Image by LucAleria (License CC BY-SA 3.0)
Full disclosure – I was a vocal Global Warming skeptic back in the 90’s. As a conservative debater, when the policy topic was renewable energy, it was in my interests to learn every argument against it. Much like an oil company funding ‘alternative research,’ or a voter who wants to believe they know more than the scientists, I wrote it off. I wanted to believe that pumping massive amounts of CO2 and methane into our atmosphere wasn’t the catastrophe the liberal intelligentsia and tree-hugging activists said it was. The only problem with my opinion: it was dead wrong.
I hope I might help persuade some people that Climate Change is a real, terrible threat. It faces our planet’s entire population, and especially those of us who aren’t obscenely rich. If a die-hard skeptic like me can be convinced, I hope skeptical readers can also realize the profound danger we’re facing.
So, I’ll try to convince the skeptics that it’s real, to motivate the apathetic that it will seriously wound their lives, and to show that there really are cost-effective, fair, common sense solutions. The biggest stumbling block to implementing them is that the people who will be hurt most, aren’t rich. In fact, many rich folks are intent on ignoring the problem, and they control our government.
“Who are you going to believe? Innocent big oil, or all those corrupt scientists and crooked drowning polar bears?”
Why should you believe in Climate Change?
As a convert to believing climate change is real and largely man made, the single most powerful argument that changed my mind was fully understanding the concept behind it. Our atmosphere is like a blanket. It retains heat. The moon, or Mars, have very thin atmospheres. They dip below -100 degrees when the sun isn’t shining. Venus has a really thick atmosphere, so it’s hot as hell, day or night.
These aren’t theories, it’s reality. When you burn trillions of tons of carbon and methane, you’re taking meaningful portions of the Earth’s crust and turning the ground into sky. That pumping the land into the atmosphere would lead to a thicker ‘blanket’ is absolutely common sense. I searched far and wide for a counterargument to that, and I never found one that held up to basic scrutiny.
The second thing that convinced me was all these scientists, with their empirical evidence, and peer reviewed studies about rising temperatures, thinning polar ice, and higher carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. It really seemed like they were on to something. And the counterargument, about urban heat islands and sunspots supposedly throwing off our measurements always came from oil companies and their lobbying firms.
After years spent researching the ‘argument,’ as the evidence became harder to refute, I realized I was on the wrong side. The scientists who had hard facts, backed up by obvious realities, were right. The oil companies trying to justify their tax breaks were lying to us. This is a reality the rest of the world has a consensus on, and we’re lagging far behind.
You specifically should take an interest, because if you’re reading this, you probably don’t have the resources to absorb the costs climate change will bring. Rising sea levels will soon cause massive disruptions along the world’s coasts. It will upend world agriculture, to the point where famines will become something that effects you and your family personally.
Shortsighted 1 percenters who want to ignore the problem will have their fortunes to insulate themselves from the destructive path we’re on, but even they will pay a price. But, it’s a price they can afford to pay. We can’t. Every day we refuse to take decisive action, the costs we’ll pay will get larger.
Even if Climate Change wasn’t a looming, catastrophic threat (which it is), you should still advocate for policies encouraging renewable energy.
‘Fossil fuels’ isn’t a marketing term made up by environmentalists. Coal, oil, even natural gas – they’re all formed over millions of years, from natural processes, from countless generations of plant and animal life. Ask any petrochemical scientist – none of them will tell you that God put a bottomless barrel of oil under the Earth’s surface that we can tap forever.
We’re already relying on new, more hazardous methods to sustain ourselves – and that’s after a hundred years of significant harvesting, and far fewer years at anything near this level. Fossil fuels could never have been anything more than a transitional step.
So, we can focus on energy solutions for the future, to master the engine driving a new economy, or we can devote ourselves to an industry that is bound to die off within our lifetime. For the record, I’m not a far left eco-activist, and I can prove it. I personally think that carbon-neutral nuclear power is far safer than polluting fossil fuels. Even if we pretend climate change is a hoax, we should be encouraging a whole range of non-carbon power sources. I want sustainable solutions. So should you.
Other countries have figured out that the future doesn’t rely on fossil fuels. It can’t. And even if you’ll never take a job in the energy industry, you should support America investing in the future. Doubling down on coal may be popular in West Virginia and Kentucky, and I understand why. The lives of people in coal country should matter as much to us as anyone elses. But we are literally making decisions on behalf of the world and our great grand children. Committing to strip-mining every last ounce of coal from the Earth’s crust, and injecting it into the atmosphere, MIGHT not be the best course of action.
If you think that makes me an out-of-touch arugula-chomping San Francisco liberal, I have news for you. First off, there’s nothing wrong with arugula, or some baby spinach for that matter. A good salad isn’t un-American. I have never lived outside of Nebraska, and I love a good steak almost as much as I love Husker football (GO BIG RED!).
So, what can we do about it?
There are market based solutions, some of which we’ve backed, others we haven’t had the guts or political will to implement. Subsidies for renewable energy is a start. They exist, but they could be beefed up. A couple of other options, both of which are market based – 1) a carbon tax, where power companies have to offset the greenhouse gasses they pump into the atmosphere with cash. 2) A cap and trade system, where we set emissions limits, but let companies going over the limit, buy credits from companies that are helping fight climate change. Both of these have been tried with other harmful pollutants like SO2 and NO2.
Gen Xers, Baby Boomers, and Millennial debaters like me will remember when Acid Rain was a big problem. Bush Sr. actually fixed that with market based solutions back when a Republican was allowed to admit that our air and water are important. The key thing about ‘market based solutions’ is that they aren’t meaningless buzz words. In a sane world, where people recognized ‘science’, ‘reality’, and ‘holy shit why are polar bears drowning now, and are we next!?!’ as a real problem, market based approaches are a smart tool we can use to make sure corporations are compensating us for the harm they’re doing to our environment and to encourage businesses that provide the same service without the harm. It’s about polluters paying their fair share. They can’t argue against that, so they just deny that they’re polluting. Who are you going to believe? Innocent big oil, or all those corrupt scientists and crooked drowning polar bears?
So, why does this matter to your average person working 40 hours a week in the middle of America?
First off, even if you’re skeptical of Climate Change, you should be concerned with America building an economy for the future. But let’s say science isn’t a hoax, and you can’t trust oil companies telling you ‘oil is always the best forever.’ If ever there’s a food shortage, which is very realistic, it’s not oil executives who will go hungry, it’s the rest of us. Even if you don’t give a damn about drowning polar bears, you should care about that.
There have been so many things to worry about recently… It disturbs me that dealing with Climate Change has found itself on the activism back-burner. Because our future really is at stake. I will loudly and proudly proclaim my support for progressive causes, but among all issues, this should clearly cross partisan lines. It is real, it’s happening, and GOP or Dem, our futures depend on it. I remember when GOP folks cared about science and the future. I hope for all of our sakes they start taking both seriously again.
Travis Hepburn was a Top 25-ranked debater on a National Championship-winning team at Creighton University. He currently manages an Assisted Living Facility for the mentally ill. Politics and policy have remained an unhealthy fixation for him for over 20 years.
This is literally a change or die scenario but it also makes this a time of great opportunity. The skeptics are those who have something to lose or something to fear; the powerful are few in number but wield enormous influence over the ignorant as if it were a weapon. But, the climate is changing, and the evidence is mounting, with some of it becoming obvious in our own daily lives. The question isn’t if we learn to accept and adapt but when.
But, it is going to take a revolution as it did with industry bringing about the advent of fossil fuels. The industrial age was based on new technology, and with it came invention and innovation, more jobs and more wealth. We have that same opportunity now – for new jobs and better lives – but it is going to take vision and leadership, or, sadly, catastrophe.
I’ve lived long enough to see change; even with massive resistance, change happens, and it will happen again – it has to.
That’s a great point. The world WILL shift away from fossil fuels. The questions are 1) how catastrophic will the damage be, and 2) will the US be left behind in the new energy economy. This is unsustainable. If America waits for a collapse before taking real action, the cost will be devastating.
The American Dream didn’t start out as a reality, and it has it’s roots in desperate necessity, substantial risk, and perspiration. The American Dream started as literally that, a dream, before it became a tangible aspiration, because there was nowhere to go but up; people were forced to make things better by both their circumstance and their dream, but there was also opportunity.
Today, people in this country have the same sweeping sense of desperation but they don’t see any kind of opportunities in the future… so they look to the past.
The future, however, belongs to those who look forward to The New American Dream. It’s out there, the new dream, like an undiscovered country waiting to be found. And, it’s going to seeded by new technologies, and part of that is going to have to be based in correcting climate change and promoting new energy sources.
We need to become pioneers again.
Oh man, the past. It was so great back then!
To that end, let’s all remember that if there’s enough of us acting up on the individual level, we too can be “market forces.” Switching electricity providers to one that uses only renewable resourses is one way (although one that depends on local availability and affordability). Another is to take personal savings/investment accounts out of big banks, pretty much all of which invest in the fossil fuel industry (and fund DAPL), and put them in small local banks or credit unions (with the added bonus of keeping more money in the local community). (Also make sure to write a letter to the big bank telling them why your account just disappeared).
You might be interested in checking out Merchants of Doubt, a 2010 book about how concepts that are both clearly disproven by modern science yet also beneficial (in the short term) to certain industries are kept alive. It’s a pretty fascinating read. Of course, you don’t need industrial backing to have layperson “debate” over essentially resolved scientific issues (evolution, vaccinations), but it helps.
Nuclear energy can be much safer and cleaner than any petroleum based form of energy if scientists are in charge. NOT Rick Perry. The main problem with adequately supervised nuclear power is waste. Unfortunately that is one huge problem that stretches as far into the future as global warming.
It’s also worth noting that “nuclear power” isn’t just one thing, though many people (including Trump and almost certainly Perry) think it does. Thorium breeder reactors dramatically reduce the overall amount of radioactive waste and especially the transuranics with half-lives in the thousands and millions of years, and as a bonus don’t require any uranium at all, so if they were adopted in say Iran there would no longer be any justification for uranium enrichment, thus stemming the tide of WMD proliferation.
And of course it’s important to keep the eye on the prize. The real end goal of Big Energy production is nuclear fusion, which has a much higher mass to energy ratio than fission, has zero risk of meltdown, and the longest lasting radioactive waste of which is tritium, which has a whopping 12.32 year half-life and would be produced in minuscule amounts.
Unfortunately, fusion research is expensive and the general population knows next to nothing about it, so we’re at least decades away from viability. We can’t wait that long before getting off carbon fuels. (And to be clear, even in a post-fusion world there will still be a place for solar and wind and other alternative sources that aren’t ethanol.)