While giving a speech in Seattle, Washington in the fall of 1969 Democratic U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson casually mentioned the idea of a national day of environmental education. Shortly after he hired a small staff of young activists to turn his idea into reality. Seven months later, on April 22, 1970, over 12,000 independently organized Earth Day events were held around the country. There was no organization organizing events or providing implementation support and guidance; only a small staff promoting an idea. They did their job well; schools closed so that students could participate in local activities or provided special educational opportunities, and many colleges held special environmental sessions that proved so popular that they were expanded and incorporated into the curriculum. Even Congress adjourned for the day so that its members could be seen participating in their home districts. Within three years, the Republican Congress passed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and established the Environmental Protection Agency. Subsequent Congresses in the remainder of the Nixon administration and in the Ford administration passed a number of important environmental laws. Those days are long gone. In spite of the fact that the United States and the rest of the world is facing the most dire environmental crises in our history, climate change, todays’ Republicans are intent on dismantling existing environmental legislation and preventing any new environmental legislation.
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change was adopted in December, 2015 with a goal of limiting “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” More recently the UN has stressed the desirability of staying below 1.5oC through the end of the century due to a better knowledge of extreme weather impacts. But, the UN has not established any critera for determining when we have passed the 1.5oC threshold. As the global monthly average temperatures was 1.52oC above the established per-industrial level for a full year by January 2024, and since each of the last nine months has set a global record for being the warmest in history, it would appear that the 1.5oC threshold has already been passed, just nine years after it was established.
If the world continues with currently planned emissions we will cross the 2oC threshold before 2050, not the end of the century.
Fossil fuels have raised the standard of living for societies since the industrial revolution and continue to do so. Fossil fuels provide 80% or our global energy. They are cheap and readily available in most locations, making it difficult to transition to cleaner forms of energy. Even the United States is today extracting more oil than any nation in history, and has issued enough long-term leases on Federal lands on coastal regions to ensure that it will continue to do so. Meanwhile temperatures are increasing, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, wide-spread and violent. We are rapidly leaving behind the possibility of mitigation and facing an future where adaptation is our only option – if we continue on our current course.
Two recent surveys by the Pew Research Center show that 46% of Americans believe that human activity is the primary reason why the Earth is warming, while 26% say warming is mostly caused by natural patterns in the environment. And another 14% deny that our climate is changing. On another question 37% of Americans responding to the surveys said that addressing climate change should be a top priority for the President and Congress, while 34% felt that it was important, but a lower priority. Overall these numbers offer little support for the idea that we can effectively address climate change by voluntary, individual action.
As other surveys shown near universal belief of a changing climate, and the role of mankind among Democrats, while Republicans tend to believe the opposite, who we vote for might well be more important than what we drive.
