Global Warming 101: Politics, Economics, Culture, Action

by Emily Gertz

Published October 03, 2008 @ 12:24PM PST

Nearly every action we take on the average day, from cooking eggs for breakfast, to watching "Project Runway" after dinner, relies upon power created by burning carbon-rich petroleum products or coal.  Burning these fossil fuels releases heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, in amounts far greater than what would occur naturally.  

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from under 300 parts per million just before the Industrial Revolution, to 385 ppm today, and it's still rising.  By current accounts, the world is sending more than 34 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year into the atmosphere.  And the United States, with approximately 4 percent of the world's population, consumes about 25 percent of the world's oil, and until very recently was the world's largest greenhouse gas polluter.

The amount of heat trapped by these gases has risen to the point that the planet's overall surface temperature is rising. And this is de-stablizing the climate -- the overall weather conditions we expect to experience in any given place over a human lifetime -- which have guided how we grow our food, and where and how we build our towns and cities.

Global warming is already transforming some regions -- most dramatically the Arctic.  Still, many experts believe that if we fundamentally re-invent how we generate energy, and do it fast enough -- 2015, 2030, and 2050 are commonly used benchmarks -- we can re-stabilize the climate and avoid the worst.

Happily, there are many options for clean energy: solar and wind power; geothermal projects; harnessing the kinetic energy of ocean waves and underwater currents; creating fuel from plant materials ("biofuels") instead of petroleum; and more.  One challenge is to implement these technologies at scales that will support both the countries that have already industrialized, and those that are industrializing now.  

Another would seem to be cost: dirty energy has long been cheap energy, while many clean energy technologies will need years to recoup their costs.  How can clean energy compete?

One way is to change how we do our accounting to calculate the benefits of the natural environment -- "ecosystem services" -- as well as the cost of pollution, and factor them into how we price energy. Take the air we breathe: Airborne soot (one byproduct of burning coal and gasoline) both causes and intensifies asthma.  American children lose over a million school days a year to asthma, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- which also means medical bills, and parents not going to their jobs.  One study concluded that in 2004 alone, parents of children with asthma lost around 15 million work days.

It's true that re-invention how we make and use energy is an immense task: fossil fuels are at the foundation of modern industrial civilization, and over the past half-century have become crucial to industrialized agriculture as well .  Still, much of America's inaction can be blamed on the automotive and oil industries --  wealthy and powerful for decades thanks to the energy status quo  -- and their political allies. 

Climate change remained very low on the public radar through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, even though a lot was going on around the world: An agreement to study and act on global warming was created at the United Nations "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.  Participants in a subsequent meeting in Kyoto in 1994 created an action plan -- the Kyoto Protocol -- which set greenhouse gas limits participating nations, and timetables for meeting them.

The Kyoto Protocol -- the most far-reaching environmental treaty in history  -- was adopted by nearly all the world's industrialized nations on July 25, 2001.  The U.S. has never ratified the treaty, however. While voicing support for Kyoto, the Clinton administration never threw any real weight behind ratification, thanks largely to  domestic realpolitik concerns.  The second Bush administration, which never supported ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, has termed it "fatally flawed" agreement because it did not cap carbon emissions from developing nations, including up and coming powerhouses like India and China, even as it imposed such caps and thus potential economic harm on the United States. ( Hot Air Over Kyoto, a 2002 article by former Senator Timothy Wirth, describes the politics of global warming in the late-Clinton/early-Bush eras.)  

Over the past decade, even proponents of carbon caps have become more vocal in criticizing the Kyoto agreement, saying its mandates are not ambitious enough to make any real difference to global warming.  With the accord expiring in 2012, an international effort is already underway to draft a new global warming treaty by the end of 2009.

However, despite years of federal inaction, the United States may finally be ready to step into line -- and maybe into leadership -- on taking action against global warming, because in the past few years, the politics of global warming have been transformed:  

States have stepped into the federal void: 850 mayors in 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have voted to support the Kyoto Accord, representing nearly 80 million citizens. Many states have formed regional initiatives to cut carbon emissions, such as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which recently held limited carbon allowance auction.

2008 has even witnessed a rare Congressional debate on a global warming bill, widely considered a prelude to regulating carbon emissions in the next presidential administration. 

Increasingly, business and corporate leaders have been taking stock of both the international support for climate action, and growing understanding of climate risk. Some are calling on the federal government to end regulatory uncertainties and enact carbon regulations. 

Thanks to factors as varied as nationwide food contamination scares and eco-conscious celebrities, "green" has surged into the mainstream consumer economy. Car dealers can't stock enough hybrid gas-electric cars, and organic is the fastest-growing sector of the food industry.  Target sells organic cotton bed sheets, and Home Depot is stocking certified sustainably harvested timber.  People are even greening their sex lives.  

The Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005 and its aftermath also primed the public to acknowledge the intensifying climate crisis. Although it's not scientifically possible to find a direct correlation between global warming and Katrina's destructive power,  the storm ripped the veil off our vulnerability to extreme weather (especially when compounded by  mismanagement, corruption, or human error).  And the conditions that created Hurricane Katrina fit scientific models of global warming that forecast greater storm intensity due to warming surface sea water.

Former Vice President Al Gore strode into the mass culture opening created by surging green consumerism and Hurricane Katrina with his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The film brought Gore's slick and informative presentation about global warming, which he had been giving live for years, to a national audience.  Promoted largely through a well-executed word-of-mouth campaign and good reviews, An Inconvenient Truth kicked off a national, public debate about the country's global warming policies. The film went on to win two Oscars, and has become the fourth-highest grossing documentary film since 1982. 

Now activists (including Gore himself), bloggers, political leaders, business leaders and entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and even a reformed oil man are trying to seize the moment to bring about an energy revolution, and political change.

 

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons