Forget Climate Change - Damn the Environment

 

A coal-fired plant in Coneseville, Ohio/NPR.com

It is indeed disheartening to watch a confluence of slams to our political, economic, public health and environmental systems. A big part of the disinformation and misinformation surrounds the questioning of the validity of science, scientific research and a series of inconvenient truths that threaten us to our core. It’s not really possible to focus on just the United States. Air and water currents cannot be confined to specific political boundaries. Birds, insects and migratory mammals cannot read maps. Viruses and bacteria are constantly searching for unwilling carriers (“travelers”) to expand their reproductive cycles. Supply and demand curves put the pricing and availability of virtually any commodity into a global “bathtub,” which tends to spit out a single global price plus transportation costs. Simply put, the world is overwhelmingly over-linked, with local causes stumbling into global effects, whether we like it or not. Trade, travel and nature’s own forces combine into “globalism,” notwithstanding our most fervent denials.

While so many of these forces are global and unable to be isolated to a limited geographical space, political forces can deny these realities, suggest containment within limited boundaries and rail at suggestions to the contrary. Politicians can prey on desperation, fear and gullibility to promise outcomes that defy nature and reality – literally kicking an inevitable can down the down the road after even more serious damage simply aggregates and accumulates. But the “big linkage” devolves around the burning of fossil fuel for electricity, transportation and big-ticket manufacturing.

Look at fossil fuels. The obvious: greenhouse gasses and rising global temperatures. Finally- admitted linkage to the release of man-made greenhouse gasses and other environmental pollutants include: soaking and powerful tropical storms, droughts/desertification, flooding, storm surges and coastal erosion, wildfires and searing/killing heat. Resulting migrations of animals, including humans unable to sustain their agrarian lives, follow. Just in the United States, an annual hard cash cost of climate change environmental disasters has risen to beyond a trillion dollars, but by simply denying the unequivocal link to climate change, politicians so inclined can simply refuse to deal with that root cause. 

But wait, there’s more. Heat unlocks frozen tundra (permafrost), releasing toxic methane (23 times heavier than carbon dioxide) and perhaps some ancient viruses and bacteria that could survive what was otherwise a perpetual freeze. Glaciers’ melting may flood now but will deny a viable and steady water supply later. A shortage of natural gas in Europe (particularly the UK) and Asia is pushing some nations back to uncleanable dirty coal as their fallback to generating needed electrical power. Plus the process of fossil fuel extraction rapes the land, as we watch fracking earthquakes in Oklahoma, and creates massive accidents along the way (think: the 1989 wreck of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf or the recent oil leak off Huntington Beach in Southern California).

We are still recovering from the prior Republican administration that openly focused on limiting and ultimately shutting down our Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental review for major projects was severely curtailed. Permitted pollution limits were raised, and significant polluting companies were not required to pay for the burdens of their careless disregard of the environment. Needed EPA staffing was reduced in decimating numbers in preparation for the complete dismantling of the entire agency. This continues into the current Congress as a Republican minority in both houses, ignoring the annual economic cost of climate change right here in the United States, has opposed (often very successfully) the allocation of sufficient federal funds to begin (begin!!!) to tackle the ravages of climate change. They consistently eliminate or vastly reduce proposals designed to deploy meaningful federal efforts to slow (hardly even to stop) those greenhouse emissions here. 

Almost eight months into its term, the Biden administration – struggling to get even a modified infrastructure bill through Congress that would at least begin to apply federal money to stem climate change – has turned its attention to the EPA: “The White House on Wednesday [9/6] took the first step to restore federal regulations guiding environmental reviews of major infrastructure projects like highways and pipelines that were scaled back by the Trump administration that sought to fast-track them. 

 “The White House Council for Environmental Quality said it will restore key provisions of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations that had been in place before the Trump administration overhauled the rules last year, the first time in decades. 

 “The new rule proposed by the White House council would direct the agency to account for climate change and other indirect environmental impacts of a project; empower federal agencies to consider alternative designs or approaches for a company's proposed projects and let agencies adopt reviews that go beyond council's regulations.” Reuters, October 6th. Still, we have to live with a political system, which clearly favors deregulation and science deniers, where 30% of the US population elects 50% of the US Senate and where a simple majority vote from Congress makes us the only democracy on earth where that is insufficient to pass most legislation. Nature truly does not care. It follows only the laws of nature… physics if you will… and does not respond to human votes to the contrary.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this is one lesson that will kill millions of humans if we keep insisting that we have to learn these lessons the hard way… when it just might be too late.