Opinion: Hope -Yes, Hope For Our Planet

The following column appeared previously in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

The last month smacked us in the face with the present climate crisis: its intolerable heat and pollution, the scientific and meteorological certainty emanating from experts and the possibility for solutions.

We sweated and felt all motivation dissolve in the face of 90-some-odd degree misery under skies turned gray by climate-change fires burning thousands of miles away. On August 9, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed the source of our suffering: that by 2019 we had infused the atmosphere with higher levels of carbon dioxide than have been present in over 2 million years, causing the earth’s average surface temperature to increase catastrophically faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over at least the last 2,000 years.

But we as a country also took steps to face the challenge. 

Hope was born in the House last Tuesday when Democrats passed the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill. It created no programs and appropriated no money, but is essentially an outline and gateway for future plans. It is a congressional document that unlocks for Democrats a longer legislative process, a tactic that allows them to write a tax-and-spending bill that can bypass a Republican filibuster.

And what is proposed for that bill that is yet to be written? A whole lot, though by no means enough, with a couple of missteps, in the battle to cut greenhouse gas emissions in a just and equitable way.

Along with promising to expand Medicare to include essentials like hearing aids, glasses and dentures (in all of which I now have a vested interest) and lowering the eligibility age; offering universal pre-K education for all 3- and 4-year-olds, child care to working families, tuition-free community college, paid family and medical leave and creation and preservation of affordable housing — any of which would be enough to shout about — it “drills” down on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and tackling some historical environmental injustices.

A short list of Democratic promises includes:

• Laying a path to quickly achieve 100% clean electricity by setting up a Clean Electricity Payment Program (CEPP) that would pay utility companies for exceeding strict clean energy targets and penalizing them for failure. There would also be clean energy tax incentives to shift investments to renewables from fossil fuels.
• Expanding access to clean public transit, union-built electric vehicles and EV charging infrastructure.

• Ending fossil fuel subsidies and cleaning up abandoned mines and wells.
• Replacing all lead water pipes
• Retrofitting for energy efficiency and electrifying (using the new greener grid) all public housing, schools and hospitals.
• Creating a Civilian Climate Corps to implement the plan’s potential.
• Protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from drilling and mining.

It would be a colossal first step toward cutting greenhouse emissions. However, there are also caveats, the most noteworthy being that what is defined as “clean electricity” at this point may include that derived from natural gas with and without carbon capture and storage; waste and biomass incineration; unproven hydrogen technologies; nuclear energy and sleight-of-hand “offsets” as cover for continued fossil fuel burning.

The bill has such potential, it deserves our intense pressure on Congress not just to pass it, but to strengthen the investments in true renewables and weed out the corporate greenwashing that hobbles it. If we couple that work with a similar effort to pass the $1.2 billion Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan sans its climate mistakes (proposed funding of fossil fuel buses and a gas pipeline in Alaska and its weakening of the government’s environmental review of potentially polluting and unhealthy projects) we will have taken a major step toward halting global heating.

Time to put on our citizen lobbyist hats.

The other major climate event, seldom referenced in this way, is the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon is the single largest industrial consumer of oil and gas. Though its peacetime emissions are appalling, war is its pinnacle of pollution. According to a Brown University report, between 2001 and 2019, the U.S. war in Afghanistan caused the emission of 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases and resulted in deforestation and the toxic burning of munitions. I won’t go into my own opposition to its waging, except to say that President Joe Biden wins my respect for his commitment to leaving.

He loses it, though, for his plan to increase a military budget that will only worsen climate change, suffering, and our opportunity to invest in a sustainable future. Cutting Pentagon funding must be a source for funding of our aggressive climate plans, along with ending fossil fuel subsidies and taxing the rich and massive corporations. Young people should be able to see a future in the Civilian Climate Corps restoring wetlands and mounting solar panels, rather than just risking their lives and their souls carrying a gun in a foreign land.

Marty Nathan is a retired physician, mother and grandmother who writes a monthly column on climate change.