Time to tackle things on climate change ‘to do’ list
Climate Change Part II, In which I promised to talk about solutions:
One of the things I forgot to say in my Thanksgiving column that we should be grateful for here in Delaware County is the high quality of our public water and sewer systems and our abundance of clean drinking water.
This is not the case in many regions of the United States or the world.
In eastern Kentucky’s Martin County, for example, water runs brown from the taps and smells like diesel fuel because of deteriorating, leaky pipes that can no longer maintain pressure to keep contaminants out.
Drinking water is at the very top of the list of resources we need to proactively protect all around the world because humans cannot live without water.
Can we do anything about climate change or is it too late?
The window is sliding shut but we can still get our fingers under the sash.
Here in America we’ve done some backsliding. We were well on our way with hybrid and electric cars 15 years ago, until gas got cheap and everyone decided SUVs were the way to go.
It does not help that we have a willfully ignorant president who is pulling us out of the Paris Accords and racing to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Continental Shelf to oil drilling.
He is also doing his darndest to reverse decades of U.S. clean air and water regulations and is now proposing new rules that would gut the Clean Air Act.
Trump’s horrible leadership on this issue is costing us and the rest of the world valuable time.
But climate change will go on long after Trump is gone (soon, please) and his true believers have retreated to their local watering holes in their gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks to “debate” the issue.
The good news is that many countries, local and state governments, public utilities and environmental groups are working to deal with their own local air and water issues, which necessarily means they are working to abate the effects of global warming.
Miami, Fla., is raising its busiest roadways to minimize the sunny day flooding it now routinely experiences from tidal surges.
In El Paso, Texas, the Rio Grande River has all but dried up, and the city of 700,000 is now building a “closed loop” plant to purify and recycle sewer water into drinking water.
And private industry is jumping in when it sees there is a dollar to be made (thus creating jobs as well).
In North Carolina, Smithfield Foods and Dominion Energy are launching a $125 million, 10-year joint venture to turn pig manure into electricity by capturing and burning methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
That’s nice, but it is probably costing the federal, state and local governments much more than $125 million right now to clean up the lakes, rivers and reservoirs that were overrun with pig manure and coal ash washed out of lagoons in Hurricane Florence.
In July an Irish-Canadian electrical generating company placed the first turbine in an arm of the Bay of Funday to harness its powerful tidal surges to generate electricity.
There are 19 profit-making desalinization plants up and running in Texas to take the salt out of brackish groundwater. The once oil-rich Texas produces the most wind power of any U.S. state.
Pennsylvania could learn from Texas. We should have had a wind turbine on every mountain top by now and only politics prevents it.
Instead of withdrawing GM’s subsidies for electric cars, we need to do everything we can to electrify everything and then to use renewable energy to power the generating plants.
Instead of subsiding the oil and gas industries to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars every year, we need to get away from fossil fuel almost completely.
We’re going to have to radically increase renewable energy so that wind and solar are supplying 85 percent of global electricity by 2050, or earlier.
That’s a real hard sell to the workers building pipelines through Delaware County and storage tanks at Marcus Hook, but it’s going to happen because, for us to survive as a species, it must.
Yes, technological change costs jobs, but it also generates them.
We are going to have to develop technology to not only diminish the amount of greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere and oceans but also to capture and remove carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from our biosphere.
We’re going to have to stop countries like Brazil and Indonesia from cutting downs their rain forests – the lungs of the world – for palm oil and cattle.
There will be taxes and there will be pain and maybe our lifestyle won’t be so lavish, but the alternative is unthinkable.
U.S. taxpayers must continue to provide relief to victims of hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes and floods.
But we must also reform the national flood insurance program so we are not constantly paying to rebuild the same house on the same barrier island or flood plain.
And we urgently need to rebuild our electrical grid.
Nothing is impossible. We just need the political will to do it.
We’re going to have lead from behind.
Over the last two elections, our politicians have not wanted to talk about climate change.
We’re going to have to insist loudly and repeatedly that our leaders make it a to priority.
We had the political will to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority to electrify America’s rural areas during the Great Depression.
We put a man on the moon.
We tackled acid rain with a cap and trade program and repaired the hole in the ozone layer by banning certain hydrocarbons.
I have faith that we will do what it takes to curb the worst effects of climate change, if for no other reason than because we simply have no choice.
We just can’t leave it on the bottom of the “to do” list much longer.