The past year’s online columns have alternated between serious (not to say dull) and personal (not to say frivolous) topics. The serious columns are collected under the rubric of “The Long View,” while the others share the heading of “Objects in Mirror,” derived from the cautionary admonition engraved on the rear view mirrors of all American cars. This past Christmas a good friend and reader gave me a new sticker he suggested I mount in my bathroom, “Objects in Mirror Are Smarter Than They Appear.” Which got me to thinking of the smart things that happened this past year, hence this column is offered as an amalgam of both impulses: “Objects in Mirror Are Longer than They Appear.”
2012 in retrospect has all the makings of a watershed year in the sense that when you cross from one watershed into another, you often do not know it. When traveling through coastal Maine, for example, are any of us conscious of when we cross from the Presumpscot and into the Kennebec-Androscoggin watershed or where the boundary lies between the Penobscot and Machias watersheds? Gradually, however, it dawns on us that something around us is different.
It was nearly impossible this year for any American to ignore the accumulation of severe weather events that began with the eerie warm spell during March when temperatures throughout most of the country, even in Maine, soared into the 70s and 80s, followed by the most severe and extensive wildfires throughout Colorado and Arizona, followed by the long summer drought that has yet to loosen its grip on hundreds of agricultural counties in the heartland of America, followed by news that Arctic sea ice covered less of the vast reaches of the high latitudes than had ever before been observed, followed by news that ocean temperatures throughout the Atlantic and Gulf regions of the U.S. were on average about two degrees warmer than had ever occurred, capped off, of course, by the tragic ferocity of Super Storm Sandy that left a 500 mile swath of destruction in her path.
One of the interesting features of this succession of news stories revolves around whom the national media interviews to provide perspective on such weather stories. At the beginning of the year, most of the scientists who appeared on the news seemed to be saying that no single weather event such as the drought, the fires, the tornadoes, the super storm or the Arctic ice is necessarily the result of climate change, which from a narrow scientific point of view is, of course, true by definition. No single weather event can ever be called a climatic event. During the past three years, sober scientists, who have been roundly castigated after their internal debates about how to explain the likelihood and causes of climate change were sensationally leaked to the world in “Climategate,” have become even more conservative in their public pronouncements about climate change. James Hansen, to the contrary, notwithstanding.
But with Sandy, we seemed to have crossed a watershed. Both New York’s Mayor Bloomberg and New York’s Governor Cuomo said Super Storm Sandy was evidence that climate change is already here. Not just going to happen someday off in the hazy future, but already here—and it is an angry beast that we have poked with a stick, to use the now famous phrase of the grand old man of abrupt climate change research, oceanographer Wallace Broecker. In fact, Mayor Bloomberg, a mostly Republican-leaning billionaire, endorsed President Obama near the end of the campaign after Sandy precisely because he thought him more likely do something about the reality of climate change than his opponent, Mitt Romney, who joked about the subject during his acceptance speech at his party’s convention.
One of the memorable lines from the post-campaign naval gazing of pundits came from one time Democrat-turned Republican pollster-strategist Dick Morris, who observed that the 2012 vote proved “this is not your father’s country anymore.” He did not add the corollary, which I will supply: this is your children’s country now.
Generations X and Y are echoes of the demographic boom that rumbled into consciousness between 1946 and ’64 and left a huge mess in its wake in the form of a political super storm. The fiscal cliff fiasco is just the latest iteration of what is now considered to be the climate of political gridlock in Washington. May the gods forgive us, even if our children will not, as they inherit places across large regions of America that will become increasingly less productive and inhabitable and where the systems that support a way of life their parents enjoyed have already become increasingly expensive to maintain. Regardless of whether our children’s taxes will increase, they will be paying more for our generation’s failure to address the what scientists have been saying is the likelihood of climate change by making smaller cautionary investments during the past two decades.
A number of years ago, economists tried to quantify the level of precautionary investments that countries should make each year to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change. The figure was $250 billion per year, worldwide. Given that the U.S. was then the leading emitter of carbon dioxide that causes climate change, it was suggested that American investment should be on the order of $100 billion a year. Clearly, that’s a lot of money. But in the context of the amount money that we will have to raise in taxes or cut in spending per year to begin paying of the $16 trillion national debt, it is a manageable sum. And considering that the current alternative energy tax credit, which is expiring because Congress cannot get its act together to act is on the order of $10 billion per year, this is a truly paltry sum.
The single most important resolution we can make as a society in the New Year is to pay for our carbon habits. A tax on the order of $25 per ton of carbon emitted would cost each one of us hundreds if not thousands of dollars per year, depending on our level of consumption. But considering that taxes not only raise large sums of money that can be wisely (or foolishly) invested in the common good, they also act as a huge incentive to change our national behavior. The arguments against action are weakening. The only question is how much longer it will take for our leaders to recognize that we are all in a new world.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute based in Maine.