It isn’t just the price of gas

Amaniacal autocrat invades a neighboring nation and sets the world on edge. A major scientific report warns that global warming may be reaching the point beyond our ability to adapt to it. Oh, and the price of gas went up.

Which of those developments will capture the American public — and the American electorate? A war that’s thousands of miles away, and doesn’t involve U.S. troops? A climate crisis that for decades so many conservative politicians and pundits have convinced millions of people is a hoax? Or the annoying reminder on seemingly every street corner that it’s going to cost us more, right here and now, to get to work, the grocery store, and the mall?

Even more importantly, will we realize how all these issues are intertwined, and how dangerous quick and easy solutions can be in the long run?

This isn’t abstract stuff. The price of gas — already rising with crude oil amid increased global demand as the COVID -19 pandemic appears to be waning — spiked anew as Russia, a major supplier of oil and natural gas, came under severe sanctions for invading Ukraine. An already volatile market was made all the more so by a belligerent, erratic Vladimir Putin.

The answer is not to appease Mr. Putin, but to punish and isolate him and his country and, hopefully, make Russia understand that this aggression is not in its people’s best interests. Otherwise, we can expect more of this behavior — and more pain at the pump any time Mr. Putin or some other leader of an oil- or gas-rich nation decides to pick a fight.

While the world has watched the terror in Ukraine, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new report containing its most dire warning yet: It says the window to prevent catastrophic, irreversible climate change is rapidly closing, and with it humanity’s ability to adapt to the consequences. The nearly 3,700-page report focuses on the vulnerabilities we face because of the interdependence of human societies and natural systems — and on the diminishing opportunities to slow or reverse these impacts.

This doesn’t make for neat political sound bites. It’s far easier — as we see in news conferences and statements from conservative lawmakers, politicians, think tanks and pundits right here in New York — to decry the push to wean just this one state off fossil fuels as a threat to cheap gas. They’ve fixated on one key proposed solution: putting a price on the carbon pollution that substantially drives global warming, which will indeed make fossil fuels more expensive, but also make green options more economical.

But the choice isn’t between a few cents a gallon (which can be passed back to consumers in the form of rebates) and the good old days. It’s between getting off fossil fuels or threatening our planet and everything living on it with more floods, droughts, rising seas, wildfires, deadly heat waves, species extinctions, increasingly tighter supplies of food and potable water, and quite likely wars over the relatively best that remains.

We don’t look forward to the next trip to the pump any more than anyone else does. But we accept the price of stopping a madman with nuclear weapons and ensuring a safer world. And we are ready to share the challenge of moving to a more sustainable energy future. Cheap gas, after all, is worth nothing if it means ruining the only planet we have.