[Mb-civic] Climate, the Absent Issue

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

This month-old article, from before the election, is of course still as 
relevant as ever....Clearly for our kids' and grandkids' sake, we need to 
continue to pursue understanding and to demand action on this issue, 
which of course is intertwined with the general deadly dysfunction of our 
rulers..


comment | Posted October 13, 2004

Climate, the Absent Issue
by Mark Hertsgaard 

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=hertzgaard
 
Every once in a while there is good news in this troubled world, and the 
choice of Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai as this year's 
Nobel Peace Prizewinner is one such moment. The timing could not be 
more apt. The choice of Maathai was announced near the end of a US 
presidential campaign that has resolutely ignored the greatest danger 
facing humanity, global climate change. Her selection thus stands as an 
implicit rebuke to the environmental backwardness of America's political 
and media classes. It also represents an explicit assertion that, as the 
Nobel committee put it, "Peace on Earth depends on our ability to 
secure our living environment." 

The Bush Administration remains in denial about climate change even 
though its closest overseas ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said 
in September that climate change is the single biggest long-term 
problem his nation faces. Blair's top scientific adviser, David King, has 
gone further, declaring that climate change is the biggest threat 
civilization has ever faced--bigger even than the global terrorism that 
dominates headlines and obsesses George W. Bush. King warned in 
July that there is now enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to melt 
all the ice on earth, which would put most of the world's biggest cities 
under water, starting with low-lying metropolises like New York, London 
and New Orleans. "I am sure that climate change is the biggest problem 
that civilization has had to face in 5,000 years," King said. Even Shell 
Oil chairman Ron Oxburgh admitted in June that he is "really very 
worried for the planet." 

Climate change is to the twenty-first century what the nuclear arms race 
was to the twentieth: the overriding threat to humanity's continued 
existence on this planet. And it is already killing people. In the summer 
of 2003, some 15,000 people died in France from an unprecedented 
heat wave. No single weather event can be definitively attributed to 
climate change, but such heat waves are exactly what scientists expect 
as warming intensifies. If climate change is not moderated, more will die 
in years to come--either directly, through more destructive storms and 
droughts, or indirectly, through declines in food production and the 
spread of infectious disease. 

Yet except for two brief references to the Kyoto Protocol during the 
Bush-Kerry debates, climate change has been absent from the 
presidential campaign. Kerry criticized Bush for walking away from 
Kyoto without mentioning that he himself also opposes the protocol 
(though Kerry pledges that, as President, he would re-open negotiations 
and fix what he considers its flaws). Bush sounded almost proud of 
having rejected Kyoto, which he claimed, incorrectly, would hurt the US 
economy. 

Although parts of the media have woken up to the danger--Business 
Week and National Geographic ran cover stories on it this past 
summer--most US journalists still don't get it. At best, they see climate 
change as just one of many environmental issues. At worst, they are 
still fooled by industry propaganda casting doubt on the science behind 
claims of climate change. Television networks approach the issue with 
a particular conflict of interest. As Robert Kennedy Jr. has observed, 
cars are the leading source of US greenhouse gas emissions, but car 
ads are the leading revenue source for US television networks. 

Thus climate change remains marginal to the political debate in the 
United States. Public awareness and policy-making lag years behind 
the rest of the world, as the impending implementation of the Kyoto 
accord, without US participation, illustrates. (Now that Russia supports 
Kyoto, the United States and Australia are the only major industrial 
countries outside the protocol.) Some state and local governments are 
reacting; California recently required that automakers increase fuel 
efficiency 30 percent by 2009. But progress is incremental when it 
needs to come at hyper-speed. 

Which is where the example of Wangari Maathai offers hope. The 64-
year-old biologist is Kenya's assistant minister for environment and 
natural resources, but she has spent most of her life as a grassroots 
activist and critic of the former US-supported dictatorship of Daniel Arap 
Moi. Maathai's great innovation was to create the Green Belt 
Movement. This radical but practical program pays poor women to plant 
tree seedlings in their communities; 30 million trees have reportedly 
been planted since the program began in the late 1970s. 

The selection of Maathai for the peace prize generated controversy in 
Norway from critics who said that honoring an environmentalist diluted 
the meaning of peace work. But that criticism was contradicted by a 
United Nations report issued a week earlier, showing how deforestation 
and water scarcity--which are exacerbated by global warming--have 
repeatedly led to armed conflict in Africa. 

Maathai's Green Belt Movement is based on a holistic analysis of the 
intertwined problems of war, poverty, environmental degradation and 
lower status for women. (Kenya had one of the highest birth rates in the 
world when Green Belt was founded in 1977, in part because women 
thought their only option in life was to bear children.) Green Belt puts 
money in women's pockets, boosting their independence and the 
educational prospects for their children. Meanwhile, the planting of trees 
replenishes the forests that are the foundation of Kenya's agricultural 
productivity and the primary fuel source for its poor. And thanks to 
photosynthesis, the new trees also fight global warming by absorbing 
carbon dioxide. 

Like the best political ideas, Wangari Maathai's Green Belt program is 
specific yet universal, grounded in intellect but insistent upon action. Its 
underlying principles are the very ones needed to build a sustainable, 
and therefore peaceful, future: restoration of ravaged ecosystems, 
expansion of economic opportunity for the poor, a guarantee of equal 
justice for all and strengthening of democracy. The Nobel committee 
lauded Maathai for work that has transformed the lives of countless 
Kenyans. But her achievements also suggest how the rest of the world, 
including the vastly richer United States, can combat climate change, if 
only it wakes up and tries. 

--------


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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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