al Gore's movie. The pictures of Hurricane Katrina
remain in the back of your mind. You've sweated through this record summer.
You sense -- with just a bit of panic -- that there's really no problem more
important in the long run than global warming. So what do you do? 

Change your light bulbs -- check.

Think about a new hybrid Prius -- check.

Go organize a demonstration -- well, maybe.

The movement to tackle climate change is finally growing large in this
country, and at least part of it is beginning to get a little more
outspoken. In late spring, three activists locked themselves in Senator Max
Baucus's Montana office when he refused to answer questions they had
submitted about his stand on climate legislation. Later this month,
protesters are expected to descend upon the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration in Maryland to demand the resignations of the nation's chief
hurricane forecasters, arguing that they have downplayed the threat from
climate change. And over Labor Day weekend, thousands of Vermonters are
expected to walk part or all of a five-day, cross-state trek from Robert
Frost's old cabin in Ripton to the Federal Building in Burlington to demand
that the state's candidates for national office pledge to support the
strongest possible legislation to slow US carbon emissions.

These are among the first even slightly militant responses to global warming
by average Americans, but I doubt they'll be the last. A small group of us
began organizing the Vermont march because we found that we, and others like
us, needed some way to make more noise. Most had done the obvious things:
made our houses and our cars more energy-efficient, and worked with our
businesses or campuses to find better ways of heating and cooling. We've
lobbied hard in state houses and city halls to get local action for change.
But it's not adding up to anywhere near enough -- and the reason is clear.
Washington, unlike every other capital in the developed world, simply won't
do anything.

Congress, in its wisdom, has decided that all climate legislation should be
sent to a committee chaired by Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, who has
declared that global warming is ``a hoax" and added that those who demand
action remind him of the Third Reich. The Environmental Protection Agency
has declared that it doesn't consider carbon dioxide a pollutant -- it's as
if the Food and Drug Administration announced it didn't consider wheat a
food and the Coast Guard declared that the Atlantic Seaboard was really not
a coast after all.

Even as new science shows we may be in for much faster sea level rise and
ice melt than earlier computer models predicted, the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration has decided it no longer wants the phrase ``protect
the home planet" in its mission statement. With that kind of blockage,
there's no way to make more than token progress, even with innovative
attempts like California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent deal with
British Prime Minister Tony Blair to investigate a carbon trading scheme.
Without the federal government committing the United States to the same
goals as the rest of the developed world, progress everywhere will be
halting -- and there's zero chance of the kind of international consensus
that will be required to persuade China and India to follow a more benign
energy path.

It's not as if changing the party in power will automatically change the
outcome, either. The Clinton administration did little to tackle climate
change; most Democrats would probably be all too willing to sign onto some
limp compromise like the bill introduced in 2003 by Senators John McCain,
Republican of Arizona, and Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, even
though the march of science in the years since it was introduced makes clear
the inadequacy of its minuscule cuts in carbon. If we lock into some weak
regimen now, it may be years before Congress will take up the issue again.

And so more environmentalists are starting to decide that 10 years of only
behaving reasonably may be enough -- that the time has come to let leaders
know that a sizable portion of the population is truly upset, and that it
won't rest until the nation's on track to tackle the problem. Progress is by
no means impossible: Vermont independent James Jeffords has introduced a
credible bill in the Senate calling for an 80 percent reduction in carbon by
2050. But if the bill is to have any chance in a capital dominated by the
energy lobby, it needs strong backing from think tanks and scientists -- and
from people in the street. The lesson of every movement in US history is
that being right is only half the battle; being loud helps, too.

We'll be walking the highways of our small state on Labor Day weekend,
collecting signatures along the way, holding town meetings, demanding that
candidates commit to actually, you know, legislating. We hope our example
will spread elsewhere, as more of the quietly freaked-out turn into the
noisily committed.

Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence in environmental studies at
Middlebury College and the author of ``The End of Nature." 

C Copyright 2006 Boston Globe 

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