This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
In case you hadn't noticed, we're now distinctly on another planet. Only recently, two weeks before summer officially starts, the temperature hit 113 degrees in Phoenix, Arizona (and 11 people waiting in line to enter a Trump rally had to be hospitalized due to heat exhaustion). In fact, the whole Southwest and parts of the West were broiling under a "heat dome," as was Florida in temperatures that were rare or unknown at this season. And the U.S. was anything but alone. Like last year, fires were already burning again in Canada, sending smoke south; a devastating heat dome sat over Mexico; and don't even think about South Asia, where temperatures have recently gone wild. Yikes!
All of this at a time when May was the 12th month in a row to set a historic global heat record and, given temperatures on this planet, June might not be far behind. Oh, and don't forget the ocean waters either. The tropical Atlantic Ocean recently hit record heat highs, leading the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to predict a particularly violent hurricane season for the Eastern U.S. and the Gulf of Mexico.
And to throw something else into the mix, in Europe, the far right only recently scored a series of victories in elections for the European Union, previewing a potential climate backlash there. In other words, that region, which has taken far more green steps than the U.S., may not be taking many more. And were the same thing to happen in the U.S. and Donald Trump became president again, a lot more Americans would be hospitalized due to heat exhaustion. With all of that in mind, let environmental policy specialist John J. Berger, author of Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth (from which the ideas in this piece were adapted), offer some fresh ideas on how we Americans might actually be able to deal better with the disaster our planet's becoming. Tom
A National Climate Action Plan
Why We Need It and How to Do It
While April and May are usually the hottest months in many countries in Southeast Asia, hundreds of millions of people are now suffering in South Asia from an exceptionally intense heat wave that has killed hundreds. One expert has already called it the most extreme heat event in history. Record-breaking temperatures above 122 F were reported in the Indian capital of New Delhi and temperatures sizzled to an unheard of 127 F in parts of India and Pakistan.
Nor was the blazing heat limited to Asia. Heat waves of exceptional severity and duration are now occurring simultaneously in many areas of the world. Mexico and parts of the United States, notably Miami and Phoenix, have recently been in the grip of intense heat events. In southern Mexico, endangered howler monkeys in several states have been falling dead from trees in their tropical forests due to heat stroke and dehydration. Below-average rainfall throughout Mexico has led to water shortages in Mexico City and elsewhere. In some places, birds and bats, not to speak of humans, are also dying from the heat.
All of this is no coincidence. The hot and heavy hand of climate change is now upon us. Last year was the hottest on Earth in 125,000 years, and the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was the highest in four million years and still climbing at an ever-increasing rate. Meanwhile, global sea surface temperatures also reached a peak, causing severe massive coral bleaching in all three major ocean basins.
The World Bank is projecting that, by 2050, there will be more than 200 million climate refugees, 20 times the 10 million refugees that have already destabilized Europe. Climate change is also putting an increasingly heavy burden on our social safety net, which could ultimately cause social order to begin to break down, generating chaos.
Nobel Prize-winning former Energy Secretary Steven Chu now claims it's no longer possible to keep the global temperature from rising more than 1.5 degreesC above the historical average, as the 195-nation signatories to the 2015 Paris climate agreement had hoped. In fact, he projects that the target of 2 degreesC will also be broken and that, by 2050 the global temperature will have risen above 3 degreesC. Nor is his pessimism unique. Hundreds of other scientists have recently forecast a strong possibility of hitting 2.5 degreesC, which should hardly be surprising since, for well over 30 years now, global leaders have failed to heed the warnings of climate scientists by moving decisively to phase out fossil fuels and their heat-trapping gases.
What to make of such dire forecasts?
It could hardly be clearer that the world is already in the throes of a climate catastrophe. That means it's high time for the U.S. to declare a national climate emergency to help focus us all on the disaster at hand. (Or as famed English poet Samuel Johnson put it centuries ago, "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.")
Such a declaration of a climate emergency is long overdue. Some 40 other nations have already done so, including 2,356 jurisdictions and local governments representing more than a billion people. Of course, a declaration alone will hardly be enough. As the world's wealthiest and most powerful nation, and the one that historically has contributed the most legacy greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the U.S. needs to develop a coherent exit strategy from the stranglehold of fossil fuels, a strategy that could serve as an international example of a swift and thorough clean-energy transition. But at the moment, of course, this country remains the world's largest producer and consumer of oil and natural gas and the third largest producer of coal -- and should Donald Trump win in November, you can kiss any possible reductions in those figures goodbye for the foreseeable future. Sadly enough, however, though the Biden administration's rhetoric of climate concern has been strong, in practice, this country has continued to cede true climate leadership to others.
Despite the laudable examples of smaller nations like Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Paraguay, and Costa Rica that are already at, or within a percentage point or two, of being 100% powered by clean, renewable energy, the world sorely needs the U.S. as a global role model. To make a rapid, far-reaching, and unrelenting break with our fossil-fuel dependency -- 79% of the nation's energy is now drawn from fossil fuels -- a national mobilization would be needed, and it would have to be a genuine all-of-society effort.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
