How to Win the War on Global Warming

Instead of crawling under the bed w/ a bottle of the strongest stuff I can find and bemoaning the utter horrible destructive insane waste of the last 8+ years, I'm ready to look ahead to a time when we might have a president w/ a brain, some integrity, and a vision of positive government. It could happen.

Considering the looming environmental crisis, we've got to get serious fast.

How to Win the War on Global Warming.

[F]or a country that rightly cites patriotism as one of its core values, we're taking a pass on what might be the most patriotic struggle of all. It's hard to imagine a bigger fight than one for the survival of the country's coasts and farms, the health of its people and the stability of its economy—and for those of the world at large as well.

The rub is, if the vast majority of people increasingly agree that climate change is a global emergency, there's far less consensus on how to fix it. Industry offers its plans, which too often would fix little. Environmentalists offer theirs, which too often amount to naive wish lists that could cripple America's growth. But let's assume that those interested parties and others will always be at the table and will always—sensibly—demand that their voices be heard and that their needs be addressed. What would an aggressive, ambitious, effective plan look like—one that would leave us both environmentally safe and economically sound?

Forget precedents like the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, or the Apollo program that put men on the moon—single-focus programs both, however hard they were to pull off. Think instead of the overnight conversion of the World War II�era industrial sector into a vast machine capable of churning out 60,000 tanks and 300,000 planes, an effort that not only didn't bankrupt the nation but instead made it rich and powerful beyond its imagining and—oh, yes—won the war in the process.

Halting climate change will be far harder than even that. One of the more conservative plans for addressing the problem, by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala of Princeton University, calls for a reduction of 25 billion tons of carbon emissions over the next 50 years—the equivalent of erasing nearly four years of global emissions at today's rates. And yet by devising a coherent strategy that mixes short-term solutions with farsighted goals, combines government activism with private-sector enterprise and blends pragmatism with ambition, the U.S. can, without major damage to the economy, help halt the worst effects of climate change and ensure the survival of our way of life for future generations. Money will get us part of the way there, but what's needed most is will. "I'm not saying the challenge isn't almost overwhelming," says Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund and co-author of the new book Earth: The Sequel. "But this is America, and America has risen to these challenges before."

Read further for recommendations. Share with friends. I really think that this is one of those issues on which Americans can find common ground. I've given up on the apocalypse-loving weirdos and the intractable capitalists, but it's possible that we could reach even them. Hopefully that pull-together spirit hasn't completely left us (though, to be honest, I do despair).

Maybe this will help: How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.

Comments

[Mick]

There was a tremendous recession after the war ended followed by massive inflation and unemployment.

You might be confusing the age of highways and suburbs for WWII.

[ae]

Mick, thx for your comment. I hope you'll post a comment on the original post from which I drew that excerpt. You can link to it from the "How to Win the War on Global Warming" headline above the excerpt.

[ae]

Mick, hmm, it looks like they're not taking comments on that Time article, but you can email the author Bryan Walsh by clicking on his name. Thx again for visiting.