A common theme in the federal debt debate has been to reduce the deficit for the sake of the children. Saving people’s children, their children’s children, and so on. I am 18. I believe I count as one of those children.
Let me tell you what about our current government concerns me the most. It’s not the debt. It’s not Afghanistan. It’s actually not even the crony capitalism.
It’s our handling of the environment.
We will fix our economy. We will eventually repair our image from the wars in the Middle East. Next year, or maybe five or ten years from now, we will rid our government of much of the extreme corruption we have been witnessing. However, we will not be able to repair our planet.
Climate change has the capacity to essentially demolish much of what people have built over the past 6000 years. Those countries that aren’t directly affected by rising sea levels or extreme weather will feel terrible effects from the resulting millions of refugees and political uproar. Climate change will alter civilization as we know it. Our debt, our invasions, our corruption, and any other political issue outside of nuclear war doesn’t have the ability to alter our world as much as climate change.
Yet the environment is still treated as a side issue. Due to the immense success of campaigning by the right, less than half of Americans believe in anthropogenic climate change. Corporations have been shortsighted enough to jeopardize the very existence of our country in order to maintain their status quo for the next few years, and many politicians have been all too eager to help. Even Obama, who arguably campaigned the hardest on the environment out of any presidential candidate – outside of maybe Al Gore – was still far more focused on our short-term problems. Who can blame him? Public opinion is not focused on such issues.
However, they certainly should be, and now more than ever. As a rec list diary yesterday discussed, ocean methane bubbling has already started to occur. Numerous other feedbacks, including ice and permafrost melt, could easily spin our greenhouse gas levels out of control. I believe people on this site reading this diary understand the implications of such events, unlike the majority of American public. A rise of CO2 levels to 500 ppm or above – which is more than feasible based solely off of current anthropogenic emissions, not even including different feedbacks – would have enormous effects. We have already greatly exceeded the CO2 concentrations seen over the past hundreds of thousands of years. The rate of increase is also unprecedented, unseen for countless years. The last time such rapid increases were seen, there were extreme changes in climate soon after.
Many people think this is just hyperbole alarmist speak. I wish it were. Science, that most extraordinary of enterprises, has shown that this is what will happen. There is debate over how long or how extreme some of the changes will be, but the fact that intense changes will occur is not debated.
This will happen, unless we act incredibly fast. As was recently quoted on this site, the extraction of oil from the Canadian tar sands would be “game over” for the climate according to one scientist. This is indicative of the problem as a whole. We haven’t quite dug the hole so deep that we can’t get out just yet; we still have a very short window of time to turn things around. Unfortunately, I can’t say that I am terribly confident that our government will be able to make the necessary changes. Agreement at the Durban conference is a good first step (assuming our congress will actually get off it’s god-forsaken ass and ratify it) but it won’t end there. Our country can’t be run the same way anymore. Fossil fuels are intricately integrated into our system, and we are incredibly dependent on them.
The free market cannot help us. The free market is not designed to incentivize people to act on their interests beyond their own life span. But what we have discovered with the debt debate is that we can convince people to act on the interests of their children. Using our wonderful system of representative democracy, we must get our government to act. We must show our leaders that this is what we care about. We know we have other problems right now, but our problems will be far, far worse if we ignore our environment.
2012 will be my first year voting. I hope that I will have a selection of candidates that will be fighting for my future. Campaign season is beginning now, and this community must now pursue true action. Tell your representative at any level, local, state, or federal, that you want to see policies that will save the youngest generations of this nation.
11:05 PM PT: Thanks for the recs and comments everyone! It seems I made the rec list while I was away. As one who is somewhat of a lurker, I am honored.