Global Warming Is a Domestic Crisis

Posted on Jan 22, 2013

AP/Julio Cortez

Brian Hajeski, 41, of Brick, N.J., reacts after looking at debris of a home that washed up on to the Mantoloking Bridge the morning after superstorm Sandy rolled through.

By Juan Cole

(Page 2)

Workers and labor unions can take their own stand by divesting from coal, gas and oil companies in their pension funds, and can lobby for the closing of coal plants and a rapid move to wind and solar energy. The House of Representatives is useless, but municipal and state governments can accomplish a lot with their own energy projects and with tax rebates. Officials often will not offer them, however, unless pressured to do so. Not only unions, but organizations representing women and minorities have a stake in preventing these calamities. There are also expanding opportunities for crowdsourcing the funding of solar and wind projects. Solar panels are increasingly affordable and should be on every roof in the United States, and it is the people who can make that happen.

If carbon emissions are not radically reduced by 2020, we will be doomed to some of the worst effects of the intensified greenhouse gases. President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has finally enforced mercury pollution limits at coal plants, and is forcing substantial numbers of them to close. But all of them have to be shut in eight years if we are to avoid calamities, and it is not Obama’s instinct to pursue radical change. Nor has he been good about standing in the way of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), a method of extracting natural gas that emits a great deal of methane. The president’s constituencies have to hold him to his inaugural promises and let him know that dealing with CO2 emissions and climate change is among their highest priorities for his second term.

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