Climate Debate: Two Futures, One Choice

Now that Sens. John Kerry and Barbara Boxer have introduced their climate bill in the United States Senate, this fall will be all about the dogs. To get the 60 votes they need to pass a bill, progressive Democrats will be trying to turn Blue Dog Democrats into Green Dog Democrats.

Welcome to the dog days of autumn. Watch for progressives to offer milk bones, kibbles and bits to coax their more conservative colleagues into commitments that conscience alone should be sufficient to dictate.

The challenge for leaders in the Senate, as it was in the House, will be to prevent the climate bill from being negotiated into something far less than required to reinvent the American economy and reverse our greenhouse gas emissions, and to do both quickly.

Whether Senate leaders succeed in producing public policy that averts climate disaster will depend in large part on how they frame the debate.

Here are three suggestions:

1. Climate Change is Not a Matter of Belief

The fence-sitters in Congress must be made to understand that climate change is a matter of physics and chemistry and associated science and not something that can be bargained away.

We might quibble about precisely what global warming will do to us and how quickly it will happen, but the bedrock reality, already evident in the world around us, is that the atmosphere, the oceans and other natural systems vital to life have reached the limits of their tolerance of economic growth at any cost. They can’t absorb more damage, not without making the planet a very unpleasant place for life as we know it.

This may be a difficult fact for many senators to accept. Congress usually is an auction house and a horse-trading arena. But carbon emissions are to the atmosphere what virulent cancer cells are to the body. We can’t wish them away. We can’t bargain with them. If we want to survive, we must treat them as quickly and aggressively as we are able, with the very best tools we have.

2. There Is No Such Thing as Business as Usual

Senators who want to protect their constituents from change, including rust belt and fossil energy industries, are voting for an outcome that cannot happen. Senators who tell their constituents they can continue living and doing business in the old carbon-intensive economy are not leading. They are pandering.

The reality is, we face a stark choice between two futures.One is a future of unmitigated climate change that proves disastrous to ecosystems, our economy, our national security, our public health and our public debt as government at all levels struggles to deal with a nation of Katrinas – not just hurricanes, but extreme weather events, severe drought, the loss of coastal communities and infrastructure, killer heat waves, more pests and diseases, and so on. That is the future we will create by default if we try to prolong business as usual.

In the second future we still will see evidence of climate change – we’ve made that inevitable by refusing to act earlier – but we will have made the transition to an economy powered by clean resources and technologies, in which we have stopped relying on foreign and finite fuels, and in which sound environmental practice and socially responsible behavior are ingrained in all we do.

3. We Are Not an Island