Paul Krugman got me
thinking about climate change this morning.
(Time) Not that the bearded oracle
was writing about global warming. Krugman’s newest New York Times column was
about that other scary and impenetrable subject: the fiscal crisis. But while
politicians in the U.S. especially seem helpless to do anything about climate
change—or really even talk about it all that much—it seems to be impossible for
anyone in Washington to allow more than five minutes to pass without panicking
about the impending fiscal cliff. (Just in case you don’t know what the fiscal
cliff is, check out this brief primer on the topic by my colleague Michael
Grunwald.)
To Krugman, though, the
panic over the fiscal crisis has a lot more to do with branding than it does
with economic reality:
So let’s step back for a
minute, and consider what’s going on here. For years, deficit scolds have held
Washington in thrall with warnings of an imminent debt crisis, even though
investors, who continue to buy U.S. bonds, clearly believe that such a crisis
won’t happen; economic analysis says that such a crisis can’t happen; and the
historical record shows no examples bearing any resemblance to our current
situation in which such a crisis actually did happen.
If you ask me, it’s time
for Washington to stop worrying about this phantom menace — and to stop listening
to the people who have been peddling this scare story in an attempt to get
their way.
What’s the climate
connection? The fiscal crisis and global warming are both, to put it bluntly,
problems for tomorrow. Even if Congress can’t come to an agreement to avert the
fiscal cliff, the economy won’t collapse immediately and the U.S. will still be
able to borrow money, just as climate change won’t render the world
uninhabitable next year the world can’t reduce carbon emissions overnight
anyway. As a society—and as a species—we tend not to be very good at addressing
problems of tomorrow, but in one very important respect, the climate cliff and
the fiscal cliff are very different. The Washington establishment—including
large chunks of both parties—is convinced that something must be done now about
the U.S.’s long-term fiscal problems, and a lot of Americans agree with them.
They disagree on what to do, but no serious politician would simply dismiss the
threat of the fiscal crisis. Yet Washington remains largely unmotivated on
global warming, despite growing evidence that we could be facing a truly
frightening future. Why does one long-term problem scare us, and the other
remain ignored?
That’s a question worth
pondering at the annual U.N. climate talks, which begin this week in the Doha.
The fact that the summit is being held in oil and gas-rich Middle Eastern
country of Qatar—which seems to have the world’s largest per-capita carbon
footprint—is perhaps indicative of just how little is expected to be
accomplished. The main point of contention is the status of a treaty that is
now more than 15 years old—the Kyoto Protocol, which was signed in 1997 and
which bound developed nations (with the exception of the U.S., which never
ratified the treaty, and in fact rejected it by a stunning 95-0 vote in the
Senate) to reduce their carbon emissions by 2012.
That year, of course, is
almost over, and it still isn’t clear what—if anything—will succeed Kyoto. Last
year, delegates at the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change talks gave
themselves a 2015 deadline to come up with a new, broader global deal—but
deadlines are made to be broken, especially by governments. European nations
and developing countries would like to see the Kyoto Protocol extended in the
meantime, but with the U.S. already out and Japan and Russia against extension,
it’s hard to see that happening.
Rich countries have
supplied nearly $30 billion in climate grants and loans to poor countries since
2009, but those commitments will expire this year as well. A $100 billion Green
Climate Fund for poor countries that was proposed at the Cancun summit in
2010—where the tropical weather seemed to make the delegates unusually
agreeable—has yet to materialize. That could mean, as Tim Gore of the British
charity Oxfam put it, that we’re about to head over a “climate fiscal cliff”
that could see the world actually scaling back on climate action even as
humanity continues slouching towards a hotter and more dangerous future.
It should be clear by now
that the U.N. process is almost certainly never going to deliver the kind of
breakthrough treaty that environmentalists have longed for. That’s partially
because climate change itself is such an intractable problem, wedded as
greenhouse gases are to the global energy system. Nor does it help that the
countries that will emit the bulk of the world’s greenhouse gases over the
coming decades are developing nations
like India and China—which means that virtually the only way to achieve rapid
carbon reductions would involve slowing economic growth in the nations that
need it most. (India alone has more people in poverty than all of sub-Saharan
Africa.)
And even beyond climate change, governments are struggling to come up
with multi-lateral solutions for multi-lateral problems. Witness the European
Union’s continuing inability to agree on a plan of attack for its own
wide-ranging fiscal problems—or for that matter, at the push for secession
within countries like Spain (Catalonia), Great Britain (Scotland) and to a much
lesser extent, even the U.S. (Texas, and just about every state that went for
Mitt Romney). If a relatively united supra-national group like the E.U. can’t
figure out to save itself, how can the 191 vastly different nations represented
at the U.N. summit in Doha agree on anything?
Climate action may work
better on a smaller scale, through the actions of individual governments or
groups of like-minded nations. But those local actions have to be coordinated
to make a real difference, and diplomacy as usual just can’t seem up to the
job—as is starkly illustrated by the new
U.N. Environment Programme report on the growing “emissions gap” between
current environmental practices and the
cuts that need to be made to avert some of the worst-case climate scenarios.
The climate crisis is as real as the fiscal one—perhaps even more so. But we
seem set on ignoring it, even as we go headfirst over the cliff.
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