No one is going to claim that the Bush Administration is entirely responsible for global warming. This is a process that's been going on for years. If you want to point fingers at presidents, the place to start is Ronald Reagan, who put the kibosh on all efforts started during the Carter Administration to explore alternative sources of energy.
In recent years, though, Americans have blithely been burning fossil fuels at a ferocious rate, buying ever-bigger SUVs and ever-larger houses with cathedral ceilings that are impossible to heat or cool. And now the Christofascist Zombie Brigade can deny it all they want, and the Bush Administration can silence scientists, but there's no denying that the effects of global warming are here, and it is not going to be fun:
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.
It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry -- a Category 5 storm with wind bursts that reached 180 m.p.h. -- exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast -- when the emergency becomes commonplace -- something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.
The image of Earth as organism -- famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James Lovelock -- has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.
Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.
But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has finally got a bellyful of us.
Captain Codpiece gave lip service to global warming in his State of the Union address this year, but given his association with the oil industry, I don't have any faith that he or his party are in a position to implement the kind of visionary, out-of-the-box solutins that would be required. What we need is a Marshall Plan on global warming -- a devotion of resources and brainpower -- and money -- the kind of money we're currently spending like drunken sailors in Iraq. A party dominated by people who expect to be raptured home to Jesus any day now is not going to take its stewardship of the planet seriously.
And when America's leaders don't take the threat seriously, Americans don't take it seriously. Everywhere you go, there are more SUVs, more McMansions, more sprawl, more communities being built where you have to drive to get a quart of milk.
Global warming is no joke, but Americans are still treating it as if it just means that inland suburbanites will finally have waterfront properties.
Meanwhile, the New York Times editorializes today on the Republicans still showering Federal cash on the oil industry in the form of tax breaks:
A public already groaning under huge deficits does not need more red ink. An oil industry already rolling in record profits does not need more tax breaks. But both are sure to happen unless some way can be found to claw back from a decade's worth of Congressional and administrative blunders, aggressive lobbying and industry greed.
According to a detailed account in Monday's Times by Edmund L. Andrews, oil companies stand to gain a minimum of $7 billion and as much as $28 billion over the next five years under an obscure provision in last year's giant energy bill that allows companies to avoid paying royalties on oil and gas produced in the Gulf of Mexico.
The provision received almost no Congressional debate, in part because Congress was lazy and in part because the provision was misleadingly advertised as cost-free. The giveaway also seemed a natural sequel to a measure passed in 1995 to provide royalty relief. But that measure came at a time when oil prices, and new investment in oil and gas exploration, had declined. It also included an important safety valve: in any year when oil prices exceeded a threshold, about $34 a barrel, companies would have to resume paying royalties.
However, in what appears to have been a bureaucratic blunder, the Clinton administration omitted that crucial escape clause in all offshore leases signed between the government and the oil companies in 1998 and 1999. It seemed a harmless mistake at a time when oil prices were still below $20 a barrel. But times changed. Prices have been above the cutoff point since 2002, and an estimated one-sixth of the production in the Gulf of Mexico is still exempt from royalties for no good reason whatsoever.
That blunder was compounded, again and again. First, a court decision in 2003 effectively doubled the amount of oil and gas exempted from royalties. Then the Bush administration offered special exemptions for "deep gas" producers, drilling more than 15,000 feet below the sea bottom. Then came the 2005 energy bill, which essentially locked in the old incentives for five more years.
At least one oil company has the grace to be embarrassed by all this. "Under the current environment," one Shell official told Mr. Andrews, "we don't need royalty relief."
But some companies seem to want more. A lawsuit filed by Kerr-McGee Exploration and Production would greatly expand the royalty relief. If the suit succeeds, the lost revenue may rise to as much as $28 billion.
Edward Markey, a Democratic member of the House from Massachusetts, has proposed a bill that would keep any new contracts from granting relief when oil and gas prices were high, and would instruct the interior secretary to try to renegotiate existing contracts. That is a fair and overdue remedy.
Keep an eye on Markey's bill. If it's killed in the House, you'll know that this party, whatever lip service its members give to global warming, is NOT serious about the problem.
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