Now that U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, has succeeded in helping to pass a major tax reform bill — co-authored by lobbyists — that enriches the wealthy and opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, she says it’s time for the Republican Party to take climate change seriously.
Really? And do what?
Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, says about climate change, “winning slowly is the same as losing.” We must wake up — and act — before the alarm goes off.
How? Enough sunlight falls on the earth in one hour to provide all of humanity’s energy needs for a year. Add to that winds that generate 40 times our energy needs per day. And tides, fives time more. It’s all there, beckoning us. The best scientific projections say we must leave 80 percent of all known oil reserves in the ground as “stranded assets” and fully embrace the clean energy revolution. Anything short of this is mere theater.
We have little time to stop a runaway process — the burning of fossil fuels that load our atmosphere with the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) — that Forbes Magazine says could destabilize geopolitics worldwide, end economic growth, and destroy modern civilization.
For the past 800,000 years, through many glacial advances and retreats, levels of atmospheric CO2 have oscillated between 180 and 280 parts per million (ppm). We know this from good science. Today, atmospheric CO2 is at 408 ppm and rising about 2ppm/year. This is why the 20 warmest years on record (since the late 1800s) have all occurred in the past 22 years. And why our oceans are acidifying (atmospheric CO2 absorbed in seawater as carbonic acid). The North Pacific has increased in acidity roughly 30 percent in the last 300 years; 15 percent since the 1990s.
As the world warms, it releases methane from permafrost in the high latitudes. Methane is 80-plus times more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas in its first few decades in the atmosphere. In 1988, the average mean temperature of permafrost at Prudhoe Bay was 17.6 degrees. Today, it’s 28.5 degrees. The Big Melt has begun. We are releasing a time bomb.
Imagine if CO2 and methane were as alarming as the bombs of the Luftwaffe falling on London. Or the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1941, the U.S. produced roughly 8,000 cars each day. After Pearl Harbor, Detroit made fewer than 200 cars or trucks for civilian use over three years. It became a war machine.
If we have the will, and leadership, we can do practically anything.
And so we stand today before another great adversary: our own selfish, hard-to-break habits that burn fossil fuels and produce tremendous industry and prosperity, but now imperil us. As such, we witness a well-moneyed resistance to fundamental change. We witness the sowing of doubt in the face of solid science, the manufacture of pseudo truths and the rise of con-man authoritarianism.
We witness Murkowski and Congressman Don Young celebrating at the Anchorage Petroleum Club. Business as usual.
Yes, we’re all users. But these people are pushers.
This is not leadership, though they say otherwise. They talk jobs, economic growth and energy independence. It’s a common trick among modern conservatives, first noted by economist John Kenneth Galbraith: “The search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” It’s the art of wrapping that hard little kernel of greed in a thin foil of altruism.
For many Republicans, human-caused climate change is a vast liberal conspiracy. Heaven forbid that reality should get in the way of their prejudices. The less they know, the more stubbornly they know it.
Where’s our Churchill?
True leadership accepts hard truths, sees into the future and inspires us to sacrifice, when necessary. True leadership knows that old paradigms die hard, but die they must, and that those who defend them will do so viciously as new paradigms become more obvious, and necessary.
Churchill told his people as the bombs fell, “You must be prepared for further efforts of mind and body, and further sacrifices to great causes.”
It’s not going to be easy to leave the oil in the ground. It will take sacrifice. And it needs to happen with true leadership. Now.
• Kim Heacox is the author of more than a dozen books, most recently the novel “Jimmy Bluefeather” and the Denali memoir “Rhythm of the Wild.” He lives in Gustavus.
