Green Progress Being Born Right Now

This article was first published in the College Voice on 12/7/07. Written by Alex Krogh-Grabbe and Pat Wallace.

There are so many exciting changes in climate policy happening right now, that this may be old news before it reaches your eyes. While we might be anxious about this from a journalistic perspective, it’s thrilling to see that the changes we desperately need are actually happening.

Before getting to all the positive news, we want to address a few issues presented by Prof. Monce in his most recent letter. First, he tries to argue that we missed his assertion that “a single piece of confirmed contrary evidence” can overturn an established scientific theory. We didn’t miss his claim, but since policy is being formed on climate change right now, policymakers need to rely on the best science available. Even though Prof. Monce might disagree, the best available science about climate change points decisively to human-produced greenhouse gases as the primary cause.

Consider also that ethical-but-misguided scientists like Prof. Monce make up a small minority of “climate deniers”. Most of those who dispute the current state of climate science are in the employ of oil, coal, and auto companies, or far-right political think-tanks. We urge Prof. Monce to be as critical of his own theory as he asks us to be of ours.

But this dry dispute has diluted this column for too long. We’re moving on. News about climate change is now dominated by a happy and hopeful exclamation mark, not a murky question mark.

In the next few days (perhaps by the time you read this) the US Senate will vote on the 2007 Energy Bill, which has provisions raising fuel efficiency standards from 25 to 35 mpg, and possibly a Renewable Portfolio Standard, which requires electrical utilities to get 15% of their power from clean energy by 2020. This will be a fantastic step forward for a political body that has recently been unacceptably stagnant. It’s a great step, but it’s just one step; we must hope and demand that whoever is elected president next fall will bring the US up to par with the rest of the world. We need to work toward much higher investment in clean energy, a moratorium on new coal plants, and a reduction in subsidies for dirty energy. This will inject bright green power into our economy, creating millions of new jobs and the sort of prosperity we demand.

Also going down this week are the international climate negotiations in Bali, Indonesia. Delegations from nearly every country in the world are meeting this week and next to generate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto agreement required that signatory nations reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. Until now, only Australia and the US were the only industrialized countries to not ratify the Protocol. But just a few days ago, the brand new Australian prime minister announced that he would sign the treaty, leaving the United States as the last industrialized nation holding out against it. There are great hopes that Bali will set the stage for a meeting after the Bush administration leaves office in which a new international climate action plan can be created.

These phenomenal political initiatives show that the American people, and the people of the world, have realized that the time for environmental action is now.