“This is going to be the Great Society, the moonshot, the civil rights movement of our generation, that is the scale of the ambition that this movement is going to require.” Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“We have not come here to beg World Leaders to care, we have come to let them know change Is coming. We can no longer save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to be changed.” 15-year-old Greta Thunberg to 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
“On climate change, the teenage Thunberg demonstrates more clarity and leadership in one speech than a quarter of a century of the combined contributions of so-called world leaders. Wilful ignorance and lies have overseen a 65 percent rise in CO2 since 1990. Time to hand over the baton.” Kevin Anderson, Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester.
People have been talking about Climate Change for a long time. The first time I became aware of it was in the late 70s when I picked up a book called The Weather Machine: How Our Weather Works and Why It Is Changing by Nigel Calder. I thought the book was going to be about the weather however it turned out to be about Global Warming and I became convinced that Global Warming is real. When I tried to spread the word, overwhelmingly my friends tolerantly smiled and changed the subject. Even if I were right – and most people thought I was wasn’t – what difference did it really make if the Earth was a degree hotter? A couple of years later, the CIA issued a report that I thought was related, and it was sort of presented as a rebut to Calder’s book but was really part of a growing consensus that the earth was heating up and we were the cause. The CIA’s report said the one-degree temperature rise was not a major change but what was a major change is the additional energy in the system that would make for bigger storms and longer droughts.
As an aside, when I told people what the CIA said, they were much more receptive than when I referenced a random Nigel. End aside.
Now we all know that Climate Change is real (well, we know that it is real if we believe in science). What not everybody is willing to admit is that the effects of Climate Change have just barely started; it is only going to get worse, faster. California is going to get hotter and dryer during the summer. Paradise won’t be an outlier. Neither will be Katrina or Sandy or the 3,000 deaths from tropical storms in 2017; sea level will rise a few feet – not much – and with stronger storms, coastal cities will be battered. Then the sea level will continue rising, the storms will get more violent, and the droughts harder.
The problem is, we mammals are a short-term-thinking class and nobody has really done much about the future. Jimmy Carter tried to do a little bit, but when he said: “Turn down your heat a little and save some energy.”, he got laughed off the Presidental Stage. One of the things Obama ran on was Climate Change and he even hired Van Jones to oversee a Green Jobs Program in answer to Climate Change but Van Jones did not last very long and Obama, under constant attack from the right – for having “a deep-seated hatred for white people” among other imagined transgressions – struggled to get a very week Paris Agreement. To make matters worse, for the last two years, we have had Trump and a Republican Congress who appear to be actually actively trying to make Climate Change worse.
But, as of January 3rd, the House of Representatives will no longer be controlled by the Republicans and that opens the potential to do something serious about Climate Change. The operative word here is potential because it is very possible a Democratic Congress will talk about Climate Change, even form a committee, but not treat Climate Change like the crisis that it really is. But the potential is also there to actually start doing something.
Let me digress for a minute to point out that Global Climate Change is an existential threat to our way of life, to our civilization. Deserts are going to get hotter as they expand to the north and south creating millions of refugees; in the Sahara region, northern refugees are already trying to escape to Europe, in the south, the Muslim nomads are pushing into Christian farming areas. The oceans are going to rise – in Miami, seawater already runs out of the storm inlets rather than in, during super-high-tides – and millions of refugees will be forced inland, especially in the mega-cities of greater Asia. Forests will get drier and the fires bigger – Sweden has already had its first forest fire north of the Arctic Circle – and there will be more fires. We can not make this go away, we have waited too long, all we can do is stop it from becoming unimaginably worse and to do that we will have to take extraordinary measures.
That is what newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, along with about 20 Congressmembers, is pushing Congress to do, take extraordinary measures. They want to form a Select Committee For A Green New Deal based on a program developed by the Sunrise Movement as first suggested in a 2007 New York Times Editorial by Thomas Friedman who wrote: If you have put a windmill in your yard or some solar panels on your roof, bless your heart. But we will only green the world when we change the very nature of the electricity grid — moving it away from dirty coal or oil to clean coal and renewables. And that is a huge industrial project — much bigger than anyone has told you. Finally, like the New Deal, if we undertake the green version, it has the potential to create a whole new clean power industry to spur our economy into the 21st century.
The Select Committee would be composed of 15 House members, 9 appointed by the Speaker and 6 appointed by the Minority Leader, none of whom would take any campaign contributions from fossil fuel industries (which, last year spent $78,185,561 lobbying Congress, so keeping them out of the process will not be easy). The Democratic Congressional Leadership wants to handle Climate Change through the standard channels and the idea of any Special Committee, but especially this one, is threatening to the Democratic Establishment. Ocasio-Cortez’s pitch is that the Committee, which shouldn’t be controlled by fossil fuel interests, will spend the next two years drawing legislation which will be ready to pass when a newly elected Democratic Senate and President join the Democratic House.
As an update per The New York Times: House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi on Friday appointed Florida Rep. Kathy Castor to lead a special committee on climate change that will be reinstated in the new Congress.
If you think that Climate Change is a problem, please write your Representative – a handwritten letter is best – and tell them that we have their back. It would also be great if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were on the Committee. If we don’t tell our government how critical we think this is, they won’t really do anything significant. Please write.
“We have to understand the emergency of the situation. Our leadership has failed us. Young people must hold older generations accountable for the mess they have created. We need to get angry, and transform that anger into action.” – @GretaThunberg