Energy & Environment

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23 January 2008
Making Global Warming Politically Hot

By Lea Terhune
Staff Writer

Washington -- Environmental degradation can be countered effectively if politicians and the public are sufficiently educated about the seriousness of global warming. That was the message from experts at a discussion on how to engage communities at Climate Change: Science and Solutions, a conference organized by the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) January 16-18.

The panel of academics, activists and a Christian evangelical leader agreed that informing people and spurring them to act -- politically and personally -- is critical to success in dealing with climate change.

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report underscored potential environmental threats and need for urgent action. Irreversible effects of global warming caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions already have affected the world’s most vulnerable regions. Scientists recommend prompt measures to preclude further damage from accelerated polar and glacial ice melt and rising temperatures.

"We don’t have a lot of time," said writer-activist Bill McKibben, founder of StepItUp.org, which organizes rallies across the country to demand emissions-cutting legislation. The movement has "mushroomed" in the past year, he said.

"An energy revolution in this country," Apollo Alliance Washington director Dan Seligman said, "is a job creator and an enhancer of our nation’s economic competitiveness." The alliance lobbies Congress and raises awareness on clean energy. "We exist to unite diverse constituencies," he said of this coalition of labor, environmental, business and community leaders dedicated to reducing oil dependency.

Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, said he is taking his university out of "the Stone Age" into a new paradigm. "We are working to rethink the very fundamental design and structure of the institution at every possible level," he said, "by organizing student teams that actually work on real world problems." Harnessing the fresh, creative energy of students to "tackle sustainability" is a means of "advancing quality of life and environmental systems," he said.

The environment concerns many evangelical Christians. Richard Cizik, vice president of the influential National Association of Evangelicals, said it is necessary to "communicate not just the scope and depth of the crisis but its moral magnitude and I would suggest that the crisis is … a political crisis not just an environmental crisis."

"Ironically, we are both perpetrators and victims," he said.

He said large religious communities joining forces with the scientific community is a powerful tool: "We are people with the capacity to dream of that which doesn’t exist and vision it forward," adding the environment is as important as the moral issues evangelicals typically support. "Do not typecast us anymore," he said.

"A culture that understands sacrifice" is required, McKibben said.

Expansion of scientific research emphasis from individual health and security "to include the collective" will help, Crow said.

Seligman said awareness in the business world is "rapidly shifting" to embrace clean energy.

This was confirmed across town at the National Press Club, where energy industry representatives attended the U.S. Energy Association’s annual meeting on the state of the U.S. energy industry January 16. Their concerns included "the technology pathway" of clean and renewable energy and alliances between private and public sectors for energy efficiency.

"Climate’s going to be huge … we are going to need every bit of energy efficiency help we can get, we’re going to need nuclear, we’re going to need carbon capture and storage and clean coal plants, we’re going to need renewables, we are going to need gas," Tom Kuhn, president and chief executive officer of the Edison Electric Institute, told the gathering. He urged legislation that would meet the needs of the energy industry while bringing in new technologies. The institute represents U.S. shareholder-owned electric companies.

"People do have to understand if we are going to invest in the infrastructure of this country for energy, if we are going to make the major investments to meet climate change, that it is going to be a costly endeavor." He said these investments likely will be made because climate change has "major impacts on the environment and our country in the future."

They agreed that the public and politicians must learn about energy realities. Informed legislation was a particular concern in the discussion about how to square the demands of climate change with the demands of the economy.

At the NCSE conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Peter Senge concluded the panel by saying that, around the world, the approach to mitigating and adapting to climate change is "a profound cultural issue. We've been caught in the culture of the industrial era for the last couple of hundred years, which has not been replaced by the culture of the information era." Taking responsibility will ensure a hopeful future, he said.

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