wish President Obama the power of Jupiter and the wisdom of Minerva as he travels to Copenhagen for the U.N. Summit on Climate Change. He will be leading the first serious U.S. participation in productive global climate change talks in more than a decade. But do I believe he will accomplish anything meaningful at those talks, meaningful enough, that is, to begin to roll back climate change? No, sorrowfully, I do not believe he can.
Why? We Americans have been redeemed from the horrific nadir of anti-environmentalism by electing a pro-environment president. But our populace will not unite behind meaningful environmental regulation or comprehensive reform that's powerful enough to recapture the evanescent monster of heat-trapping greenhouse gas and slay it.
Rolling back climate change requires a two-pronged approach. Only one of those "prongs" is even on the table in Copenhagen -- reduction of greenhouse gases. To get there, we must curb many of our beloved activities that create them, including our affinity for big cars and trucks, our passion for fossil fuels, our dependence on smokestack industries and our love of sprawl development.
Americans haven't the spine for such concessions. Once we do, only then can we begin to approach the second prong. The second prong requires admitting that population growth here at home is a major factor driving climate change. We must begin to curb our ballooning population before we can draw up a plan to combat climate change. There is no political will for such an admission, much less action on that front.
President Obama is proposing a roughly 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen. According to a Chicago Tribune story, this is "in line with a climate bill that passed the House in June and is pending in the Senate, but well below what many scientists, along with political leaders in Europe and developing countries, say is needed from the United States to avert the most catastrophic effects of climate change worldwide."
At the outset, Mr. Obama is heading to Europe with a plan most experts find woefully feckless. Mr. Obama sees "splitting the difference" as the righteous path to progress. Despite the president's never-ending succession of compromises, he has yet to woo his own Senate into an alliance on greenhouse gases, much less his own party, which controls the U.S. Senate:
"The measure has deeply divided Democrats. With states in the Midwest, South and Rocky Mountain West dependent on fossil fuels for energy, many senators are worried about the legislation's impact on industry and consumers."
While Republicans and conservative Democrats fiddle over industry's rights and consumers' needs, the planet is burning. And the heat will go up and up and up while present-day Neros (country leaders) keep on fiddling.
So my pessimism about the president's mission is born of a realistic assessment that not only are we far from agreement on limiting greenhouse gas emissions, but we are even further from admitting their primary source: There are too many people living in developed nations, driving industrial production, the need for fossil fuels and therefore creating greenhouse gases.
There was a time when discussion of population stabilization was not verboten in the popular culture in conjunction with environmental progress. Organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970 called population growth a central issue in the fight to save the planet. A groundswell of support for environmental causes helped spur Congress and the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations to enact a host of sweeping environmental laws.
On Jan. 1, 1970, the president signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), often referred to as the nation's "environmental Magna Carta." The act included a "Declaration of National Environmental Policy" that began: "The Congress, recognizing the profound impact of man's activity on the interrelations of all components of the environment, particularly the profound influences of population growth . . ."
Can you imagine Congress passing and the president signing such a law today? Of course not! This would, and eventually did, cause the churches and the pro-immigration lobby to spiral skyward in a frenzy of fury and angst. And yet, environmentalists were much closer to conquering the greenhouse gas problem then, with many fewer people and much less development, than we are today as the president heads to Copenhagen.
How and why we drifted away from population stabilization as an environmental mantra is fodder for another column, or a book. But let me give you the headline version, which is to say, A) Immigration (the primary driver of U.S. population growth) interests formed a powerful lobby that painted immigration as a human right, rather than as an environmental wrong, and B) Churches, industry and developers realized that without a ballooning population, churches would lose followers, and industry and developers would lose customers. So they marketed the benefits of an unending population boom. And their campaign worked.
Let me state, as I always do when I write on the touchy issue of immigration, that I am the proud daughter of a Cuban citizen who entered this country penniless. It is mass immigration I oppose, not individual immigrants, most of whom are honest, hard-working people. That said, if we want to stop global warming while the earth is still salvageable, we must start by curbing immigration.
So as President Obama heads to Copenhagen with or without the power of Jupiter and the wisdom of Minerva, he must maneuver past fertility goddess Diana. And unfortunately, Diana appears ready to overwhelm Jupiter and Minerva.
Source:politicsdaily.com/
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