Walls of Denial are Beginning to Crumble

Valley News
July 22, 2006

Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont will end four decades in politics by introducing legislation that would force the nation's power companies, manufacturers, automobile drivers and others to cut emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases by up to 80 percent over the next half-century, the Rutland Herald reports.

"Pie in the sky," you say?

More like, "About time."

Writing in the most recent National Geographic magazine, Vermont environmentalist and author Bill McKibben points to some of the obvious signs of peril from global warming: killer hurricanes, vanishing Arctic sea ice and the news that 2005 was the warmest year on record.

"Historians, I think, will look back on this as the time when denial finally began to crumble," McKibben wrote. "When we finally began to understand that the planet as we've known it was at stake - and not from a possible scenario, like nuclear war, but from the consumption of the coal and oil and gas that power most of the actions of our lives."

Jeffords's legislation is one of the few signs that this realization has pierced the walls of Congress. As President Bush has shamelessly served his friends in the oil industry by pushing tax breaks, opposing fuel-efficiency standards and refusing to join other nations in battling global warming through the Kyoto Protocol, members of Congress have mostly stood by in silence.

Jeffords and his supporters will have to surmount enormous resistance in the White House and Capitol. Before they reject the notion of dramatic change, however, lawmakers ought to look to the people who sent them to Washington. In this case, Americans impatient with government inaction are forging ahead on their own.

Prompted by financial and environmental considerations, consumers have signed up to purchase hybrid cars, increased the business of local solar energy providers and shopped for local food that doesn't need to be shipped across the nation on gas-guzzling trucks.

Businesses and other institutions have also gotten into the act, building energy-efficient corporate headquarters, running bus fleets on biodiesel fuel and looking for ways to satisfy the growing demand for "green" goods and services.

Wall Street is taking notice: Vinod Khosla, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has ramped up investments in firms specializing in solar power, natural gas and ethanol, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Such endeavors, largely unaided by government policies, give a sense of the potential political power behind a serious push to reverse global warming. Just think what could happen if Congress endorsed a combination of incentives and disincentives aimed at taking advantage of the limited time remaining - some estimates give us only a decade - to reduce greenhouse emissions before the damage is irreversible.

The first step would be to begin taxing carbon emissions from power plants, automobiles and other heavy polluters. Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby noted recently that the average Western European uses half as much energy as the average American, largely due to tax policies that make it prohibitively costly to drive gas-guzzling cars, heat big homes and run carbon-belching power plants.

Along with those sticks, the government ought to provide some carrots: tax breaks or other significant economic incentives that speed the shift to greater energy efficiency and less pollution.

But don't just write to your senator and representative and then sit back to hope for the best. As McKibben points out, we have the power to reverse the tide one community at a time.

Every time you buy a head of lettuce from a local farmer, you save the gallons of gas needed to transport it from California. Every time you share a ride to work, you not only clear the air but also set an example of responsibility that echoes from your neighborhoods to the marble halls of Washington, D.C.