A Reminder From History - We Were Definitively Warned Of What Lay Ahead 34 Years Ago

[hatrack]

EDIT

It was just over 34 years ago — June 24, 1988, to be exact, in the last year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency — when the New York Times carried the front-page headline, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.” That expert, the NASA climate scientist James Hansen, said at a Senate hearing that “it is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.’’ Instead, there has been so much waffling.

Writing for the New Yorker on Saturday, the climate activist and writer Bill McKibben offered an excellent history of congressional cowardice and inaction on climate that long predates last week’s news that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — a multimillionaire from continued coal royalties — is so far using his veto power as the fulcrum of a 50-50 Senate to prevent any environmental legislation from passing in 2022. McKibben reminds us that every single Republican and Democratic member of the Senate’s “millionaires’ club” voted 95-0 in 1997 to urge then-President Bill Clinton not to join the rest of the world in signing the Kyoto Protocols to reduce fossil-fuel pollution, and that Republicans cowed by the newly formed Tea Party (which got “Astroturf” funding from the oil billionaire Koch brothers) killed 2009′s “cap and trade” plan to curb pollution.

But the legacy of failure that starts with blowing off that 1988 early warning and leads directly to this weekend’s conflagrations in Europe has many fathers — the greedy oil companies whose lies about climate science really launched today’s disinformation culture; the weak leaders in both parties, including George W. Bush who warned that America is “addicted to oil” only after invading oil-rich Iraq on a mountain of lies, but also Barack “All of the above” Obama embracing fracking; and senators who care more about this quarter’s campaign contributions than their own grandchildren. Joe Biden didn’t start the fire. He was just the poor sap who was handed a water pistol and told to put it out.

America could have spent these 34 years displaying our strengths as a nation — becoming a world leader in clean, alternative energy and cutting politically smart deals to place a lot of these new, decent jobs in places like Manchin’s West Virginia to ease the difficult transition out of long-standing obsolete industries like coal. Instead, get-me-through-the-next-election politicians thought it was smarter to send some of those kids from Appalachia off to fight deadly wars in the Middle East, to keep prices at the pump a few pennies lower. That incurable chemical dependence on oil is what made the so-called leader of the free world look like a 98-pound weakling, wilting in the Jeddah heat.

EDIT

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/us-climate-policy-biden-manchin-20220717.html

[2naSalit]

2. Reminds me of...

A protester's sign that read something like;

Every science fiction horror story starts with everyone ignoring the scientists!

Only it's not fiction!

[NNadir]

3. Bill McKibben should probably not lecture people on cowardice. He's afraid of the word "nuclear."

He thinks the problem will be solved with solar cells and electric cars.

He's kind of clueless.

Jim Hansen on the other hand can and does say the word "nuclear."

There really isn't much of a comparison. These two people live on different planets, one where people chant and shake their fingers, and the other where realism is operative.

[Brenda]

4. Good article thanks

Isn't it interesting that certain people attack the messengers instead of the facts about how politicians of both parties are guilty of collusion and inaction for decades, decades that could have made a difference. Thanks Jimmy Carter for trying.