It\’s Getting Hot In Here

Editor’s note: This is part 4 (of 5) of the serialized introduction to Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalist to the Politics of Possibility, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger’s latest book.

Here are the other sections of the Introduction: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] Part 4 [Part 5]

“From the Nightmare to the Dream” – Introduction to Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Part 4 of 5)

6.

The political environment for action on energy independence and global warming has undergone a dramatic shift since 2004. Motivated by their anger with government inaction and the Bush administration’s outright interference, climate scientists increasingly started speaking out about the need for bold action. In the summer of 2006, Al Gore wrote a best-selling book and starred in a widely seen movie, An Inconvenient Truth, that were compelling—and terrifying—presentations about global warming.

In lieu of action by Congress, progress on climate has come from other quarters. California enacted historic legislation reducing the state’s greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020, and other states are likely to follow. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in the spring of 2007, that the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant causing global warming. And sustainability is today one of the hottest topics in politics, the corporate world, and the media.

The twenty-year effort by environmentalists to educate the public about the facts of global warming has gotten us halfway there. Lawmakers and the media now understand the seriousness of climate change and are committed to action. Federal legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions, and create a mechanism for them to be traded, is inevitable.

To seize the new opportunities being offered, we must first face up to four inconvenient truths about global warming. The first is that those developed nations that ratified the Kyoto treaty on global warming have made little headway in actually reducing their own emissions. In late 2006, the United Nations announced that, since 2000, the emissions of the forty-one wealthy, industrialized members of Kyoto had gone up, not down, by more than 4 percent.

The second inconvenient truth is that China and India long ago rejected any approach to addressing climate change that would constrain their greenhouse gas emissions or their economic growth. For years, energy experts had expected that China would overtake the United States as the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter by 2025. It turns out that China will gain that dubious distinction by 2008. The governments and the people of China and India are increasingly concerned about global warming, to be sure, but they are far more motivated by economic development, and to the extent that the battle against global warming is fought in terms of ecological limits rather than economic possibility, there’s little doubt which path these countries will take.

The third inconvenient truth is that even if we were to drastically limit the greenhouse gas emissions produced by power plants and automobiles, we would still need a strategy to slow the rapid rate of deforestation. Destruction of rain forests contributes an estimated 25 percent of all greenhouse gases, far more than vehicles contribute. Perversely, some of the deforestation in Indonesia and Brazil is driven by the rising demand for land to grow biofuels. In the nearly twenty years since the United Nations held an environmental conference (the last one was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992), foreign governments and philanthropists have invested billions in conservation and “sustainable development” pilot projects in the Amazon region. During that time, deforestation accelerated. And when the forests are gone, they can no longer play their ecologically crucial roles of storing carbon and cooling the atmosphere.

The fourth inconvenient truth about the crises we face is that global warming has arrived and will have increasingly serious consequences, even if we stop emitting all greenhouse gases tomorrow. Climatic changes will lead to increasingly severe, more destructive, and more deadly hurricanes, tornadoes, and monsoons. The melting of ice sheets will raise sea levels and increase the threat of flooding, agricultural collapse, and food shortages. In other parts of the world, global warming will likely trigger droughts, water scarcities, and famines.

7.

In November 2006, Americans voted to eject Republicans from both houses of Congress. Public upset over the worsening quagmire in Iraq has kept President Bush’s popularity ratings at around 30 percent, and today it seems that nothing can go right for Republicans. The chances are good that in 2008 America will elect both a Democratic president and Congress, and so it is no exaggeration to say that the opportunity for real action on everything from global warming to health care is better than it has been since 1992.

Many on the left viewed the 2006 election results as proof not just that the Republican Party had been repudiated but also that conservative ideological hegemony had come to an end. Whether that’s the case, only time will tell. What is certain is that, while voters rejected Republican incompetence, they have not yet affirmed a Democratic vision.

The time is ripe for the Democratic Party to embrace a new story about America, one focused more on aspiration than complaint, on assets than deficits, and on possibility than limits. For the party to do that, progressives, liberals, and Democrats must deal with some inconvenient truths of their own. Just as environmentalists must grapple with how global warming challenges the politics of limits, progressives must understand how a half century of prosperity and changing social values challenges materialist liberalism.

Globalization and the transition to a postindustrial economy have generated remarkable material wealth, but they have also brought outsourcing, downsizing, and instability. The result is that Americans have seen their wealth and spending power rise, but they have also become increasingly insecure in terms of their employment, retirement, health care, and community. What results is what we call insecure affluence, a kind of postmaterial insecurity that is profoundly misunderstood when viewed as poverty.

The worldview of materially affluent and postmaterially insecure people is vastly different from the worldview of the materially deprived. During the Great Depression, the poorest one-third of the country stood in breadlines, ate from the garbage, and roamed cities searching for work. They could not hide their poverty. Today’s insecure affluent both mask and overcompensate for their insecurity by flaunting their material wealth. The politics born of material poverty cannot speak to postmaterial insecurity. Misunderstanding this, Democrats and liberals find themselves constantly telling Americans how poor and vulnerable they are—which is quite possibly the last thing insecure Americans want to be told.

The rise of insecure affluence has caused social values to evolve in two directions simultaneously. Rising insecurity has fueled the move away from fulfillment values and back toward lower-order, postmaterialist “survival” values, which tend to be manifested as status competition, thrill-seeking, and hedonism, all of which have triggered a cultural backlash that conservatives more than liberals, Republicans more than Democrats, have harnessed. At the same time, rising affluence has fueled the shift, over the past century and a half, away from traditional forms of religious, familial, and political authority and toward greater individuality. In response, today Americans are creating a number of new identities for themselves that were unimaginable a hundred, fifty, and even twenty years ago. The problem is thus not with globalization and postindustrialization so much as with the absence of a new social contract, one that joins the individual’s self-interest with the common good.

That’s the end of Part 4. 

Here are the other sections of the Introduction: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] Part 4 [Part 5]