Climate Change Mitigation Won’t Happen with “Alarming Levels of Inaction”

From The New York Times:

“Alarming levels of inaction.” That is what the World Health Organization said Wednesday about the global response to coronavirus.

It is a familiar refrain to anyone who works on climate change, and it is why global efforts to slow down warming offer a cautionary tale for the effort to slow down the pandemic.

“Both demand early aggressive action to minimize loss,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was teaching classes remotely this week. “Only in hindsight will we really understand what we gambled on and what we lost by not acting early enough.”

This speaks to the universal challenge faced by those who work to mitigate disasters: you’ll know if you did too little, but it’s impossible to know if you did too much.  Thus there will always be people who ridicule and impede the work of those who favor swift and aggressive action to prevent catastrophe, and that’s especially true when there is significant social cost to the prevention plan.  In this case, we’re talking about transitioning the energy, transportation and agricultural habits of an entire civilization.

What climate activists have in their favor, however, is that plans like the Green New Deal offer fantastic economic growth opportunities; they offer the promise to make America competitive in the global marketplace of the 21st Century, in the face of the decline of the manufacturing sector and the movement of jobs overseas.  In addition, they address many horrific environmental diseases, some of which  have little to do with warming itself, e.g., ocean acidification and a myriad of human health concerns.

But again the question arises: can we create the political will to make this happen?  If the answer is based on our feeble response to a pandemic that is running through our entire population right now, we’re in deep fertilizer.