When our children, and our children’s children, learn about this period of U.S. history, let us hope the extramarital travails of South Carolina’s governor will be no more than a footnote. Let us hope they are taught that this year, the U.S. Congress passed a new kind of law, one that not only reduced harmful greenhouse-gas emissions but set the United States on a new trajectory to a more just, healthy and sustainable future.
The U.S. House of Representatives did just that late last month when it passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. The bill in its current form does not go nearly far enough in reducing emissions and is overladen with giveaways to powerful business lobbies, but it aims in the right direction. If our children are to have a world in which they have the luxury to study history, this bill (or a stronger version) must become law.
Some have balked at the price tag on this legislation, but that amount is trivial when compared with the price of inaction. In June, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, an interagency team of scientists, published a “game changing” report laying out the consequences of climate change to the United States if we do not act now. Among its findings: a rise in mean temperatures of 7.5 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit (turning Iowa’s climate into Mississippi’s by 2095), dramatic loss of coastal areas to sea-level rise and erosion, and a breakdown in the water cycle that will leave the southern half of the country in perpetual drought while subjecting the northern half – including Iowa – to torrential downpours and flooding. We are already beginning to feel these impacts: Temperatures have risen 2 degrees over the last half-century, and over the past century, the heaviest 1 percent of downpours increased 20 percent. The damage these trends will have on the economy is measured in trillions of dollars.
Read the rest of the Des Moines Register article here.
