Global warming can't be legislated away.
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| New England if the polar ice caps melt |
Our weather keeps getting weirder. We're seeing record-busting
heat waves, droughts, thaws, and forest fires, freakish "derecho"
storms, and spring striking weeks too early. Most of these trends are either caused
or exacerbated by another,
underlying problem: climate change.
Yet the more extreme our weather becomes, the less attention
the media pays to this deadly
scourge. Conservative politicians, determined to deny the existence of global
warming, are taking advantage of this information vacuum to mandate collective
ignorance.
Consider a new North Carolina law
that dictates how the state should go about forecasting the state's swelling
sea levels.
Lawmakers and lobbyists were shaken up by a 2010 report from the
state's Coastal Resources Commission. The members of the panel that drafted
this straightforward document, which included several retired Army Corps of
Engineers experts, dared assert that North Carolina should prepare to deal with
an estimated 39-inch rise in
its sea levels by the end of
this century. That kind of increase would put 200,000 square miles of coastal
land at risk.
Since this finding clashed with their brand of climate change
denial and would have had major
repercussions for real-estate
developers, lawmakers tried banning the pursuit of this kind of scientific
research.
An early version of North Carolina's new law was so absurd that
comedian Stephen Colbert
ridiculed iton his TV show,
prompting lawmakers to water it down.
Although North Carolina
Governor Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, urged Republican lawmakers to reconsider their
blatant disregard for scientific integrity, she nonetheless neglected to either
veto or sign the bill — ushering it into law.
Virginia
lawmakers engaged in a similar ruse. They stripped any mention of climate change or sea levels from
a proposal to fund research on the impact of, well, climate change on sea
levels in the commonwealth.
This willful ignorance pervades
Congress too.
Conservatives like Sen. Jim Inhofe regularly oppose federal effort to assess or
address climate change. "I thought it must be true until I found out what
it cost," the Oklahoma
Republican accidentally explained during an interview with Rachel Maddow.
But making the systemic changes required to slow climate change
will cost far more if we wait — that's a big part of what Al Gore dubbed
"an inconvenient truth."
Gore, like other major climate-action advocates, sacrificed his
stature to take the high road in this fight. Remember the former vice
president's great speech at the Democratic National Convention? Oh, right, he
didn't make the cut this year.
Maybe that had something to do with Gore's harsh critique of Obama's climate record in Rolling
Stonemagazine last year. He also skewered the media's spineless coverage in
that essay, which probably didn't endear him to many journalists.
Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives, is
another vanishing climate celebrity. As the leader of the world's lowest-lying
nation, he vociferously pointed to his country's flood-prone status, and
trumpeted the need for action. His influence was short-lived. Moneyed interests
quickly arrived to support restoration of the dictator whom he had replaced,
and Nasheed was soon overthrown in adisputed coup. Sadly, Washington was quick to
recognize the Maldives'
new government.
At the same time, Americans are being fed a steady diet of
climate misinformation from a growing number of supposed experts funded
by coal, oil, and gas companies.
In some cases, this hot air is nowrequired
reading in schools,
thanks to the ease with which energy companies exercise their fabled muscle on
pliable legislatures.
As our planet heats up, we're still eating too much beef,
burning too much oil, fracking too much natural gas, using too much air
conditioning, and mining too much coal. Why should we worry about these things,
after all, if so many of our leaders are determined not to worry about climate change?
Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords,
a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy
Studies. OtherWords columnist
William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of
Norwalk, Connecticut. OtherWords.org