I would be remiss if I didn’t point you in the direction of this thoughtful and impassioned column today by Paul Krugman: Drilling, Disaster, Denial. Krugman is eloquent about our complacency. He attributes this, in part, to our many successes in fighting the visible manifestations of pollution: smog-enveloped cities, burning rivers, garbage barges, etc. He adds “This decline in concern would be fine if visible pollution were all that mattered – but it isn’t, of course. In particular, greenhouse gases pose a greater threat than smog or burning rivers ever did.”
Yet, the evidence is abundant that we are heading into a climate crisis that will devastate life on this planet, just as the spill in the Gulf of Mexico is going to devastate not only wildlife but the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people.
As frustrated as I was by President Obama’s pronouncement a little over a month ago on offshore drilling, I wanted to give the man and his administration some slack. He’s just trying to play some politics and win some votes, I reckoned. Same as John Kerry in the Senate with his climate and energy vehicle. But the blowout and spill in the Gulf of Mexico last week and the ensuing environmental devastation have had me really angry, and not just because of Obama’s opening up new, previously off-limits areas. It’s because we have still not learned the lessons of oil and coal. (Yes, and natural gas too, but that’s part of our ticket away from the fuel-based energy economy, at least for now.) Fossil fuels are inherently dirty and will kill us if we don’t stop using them. That’s a message that I’ve conveyed in many ways here at the blog. It is a message that many environmentalists like me have been trying to convey for decades. If the politicians will only listen a little better and think less about the votes – not to mention the money – then we might have a planet worth living on in a hundred years.
A student of mine quoted Rosalyn Carter recently in a note to me: “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go but ought to be.” It’s past time we started leading ourselves away from our dependence on fossil fuels.
