COP 15 Day One - The Great Divide - America and Climate Change

As we approach COP15, the United States remains a polarized and split society on climate change. The factions are still strongly divided in their views on whether climate change is real, and if they accept that it is, many do not agree that the cause could possibly be anthropogenic. The impacts are so far away, both in time and space – even though they are getting closer by the day!
We have made progress in the House, but the Senate has many members that are still plagued with insecurities about making decisions related to climate change mitigation, when the changes will undoubtedly affect our society. We are also split when we debate the economic impacts of carbon reduction policies. Despite the years of study and analysis, and a fairly compelling Stern report from UK, many Americans are still paranoid that meddling with our “cheap” fossil fuel energy systems will wreak havoc on our ability to compete. We make all kinds of excuses to defend the merits of petroleum and coal.
At a more individual level, we are afraid of how price increases will limit spending power. Fear is an inherent characteristic of this resistance to change, and it was whipped into a political frenzy by our recent Administration. A recent ‘Climategate’ article in our local Santa Barbara News Press has once again initiated a blogging frenzy that exemplifies this paranoia. Even here in this very progressive community, we have a chasm of disagreement over how we should or should not step forward on climate change and energy at our local level. There’s talk of conspiracy on both sides, and the debate is so polarized that there is an element of truth both ways.
Red states resist change, blue states and their progressive communities are taking the lead. There is action in the United States, but it is fractured and inconsistent. It is this unintended consequence of failed federal leadership that is having an adverse affect on the competitiveness of our businesses that are trying their best to take action in the absence of a well defined, consistent playing field here in the US.
We are a consumer society, and we demand goods and services of all kinds to fulfill our voluptuous western lifestyle. We deplore the exploitation of our own immediate environment (NIMBY), but we turn a blind eye to the perils of globalization – a powerful change that swept the world in the nineties allowing the US to import products – especially from the Pacific rim countries at low cost and with no nasty impacts on our local environment.
We are blind to this disguised form of “leakage” where the carbon emissions needed to create those products are inadvertently borne by the developing countries that are so willing to produce these goods to fire up their economies in a way that should get them on track to emulate our own opulence.
It grieves me to hear our legislators pontificate that the US is willing to reduce emissions, only if “emission reduction targets are fair”. But what is fair when we now have half the world manufacturing the goods and services we enjoy, and absorbing a large share of “our” emissions into the bargain? Without supply chain accounting, supported by robust, transparent verification systems, the political arguments for fairness are shallow. “Fairness” also needs a measure of the “converge and contract” school of thinking if we are to even dream of an agreement that will survive and thrive.
The grand scale of carbon leakage, created by this vast wave of globalization, is exacerbated by the use of dirty coal as the source of energy in many of these developing countries. There are vast numbers of coal plants being built in the developing countries as we speak, but how many of them are being built to provide essential services for the Chinese, and how many are to satisfy the western world’s hunger for consumables?
Ironically, the very solutions we need to address the climate problem are the ones that will relieve us of our fears and help us climb out of the massive hole we are digging ourselves into, with our slavish commitment to our empire and the fossil energy systems which made it possible. We are precariously close to a collapse of this fragile empire, and we need a determined leadership to change direction in this country.
Obama “gets” all this, and his campaign was full of promise, but even he is struggling to turn the tide here and having to back-pedal just to keep climate as a top agenda priority. Thankfully, he has a few insightful journalists like Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria who also get this, and they are evangelistic in their efforts to raise awareness among the people at large.