World
leaders are resolving to stop cooking the planet after they’re dead.
After
a quarter-century of buzz over global warming, the climate talkers are at it
again, doing whatever it is they do. Visitors to the next big climate change
summit, in an act of glorious irony, will pack Paris-bound jets flown by Air
France — one of the meeting’s big corporate sponsors with deep ties to fossil fuels.
The
UN-organized meeting won’t take place until December, but Pope Francis is
already doing his best to make sure global powers give it plenty of bandwidth.
Days
before a conservative Italian newspaper leaked the Pope’s game-changing
encyclical, the leaders of the seven richest industrial nations (G7) were
already talking about the need for “deep cuts in global greenhouse gas
emissions” and “a decarbonization of the global economy over the course of this
century.”
Translation:
The G7 leaders want expiration-date stickers slapped on the oil, gas, and coal
industries.
Identifying the culprits that pump carbon into today’s economy or promising to do something about it themselves would have been bolder. Failing to name names shows how cowed these presidents and prime ministers are.
Still,
collectively kicking the world’s fossil-fuel addiction means no more mining
coal by blasting the tops off mountains. No more offshore oil platforms prone
to bursting into flames. No more telling communities they can’t ban frackers
from operating near freshwater sources.
“What
is occurring is in many ways unprecedented in the history of international
cooperation in respect to vision and scale,” chirped Christiana Figueres, the UN’s top climate change official.
Figueres
makes it sound like a big-fossil deal. As Pope Francis might say, Hallelujah.
But wait. They’re talking about the year 2100.
How
old will you be 85 years from now? Oh, right. You’ll be dead. Me too. I doubt
134 will be the new 30 at the turn of the next century. No one writing this
accord will get to personally declare the world’s energy matrix fossil-free.
Probably none of their children either.
Punting
to a generation not yet born isn’t leadership. Real to-do lists are doable
during your own lifespan.
Did
Abraham Lincoln promise when he delivered the Emancipation Proclamation that all enslaved people would
be free by 1948?
When
the Supreme Court demanded an end to the segregation of American schoolchildren with all
deliberate speed, did the justices add “so get it over and done with
before 2039 rolls around”?
And
when Ronald Reagan shouted in Cold War-weary Berlin “Tear down this wall,” did
he elaborate with the words: “no later than the year 2072”?
No,
no, and no.
Sure,
re-wiring the global grid takes time. But given what’s at stake and the speed
with which the costs of wind and solar power are dropping, 85 years is too
long. How about some gumption and a bigger hurry?
Apparently G7 leaders and some climate talkers flirted with a brisker pace that
would have meant kicking the worldwide fossil-fuel habit by 2050. Both groups
wound up saying — I’m paraphrasing here — “nah.” Aiming for 2100 is a
compromise between doing nothing and doing what’s necessary right now.
Our
country, the world’s No. 2 carbon polluter after China, can transition to full
reliance on energy derived from wind, water, and sunlight by 2050, half a century faster
than the G7’s timetable. A group of researchers from several leading
universities even drew up a state-by-state roadmap.
As
the mother of two kids still in elementary school, bequeathing this headache to
them seems bad enough. Why are global leaders shunting this tough job to our
children’s grandchildren?
Columnist Emily
Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national
editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords.org.