Climate champions hard to find
The searing heat has persuaded many Southerners — even the hardy souls used to soaring summer temperatures — to forsake their evening bike rides, dog walks and baby-carriage strolls. Dinner on the patio? Not unless you want to eat at 9 p.m. Recently (June 14), more than 100 million Americans — close to a third of us — were under advisories for extreme heat, which can cause severe illness.
But the heat wave isn’t the only extreme weather that Americans have experienced over the past couple of weeks. Record flooding, which made roads impassible, shut down Yellowstone National Park. Violent thunderstorms knocked out power in the Midwest and spun off tornadoes. Fires raged in the desert Southwest, where there is no longer a predictable fire “season.”
Human-caused global warming is now so obvious that even Republicans — at least those who still cling to the world of verifiable facts — have given up calling it a “hoax.” But that hardly means they are willing to do anything about it. Few of us are, it seems. The United States is the world’s second-biggest emitter, after China, of the greenhouse gases that warm the planet. Gasoline prices are in orbit, so this should be a perfect time to persuade Americans to switch to green energy — hybrid vehicles, solar panels, wind farms. Instead, the Biden administration and Congress are doing next to nothing to ameliorate climate change.
President Joe Biden has been cowed by Republicans blaming him for skyrocketing gasoline prices, so he has made the mistake of encouraging more drilling for oil and gas. In his first year in office, the president approved more new permits for drilling on public lands than his predecessor, Donald Trump, did in his first year.
That was the wrong move — politically and practically. Even if the oil moguls were to rush out and start more drilling quickly, Big Oil sells its black gold wherever the prices are highest. Companies are under no obligation to sell in the United States to bring down prices here.
In political terms, Republicans are going to bash the president no matter what he does. They point to artificially low gas prices during Trump’s tenure, when the price of a gallon was under $1 in a few states. But that was due to the COVID shutdown, which kept Americans at home. No one was driving, so there was a surplus of gasoline, driving prices down. We won’t see a return to those
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prices in normal times.
Biden did have the gumption to push through an infrastructure plan that included billions for clean-energy-related investments. Still, much of the money in that plan goes to protect against the effects of climate change, not to stop it. Biden had planned for billions more in his “Build Back Better” plan. Those investments might have slowed emissions, but he couldn’t get the proposal through Congress, where even a few Democrats refused to back it.
Then there are the fossil fuel moguls. Never underestimate their desire to keep getting richer, even if they destroy the planet in the process. While oil companies run advertising campaigns touting their commitment to a green future, they less publicly invest hundreds of millions to prevent that future. They fund the campaigns of politicians who thwart green energy proposals in Congress and state legislatures. They also fund local initiatives to beat back green energy projects.
In Maine, for example, voters rejected a promising clean energy project, one that would have, by some estimates, taken the equivalent of 700,000 cars off the roads annually. The project involved building an electric transmission line that would have brought hydroelectric power from Canada into New England. There were local environmentalists who opposed the project, claiming that the line would have hurt fragile aquatic ecosystems, but the big boost for the opposition came from energy companies, which spent $24 million to persuade voters to ditch the project.
This doesn’t portend well for the future of planet Earth or its inhabitants. If we can’t find a way to wean ourselves off fossil fuel at these prices, we’ll be driving into a much, much hotter future.
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