…Prior to 9/11, I was incredibly frustrated because I could see a “clear and present danger” to the United States but, despite my warnings and those of others, the U.S. government remained complacent until it was too late. The result was the death of three thousand innocent people in one day of attacks on two iconic American symbols. As horrendous as that was, it may someday seem less significant than the deaths from floods, the forced migration of millions, the spread of diseases, the dust bowls that were once fertile lands, all of which may be the result of the climate change that we are causing. And, as with 9/11, we were warned, told for years that climate change was happening. Those like Al Gore who told us what was coming were not merely ignored, they were mocked. Imagine their frustration. During critical years when something might have been done to stop climate change, we not only failed to act, we made it worse. When most of the world united to address the problem, the United States rejected the approach and failed to offer an effective alternative.
The “know-nothings” of climate change have contended for years that the science of climate change was uncertain or that global warming may actually be a good thing on balance. They were right about one thing, that there is uncertainty: we are uncertain about whether we have already passed the point of no return, whether cataclysmic climate change is now inevitable. On the chance that it is not too late to mitigate the damage, to make it less bad than it might otherwise be, we should embark on a national emergency program to reduce carbon emissions. Instead, today, our government continues to fail on the conjoined issues of energy policy and climate change. We are misdiagnosing the national security issues associated with oil, and we are far from a national emergency effort on climate change. We have a muddled, leaderless effort that will not significantly reduce carbon emissions in the foreseeable future. Future generations will likely regard the last decade’s activity, or lack of it, on climate change as the most important failure of government in human history. And the failure continues…
Because we do not have that precise knowledge, we seem to think it is acceptable to do little or nothing. If, however, we were told that a terrorist group was going to attack New York City or Florida sometime in the next few decades with a weapon that would flood the areas and make them uninhabitable, we would not hesitate to begin acting now. Yet climate change may have a greater effect in this century than any combination of major terrorist attacks or wars, causing population centers to disappear, millions of people to move, and the global balance of power to shift away from the United States…
I have never really understood why some national security experts willingly accept the need to act on the basis of unquantifiable and remote threats from terrorists or the ballistic missiles of countries that do not yet have long-range systems, but at the same time ridicule the need to act against a threat that almost all reputable scientists say is real. In his book The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind tells the tale of Vice President Cheney’s being willing to wage a fierce (and counterproductive, the way he waged it) war against Iraq and terrorism if there were just a 1 percent possibility of a terrorist nuclear weapon going off in the United States, perhaps destroying New York, on some unknown day in the future. “The United States must act now as if it were a certainty.” Well, there is a far greater risk than 1 percent of destruction occurring in all of our coastal cities over the lifetime of children alive today, not because of an enemy, but because of our own and other nations ignoring climate change.
