THE GREATEST THREAT TO AMERICA AND THE REST OF THE WORLD IS CLIMATE CHANGE!

More precisely the "threat" is ignoring or denying it, and most importantly, failure to act NOW with the urgency required to save us from ourselves.

CLIMATE CHANGE REQUIRES A “WAR FOOTING” to compare today’s situation to what we believed was an existential threat to the world requiring opposition to the Nazi ambitions to subjugate the rest of the world. The entire American industrial output changed in just a few years from an emphasis on consumer goods (and cars in particular) to the incredibly massive output of the machinery of modern war.

The good news in all of this is that we are in a war where it is not an "us" against "them". We all have a common enemy. It is not an enemy that we can defeat with guns or bombs or tanks or drones. It is an enemy to everyone on Earth. The GREATEST threat to America and the rest of the world is CLIMATE CHANGE or more specifically the real threat is a failure to take immediate action to reduce or, better still, eliminate the causes of Climate Change. Even the slight rise in global temperature that has already occured is release untold quantities of methane (estimated as 30 times as destructive as carbon dioxide) from the permafrost of the arctic tundra. Annually the quantities of carbon that geology has buried over the millions of years increases as it is relesed into the atmospherrerate as the use of petroleum continues to grow. The blows that climate change has already inflicted have killed thousands of people with floods as well as starvation in desert areas where there has been no rain for years so no crops can grow. We need to recognize that this threat is even more severe than the Nazi attempt to subjugate all of Europe. This is a global threat that, if ignored as it has largely been thus far, may mean the extinction of our species in just a couple of generations from now. We are almost at the point of no return when no action we can take will stop global climate change from proceeding at an ever faster rate. The more methane released from the tundra will doubtless contribute to greater and greater amounts of previously sequestered carbon to the atmosphere. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, climate change can, and according to many scientists will reach a stage at which the changes it causes will also be the main force that propels it into ever worsening disaster. We have been through a “war footing” transformation in the past, starting with our support of our allies in World War II in their fight against the Nazi aggression in Europe. Public sentiment in the USA was primarily isolationist. The war was “over there” a whole ocean away. It was no threat to America they thought. A large portion of the public was against our intervention in the European war but with the excuse that Japan attacked us, we very rapidly put on our own transformation from making cars and farm vehicles to making tanks, trucks, jeeps, amphibious landing craft and thousands of airplanes, not just for our allies but for ourselves. We MUST stop putting fossil carbon (from petroleum and coal) into the atmosphere instead of using the carbon that is already part of the natural carbon cycle of air, plants, trees and grasses as well as ocean creatures. The death and decomposition of these temporary keepers of carbon are eventually released to become part of the next generation of plants. As an important part of transitioning, as rapidly as possible, from fossil carbon based high energy fuels, the same fuels can all be made from plant materials. Look at the Bioeconomy today. Economically the Bioeconomy, though it is now fueling small parts of several airline fleets, is barely an eyelash on the elephant that is the American economy. It could also be that China will, according to predictions from American and other scientists, be building a coal-fired electrical generating plant every month for the next five years or more. The effect on the world should rapidly become large portions of that huge beast. We need to take ACTION, IMMEDIATELY if we are to have any hope of staying ahead of climate change. It is institutional suicide to consider any other fate.

The very different idea: Congress is taking this seriously enough to have introduced a bill they are informally calling the “Green New Deal.” Even this legislation’s title which mentions “green” is an acknowledgement of an awareness of the impending crisis of fossil fuels and climate change is a hearty encouragement that American legislators have emerged from the head-in-the-sand climate change denials of the last decade or more. The “New Deal” part was to suggest that this was NOT a betrayal of working Americans, but a jobs program that also addressed environmental issues, including the reduction of fossil carbon-based fuels coupled with greater efficiency in the use of energy. The “New Deal” portion is also cleverly harkening back to recent American history of the original “new deal” implemented to help America recover from economic disaster by putting virtually everyone (okay, every every man in those days) to work on infrastructure and other government-sponsored projects and programs which were often paid for by the federal government. Today’s government would put more dollars behind a subsidy program to help consumers afford to be sealing energy leaking windows and doors to prevent entry of cold air in Winter and hot air in Summer for instance, but also make this a part of a broad publicity campaign to raise public awareness and encourage support for such energy programs. Not that it is openly discussed in the bill and its objectives, but also the transformation to “green” fuels would, like the original “New Deal” created by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, provide thousands upon thousands of relatively low skill jobs for workers displaced from manufacturing jobs. It also would create hundreds and hundreds of jobs for highly educated, highly skilled workers and a new kind of social security (discussion of which I will leave for a later date). These new “green” jobs will also include thousands of new jobs working on repairing and upgrading infrastructure. Modern tracks that are a requirement for high-speed trains means massive upgrades to every mile of train track. Yes, even the Acela routes which are barely adequate for this slow-boat-to-China version of an actually multi-hundred mile per hour train like the ones already running in China. Perhaps also a great number of a different kind of track to accommodate maglev trains as have already been proposed for a Los Angeles to Las Vegas route at five (or more) times faster than conventional diesel-powered trains today, not to mention new and more direct routes. In China, for example, their high-speed trains can cruise along at a little more than 200 miles per hour. Their current maglev trains go about 50 mph faster than that. (Yes, the Chinese already have maglev trains moving millions of people, not just "discussions" about "if" and "when" and "where" they "might" go. America’s “high speed” Acela train travels at up to 160 mph but some track sections force its maximum down to 125 mph. Even at those speeds freight trains can carry cargo cross country far more efficiently, less expensively, than trucks. That doesn’t mean eliminating trucks, especially for short haul and delivery. Such trucks are already being built by Volvo which run entirely on electric motors and includes a range of long haul trucks too.

The Tesla Company keeps making progress on improving its electric-powered vehicles. The news bulletins of their advances are almost a monthly occurrence. Regardless of sceptics who predict doom and gloom for Tesla cars (and home charging units, and solar roof tiles), I think we can reasonably expect success from the man whose accomplishments include launching a cargo rocket into space and returning the rocket safely to its launching pad. They are making it all the more remarkable by the fact that the rocket not only lands on the pad from which it is launched; it lands tail-first as if it was eager to take off again. NASA has contracted Elon Musk’s company to supply the International Space Station. This month NASA has announced a contract with SpaceX to carry American astronauts into space. In just a few years, Musk’s team has far exceeded even the goals of various nationally sponsored space programs. No one, anywhere on Earth, has achieved what Musk’s company has done in a mere few years.

I keep coming back to my foundational concept of how great things, great changes come about. That idea was so well encapsulated in the famous, often quoted, Margret Meade statement that contended if you are starting with just a small group of determined and dedicated people they can change the world, and indeed that is the only way it has ever happened according to Ms. Meade’s perception of the history of human society. It is really hard to disagree with her assessment of how society changes over time. This time, with respect to climate change, the time horizon is extremely short to avert a disastrous outcome that could leave our planet unsuitable for human life within just a few generations. We must act swiftly and we must initiate drastic action now! Fortunately, there is a small group who can decide to save the planet. It is the United States Congress. Which is not to say that the USA will singlehandedly reverse all the anthropogenic ills of the entire world. Rather, by acting as a leading example of national commitment, with the funding as well as the policies to implement environmentally responsible actions, such clear and obvious efforts will rapidly draw other nations into similar pursuits.

 One of the main obstacles to the whole world making the effort to ensure that their energy policies conform to the needed measures is a complaint that the US, Britain, and other technically advanced nations did not have to adhere to these kinds of standards. Their technological revolution was fueled entirely by fossil fuels, yet when it comes to us, the small, poor and underdeveloped nations, the world, is asking for emerging nations to take on an economic burden of avoiding these same cheap and easily available forms of energy. For that matter, those nations are not displaying a solid effort to face the situation. Their efforts, if any, are pitifully small compared to their overall energy consumption. Even now, they make only a tiny effort, a mere nod, in effect, taking minimal actions to mitigate climate change. Their efforts are trivial with respect to moving away from fossil carbon fuels. (The current Trump administration in the USA is even worse as it has massively reduced regulation in air pollution and the use of fossil fuels.) Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industries, coal and petroleum, have fostered the idea that converting from their products, or even just moving in that direction, will result in massive unemployment and even greater financial disasters, when, in fact, the opposite is true. The original New Deal showed that government subsidization and policies supporting the arts not just manufacturing, brought us back from the verge of financial collapse creating so many jobs that tax revenues rose dramatically overall mitigating what looked like impending government financial collapse into one of the most successful jobs programs in the county’s history.  Once wholeheartedly committed to participating in the war, there was very little concern about the cost in dollars. The government paid all the soldiers, sailors, marines and their equipment, vehicles, weapons and ammunition. The cost was recognized as a global threat that could not wait, would not be defeated by docile good intentions. Action was needed NOW!

The ever-increasing problems of poor air quality have led to a public perception that more cars all the time is the heart of our present problems. The current problem is not the ever-increasing number of automobiles. It is the fact that all these automobiles (including trucks, trains and airplanes) are burning fossil carbon based fuels making billions of small point sources of fossil carbon contributions to the atmosphere, accelerating climate change when instead they could be using liquid fuels made from agricultural or photovoltaic solar sources of energy. Making electric powered vehicles is better than nothing. It could offer a pathway away from fossil carbon fuel. The facts, however, that are being ignored is that creating the electric power to run electric vehicles merely shifts from the thousands of individual vehicles to electrical generating plants that are out-of-sight and therefore out-of-mind, but still fueled by fossil fuels. One is merely shifting the cause of adding fossil carbon to the atmosphere from individual cars to the massive generating plants that would (will?) be needed to provide the electricity that powers the individual cars. In the USA, for example, one of those many anti-climate mitigation regulations which have been reversed. It now allows the use of more coal-fired electric generating operations than were previously being permitted. Indeed, the regulations curtailing, and soon we had hoped eliminating coal-fired electric generating operations, merely has the effect of shifting a “dirty” burning fuel, coal, to a different form of fossil carbon fuel derived from petroleum. The US Environmental Protection Agency (the EPA) is being gutted and de-clawed. This is hardly the shining example that is needed to lead emerging nations into the non-fossil fuels route to mitigate, if not completely eliminate, their contribution of adding fossil carbon to the atmosphere. Why should emerging nations not be permitted to grow their economies on fossil carbon as the most technologically advanced nations have done for the past hundred years? Britain grew by leaps and bounds fueled almost entirely from the coal they mined in the nineteenth century. The USA followed a similar path which started with coal as a well-established energy source but switching to petroleum as that source became plentiful and cheap. Why would a small African nation accept the imposition of fossil-free energy regulations, or even just rapidly moving in that direction, due to the political pressure from those nations that are continuing to almost exclusively power themselves on the fossil carbon sources that fueled, and continues to fuel, their highly successful economies?

This whole subject of climate change and what to do about it has received so little attention from lawmakers and politicians (left, right and center) so as to truly resemble the analogy of the ostrich with its head buried in the ground, believing it is “safe” because it cannot hear or see a very real danger even as the threat approaches to within a lethal distance. They have been funnels, or rather megaphones, for the fossil carbon fuel industries which have hired “scientists” to propose alternative explanations for climate change, formerly known as “global warming” with moniker changed to avoid the easy apparently logical “evidence”. They have claimed that global warming is a normal, natural phase of the sun, or of variations in the flow of the liquid centre of the earth itself. Others simply refuse to believe the broad consensus of the majority of scientists who have looked at the situation. They dismiss it as a liberal hoax, or simply refuse to accept the consensus opinion. 

I consider it a hopeful sign that on Friday of this week (March 1, 2019) the PBS program. “NewsHour” had its leading feature story interviewing the author of a book that comes out this week. The title? It is entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth” based on the likely outcome of climate change if we do not see the incredible urgency of taking action now! Any time later will likely be too late to avert such damage to the planet that it may become uninhabitable by humans by the end of the century. The book unblinkingly examines the inaction thus far, some of the measures that can be taken now, and almost of primary importance is the fact that any global action will almost certainly take until about 2030 to fully implement, a whole third of the century gone by that time. It makes the prospect of climate change for another 60 years beyond that time seem so much shorter a journey than thinking this is a problem for generations to come, likely not even in the time of our children or their children either. On the opposite side of that perception is my own perspective. I have lived the whole of the last half of the last century. Looking back on it I have seen incredible changes in many things, but some expected changes have not happened either. An average Chevrolet in 1956 achieved a fuel economy of 15 miles per gallon. Today my wife and I drove on a few errands. Her Ford achieved 18 miles per gallon. So in 63 years gas mileage has improved 20% but that amounts to just 3 miles per gallon increase in efficiency. A whole half century, and more, feel to me more like a month has passed. If we wait a half century to accomplish "enough" on the battlefront of climate change, or think that achieving some lofty (but nearly impossible) goals is fast enough, we may never recover from those battle against climate change that we lost along the way.

The sign that politicians are paying attention, finally, to the crisis' urgency is a good one. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a Green New Deal resolution on February 7, 2019 which following her recent somewhat controversial election in the 2018 midterm election brought attention to the subject of climate change for the whole of congress. Indeed, the young lady who had a surprising victory in New York and has proposed the "Green New Deal" legislation (co-sponsored by Ed Markey, and 64 others) also compares the climate change to WW II. (Foxnews.com Jan 21, 2019) On May 1, 2019 the NPR website featured a profile of Governor of Washington state Jay Inslee who said, "I do think it is absolutely imperative that the Democratic Party put forth a candidate [in the 2020 election, opposing President Trump] who will make climate change a principal, front-burner issue, rather than some peripheral back burner [item]. Governor Inslee has been ringing the climate change alarm bill since at least 2009 when he wrote and published a book on the subject, but it has been falling on deaf ears. On the website Jacobin (which admittedly "is a leading voice of the American left") offers a quote calling for, "... industrial and economic mobilization at a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era."  

Washington state Governor Jay Inslee has recently announced that he will be vying to be the Democrat Party' nominee for Presidential candidate to "challenge President Trump next year" (NRP website March 1, 2019) which in itself is not all that remarkable. But Inslee has another extremely positive view of the problem of Climate Change. In his opening announcement he pointed out, "We went to the moon and created technologies that have changed the world. Our country's next mission must be to rise up to the most urgent challenge of our time — defeating climate change." harkening back to the famous speech by President John F. Kennedy. Not only is it, "the most urgent challenge of our time," Governor Inslee's focus on climate change introduces climate change into the debates and positions of the entire field of Democrat candidates, their responses, their call to the voters to be aware of a candidate's stand on climate change action, especially during the coming year. Remember too that President Kennedy set a deadline of "by the end of this decade" for a manned landing on the moon. Inslee wrote his book back in 2009. It was entitled, "Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy," in which he made that exact comparison. A decade has already passed since Governor Inslee's call to urgent action.

It really is an existential threat. Whatever analogy you put on the face of it, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, "said the fight against climate change is war and that it’s 'our World War II.'” We also need to recognize that we have weapons to defeat it if we start now, keeping in mind that climate change affects the whole world. Paying for this war should not be a consideration. Any consideration of "cost" was minor during WW III. If we don't win this war, there will be an unstoppable disaster by forces of nature that we failed to defeat. Those forces of nature have no interest whatsoever about how many humans, animals or plants it kills. Let's not surrender now. Let's focus on the heart of the problem and react like we can see this metaphoric "tank" that is going to roll over each and every continent. 

Former New York city mayor, Michael Bloomberg said on December 30, 2018, that, "It would be a lot more helpful, if we had a climate champion, rather than a climate denier, in the White House," according to an article on NBCNEWS.com. In the same article outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown, said it took many, "... years to get America willing to go into World War II and fight the Nazis. Well, we have an enemy, though different, but perhaps, very much devastating in a similar way. And we've got to fight climate change."  

We must muster every resource we have. We must do it now. Change our transportation system, change out sanitation systems, change our data transmission systems (to 5G and beyond), transition from fuel uses for fossil carbon as a liquid transportation fuel to systems that use that carbon in permanent structures (high carbon concrete for example) so as not to completely devalue the vast assets of petroleum companies. Rather help them recognise that they can be the leaders in the green fuels revolution. Vegetable oils (even used vegetable oils) can become liquid fuels, but they still need a refining process that is almost identical to the massive oil refineries that already exist today.

Change our, and everyone's orientation against other "world powers". No nation on earth has any weapon which can damage us as much as ignoring the urgent need to defend ourselves from climate change. We must take action now if we are going to survive.

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Stafford "Doc" Williamson