This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Maybe T. S. Eliot was wrong. Maybe the world ends in localized bangs that are easy to ignore until one of them sounds where you live. Cyclone Kenneth in Mozambique, an unheard of amount of snow followed by a bomb cyclone in the Midwest, mudslides in South Africa, wildfires in California, and two thousand-year storms in the space of two years in Ellicott City, Maryland are but a few examples of the bangs of the climate crisis as it intensifies.
They’re getting closer. Pennsylvania saw devastating floods last summer and 14 tornados last month, 7 times the normal number.
Our Hollow Men (and women) are politicians who respond by telling their bases what they want to hear.
In the past few weeks, Representative Daryl Metcalfe and Senator Scott Martin have invited climate deniers to Harrisburg to tell their voters, “There’s nothing to see here.” Martin has gone the additional step, as has his colleague Senator Mike Regan, of pushing ALEC-inspired bills framing pipeline protesters as the ‘real’ national security threats.
When they’re not hosting climate deniers and writing bills to strip citizens of their Constitutional rights, Republican legislators are busy trying to pass bills to strip environmental regulators of their authority to draft and enforce regulations.
Governor Wolf’s base demands more. A Franklin & Marshall poll last month showed that 68% of Pennsylvanians want the government to do more on climate change. According to the results, the vast majority of those who believe climate change is causing problems now are Democrats and independents. Earlier this week, a national CNN poll found that climate change is now the top issue for Democrats and left-leaning independents.
On Monday, Wolf announced the release of Pennsylvania’s climate action plan at the same time he announced that he’d just become the 24th governor to join the U.S. Climate Alliance. His message was, effectively, “Yes, climate change is a thing and we are ON it! I just joined the U.S. Climate Alliance and I’ve got this 231-page plan with lots of charts and tables and bullet points and, better yet, it says addressing climate change demands virtually nothing of you!” The recommendations to Pennsylvanians about how they could do their part consisted of tips like using energy efficient light bulbs and making sure their tires are pressurized.
Days after Wolf’s announcement, he made the 45th stop on his tour to pitch his severance tax plan called Restore Pennsylvania that would condemn the state to more decades of drilling and fracking, more pipelines, more processing plants, power plants, and export facilities, and countless more emissions. His plan would also put some of the money collected right back into the pockets of the industry to enable more pipeline construction and petrochemical hub development.
Politicians play to their bases. Leaders lead. We need leaders and we need a real climate plan.
Real leaders would attack the problem head on. Their aim would be to transition off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. They’d make a plan.
A real climate plan isn’t a slickly formatted presentation of carefully massaged data that overlooks key sources of emissions and aspires to do nothing more than meet what are widely understood to be inadequate climate targets. There’s not one mention of ethane, the greenhouse gas at the heart of the petrochemical boom, and no attention is given to the fact that the state has no idea how much methane is leaking from the hundreds of thousands of orphaned and abandoned wells that dot the state, some of them characterized as ‘super-emitters’ of methane.
A real climate plan would start by setting a deadline for achieving our climate goals and working backward to figure out how we get there. What mix of fuels will it take to make it to 100% renewable energy? What’s the proper way to phase out fossil fuels? For instance, does it really make sense to take an aging coal-fired power plant offline five years earlier than it would be decommissioned if it means replacing it with a costly new natural gas power plant built to last 40 years that will require a costly new pipeline built to last at least as long? What programs must we create to help all Pennsylvanians transition to renewable energy? How will we ensure that workers aren’t hurt in the transition? What job training do we need to provide? How will we address the impacts of the climate crisis we can’t avoid? How will the state ensure food security? How will the state provide assistance to Pennsylvanians devastated by floods? (And, no, funding recovery efforts with severance tax dollars from fracking that will just exacerbate climate change that will, in turn, intensify storms and lead to more flooding, as Restore Pennsylvania aims to do, isn’t the answer.)
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently reported that Governor Wolf and the public-private partnership he leads called Team Pennsylvania convened discussions about Pennsylvania’s energy future in 2017. The discussions were led by Royal Dutch Shell, the company that received $1.65 billion in tax breaks from the state to entice it to build an ethane cracker in Beaver County. Anya Litvak reported that “the phrase ‘climate change’ was ruled too much of a ‘trigger’ in their early sessions.” Resulting from the effort is a newly-created Pennsylvania Governor’s Office of Energy headed up by Denise Brinley, a former senior energy advisor at the Department of Community and Economic Development. Very little is available online about the newly created office. The only publication on Brinley’s LinkedIn page is entitled, not surprisingly, “The Job Multiplier Effect of Home Grown Energy Projects in PA: Shell's Ethane Cracker as a Catalyst for Growth.”
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.