Climate,
The Absent Issue
By Mark Hertsgaard
20 October, 2004
The
Nation
Every once in a while there is good news
in this troubled world, and the choice of Kenyan environmentalist Wangari
Maathai as this year's Nobel Peace Prizewinner is one such moment. The
timing could not be more apt. The choice of Maathai was announced near
the end of a US presidential campaign that has resolutely ignored the
greatest danger facing humanity, global climate change. Her selection
thus stands as an implicit rebuke to the environmental backwardness
of America's political and media classes. It also represents an explicit
assertion that, as the Nobel committee put it, "Peace on Earth
depends on our ability to secure our living environment."
The Bush Administration
remains in denial about climate change even though its closest overseas
ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said in September that climate
change is the single biggest long-term problem his nation faces. Blair's
top scientific adviser, David King, has gone further, declaring that
climate change is the biggest threat civilization has ever faced--bigger
even than the global terrorism that dominates headlines and obsesses
George W. Bush. King warned in July that there is now enough carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere to melt all the ice on earth, which would
put most of the world's biggest cities under water, starting with low-lying
metropolises like New York, London and New Orleans. "I am sure
that climate change is the biggest problem that civilization has had
to face in 5,000 years," King said. Even Shell Oil chairman Ron
Oxburgh admitted in June that he is "really very worried for the
planet."
Climate change is to the twenty-first century what the nuclear arms
race was to the twentieth: the overriding threat to humanity's continued
existence on this planet. And it is already killing people. In the summer
of 2003, some 15,000 people died in France from an unprecedented heat
wave. No single weather event can be definitively attributed to climate
change, but such heat waves are exactly what scientists expect as warming
intensifies. If climate change is not moderated, more will die in years
to come--either directly, through more destructive storms and droughts,
or indirectly, through declines in food production and the spread of
infectious disease.
Yet except for two
brief references to the Kyoto Protocol during the Bush-Kerry debates,
climate change has been absent from the presidential campaign. Kerry
criticized Bush for walking away from Kyoto without mentioning that
he himself also opposes the protocol (though Kerry pledges that, as
President, he would re-open negotiations and fix what he considers its
flaws). Bush sounded almost proud of having rejected Kyoto, which he
claimed, incorrectly, would hurt the US economy.
Although parts of
the media have woken up to the danger--Business Week and National Geographic
ran cover stories on it this past summer--most US journalists still
don't get it. At best, they see climate change as just one of many environmental
issues. At worst, they are still fooled by industry propaganda casting
doubt on the science behind claims of climate change. Television networks
approach the issue with a particular conflict of interest. As Robert
Kennedy Jr. has observed, cars are the leading source of US greenhouse
gas emissions, but car ads are the leading revenue source for US television
networks.
Thus climate change
remains marginal to the political debate in the United States. Public
awareness and policy-making lag years behind the rest of the world,
as the impending implementation of the Kyoto accord, without US participation,
illustrates. (Now that Russia supports Kyoto, the United States and
Australia are the only major industrial countries outside the protocol.)
Some state and local governments are reacting; California recently required
that automakers increase fuel efficiency 30 percent by 2009. But progress
is incremental when it needs to come at hyper-speed.
Which is where the
example of Wangari Maathai offers hope. The 64-year-old biologist is
Kenya's assistant minister for environment and natural resources, but
she has spent most of her life as a grassroots activist and critic of
the former US-supported dictatorship of Daniel Arap Moi. Maathai's great
innovation was to create the Green Belt Movement. This radical but practical
program pays poor women to plant tree seedlings in their communities;
30 million trees have reportedly been planted since the program began
in the late 1970s.
The selection of
Maathai for the peace prize generated controversy in Norway from critics
who said that honoring an environmentalist diluted the meaning of peace
work. But that criticism was contradicted by a United Nations report
issued a week earlier, showing how deforestation and water scarcity--which
are exacerbated by global warming--have repeatedly led to armed conflict
in Africa.
Maathai's Green
Belt Movement is based on a holistic analysis of the intertwined problems
of war, poverty, environmental degradation and lower status for women.
(Kenya had one of the highest birth rates in the world when Green Belt
was founded in 1977, in part because women thought their only option
in life was to bear children.) Green Belt puts money in women's pockets,
boosting their independence and the educational prospects for their
children. Meanwhile, the planting of trees replenishes the forests that
are the foundation of Kenya's agricultural productivity and the primary
fuel source for its poor. And thanks to photosynthesis, the new trees
also fight global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide.
Like the best political
ideas, Wangari Maathai's Green Belt program is specific yet universal,
grounded in intellect but insistent upon action. Its underlying principles
are the very ones needed to build a sustainable, and therefore peaceful,
future: restoration of ravaged ecosystems, expansion of economic opportunity
for the poor, a guarantee of equal justice for all and strengthening
of democracy. The Nobel committee lauded Maathai for work that has transformed
the lives of countless Kenyans. But her achievements also suggest how
the rest of the world, including the vastly richer United States, can
combat climate change, if only it wakes up and tries.