We are living in a climate emergency, one of our own making. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when the use of coal in energy production and manufacturing took off, and into our present fossil fuel driven age, we have relied almost exclusive on fossil fuel extraction to power our economy. And we are now seeing the results.
Tens of millions of human lives around the world are in jeopardy, either directly from the impacts of violent storms, floods, fires, droughts, plagues, et., or indirectly from being forced from their homes due to sea level rise, high temperatures, violent conflict for resources, etc. And upwards of 60% of all life on Earth is currently at risk as we are no fully in the Sixth Mass Extinction. This extinction event is not from an asteroid, but rather from direct destruction of land, pollution of waters, and chemical alteration of our atmosphere caused by human activity.
The United States actually has a mixed, occasionally decent record (until the Administration of President Trump) on environmental protections. Public lands, in the form of not only national parks but forests, grasslands, wetlands, etc., are an incredible resource for our future. The Environmental Protection Agency, born of Republican activism in the 1970s, and the associated Clean Air and Water legislation of the same time period. Quick action, coordinated and pushed globally by the Reagan Administration, to curb the threat of ozone depletion from human created aerosol chemicals. The efforts under Bush and Obama to start coming to come to terms with the global threat of climate change, and eventually secure the Paris Accords of 2015. Yet to many U.S. citizens, “environmental protections” is a somewhat nebulous concept, mostly focused on local water and air quality in their own backyard (see Flint MI as an example of most U.S. persons level of concern). And protections for water and land resources that might get in the way of “development.” This misses the larger overall point, of course.
What we do in our own backyards has an impact thousands of miles away. The emissions we generate from our personal supply chains and household emissions contribute to loss of habitable land, droughts, crop failures, and resource conflicts on the other side of the planet. These are consequences of actions that we are directly responsible for. Our turning the ignition on a F250 directly impacts the composition of our atmosphere, as much as us dumping batteries and tires in an open field might contribute to poisoned water in a nearby stream that leads to a larger water drainage area. And it’s not just our own actions of course, but that of our nations. Many residents here carp about how it doesn’t matter what we do for climate if China or India don’t also reign in their emissions. This is a dangerous cop out, and additionally doesn’t address cumulative facts. While the USA is #2 or #3 in recent years carbon dioxide equivalents, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, we are by far the leading emitter. 397 gigatonnes of CO2 since 1750 as of early 2019, versus 214 gigatonnes from China. We are world’s greatest polluter throughout history. And we owe the world an equivalent share in cleaning up the mess we have all created.
But what can I do? This is the question so many of us struggle with. After all, we live in a nation where the entire economic engine is built on the violent extraction of fossil fuels from our planet. We rape Earth in order to drive capitalism. We steal resources from people who gain the least amount of financial benefit from the use of those resources. And those same people tend to suffer the most from the aftereffects – the pollution, the sea level rise, the loss of bio diversity, etc. – of said use. All of us, however, are somewhat trapped in that economic system. We need to eat – right now agriculture uses fossil fuel derived chemicals for fertilizers, and of course fossil fuels in its own logistics and transportation chain from animal feed to grocery store shelf. In the USA, agriculture accounted for 9.9% of total US GHG emissions in 2018, up 10.1% from 1990. Fast fashion and electronics life cycles contribute to transportation and waste pollution on a planetary scale. Many of our jobs are located miles from our place of residence, requiring driving personal transport vehicles that burn fossil fuels and emit their own levels of particulate pollution.
We have options on the individual household level. Install you own solar system and batteries for your household use. Modern systems can be had for a little over the price of a new roof, can generate enough power for your household electric usage, and with new batteries, can store a week or two of backup power. Buy an electric vehicle. While abandoning personal use vehicles should be the ultimate goal, especially in urban environments, if you must have a car, eliminating emissions on your commute and runs to the grocery store is a good place to start. Remove your yard. Yeah, that Kentucky Blue Grass has ZERO business as the dominant form of vegetation around your house. Research grasses and plants native to your region and seed the ground around your house with that. Or better yet, grow trees, fruits, and garden veggies native to your area instead. Then you can eat what you grow and share the extra. Shop local. Avoid chain stores. Online shopping is not evil but avoid Amazon and others whose major selling points are getting it to you in a day or two. Not everything has to be shipped by air. For that matter, avoid any company whose main priority is to cater to shareholders and board room profits, and not cater to making the world a more livable, survivable place. Vote. Vote for anyone that works to make the world a more livable, survivable place. Run for office yourself if no one in your area does.
But there are things outside of our individual lives that limit what we can do, at least with the impact needed on a global scale. Our governments have made it legal to act unethically and immorally, in a way that is directly counter to equality and the long-term survival of life on Earth. They have stripped power from the person and given it to the corporate. You, by yourself, might not be able to fix that. But there is power in numbers. Find like-minded people, get together, and demand change. March. Write letters. Call. Protest. Carpool. Build a community solar array. Grow community crops. But do whatever you do, do so loudly. Demand at the top of your lungs that we transition from a fossil fuel infrastructure to a zero green house gas infrastructure. No industrial system is perfect, but first things first. Our emissions must be brought as close to zero as possible.
Why do we need to do anything at all? Why does this matter? Say you don’t care about the plight of people losing their homes to the sea in Bangladesh, or indigenous peoples having the ground melt away under their feet in the Arctic, or even the fact that a 1/3 of Florida will be underwater in fifty years. Say you don’t care about anyone other than yourself. Minnesota is warming more rapidly than anywhere in the USA outside of Alaska. Imagine no ice fishing, or lakes filled with toxic algae all summer long. Imaging the forests dying off, the deer that you hunt moving north into Canada. Picture North Dakota turning into sandhill region, with portions of it subject to wildfires akin to California. Picture millions of US citizens, forced out of their homes in the south, racing north into the northern plains. Picture a wall going up on the northern border. To keep us in. If you don’t care about anyone else, think about how this will impact you.
Government and scholarly economists have estimated that climate change, if we do nothing, will cost tens of trillions of dollars’ worth of damage and loss to global GDPs. Anywhere from 250 million to one billion climate refugees will be forced from homes and homelands. Millions of lives could be lost. This is the price of doing nothing. It is a price I am not prepared to pay.
It will get bad. Much is already locked in. But we can stop it from getting worse. We can save so much. How much, or how little, is on us. Not only are our own present lives in our hands, but the lives of all future generations are as well.
No pressure.
Source Weblinks:
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-America-stacks-up-greenhouse-gas-emissions-180963560/
https://features.weather.com/us-climate-change/north-dakota/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/climate/climate-change-financial-markets.html
https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents/climate-change-nd.pdf
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27599/w27599.pdf