The Sky is Falling

On the morning of the first presidential debate, more than two months ago, the Global Carbon Project released a 578-page report to little fanfare. Had anyone been paying attention, even this historic election would have paled in comparison to its warnings. And, as preoccupied as we are by the economic crisis today, it would be a colossal mistake to ignore them.

Carbon dioxide levels are now higher than they “probably [have been] during the last 20 million years.” And, the report noted glumly, with China and India consuming more and more, the problem is getting worse instead of better. The new data shows that CO2 levels have only risen faster since the turn of the century. So much for compact fluorescents and hybrid Priuses—apparently, the world is still going to end.

These should have been the golden years for climate change activists, who count scores of Nobel scientists, countless Hollywood celebrities, and the entire Third World among their allies. So many books, so many films, so many conferences and papers and symposia, and here is the most damning evidence of all that, even if acknowledging the problem is half the solution, it is only half.

Climate change, education, health care, immigration, fiscal responsibility: These are the issues on which we build our political identities. They rouse us to fight so-called enemies in election after election, to support scoundrels in the interest of the party, to donate vast sums and volunteer long hours—they divide us because they matter.

But the very power of these issues to determine our politics also means that they are too often delayed or simply avoided in our policy. “Democrats and Republicans will never agree,” the conventional wisdom declares, “Why even bother?” In the end, some of the past two decades’ most critical legislation was sacrificed to political expediency and Congress’s desperation to get something—anything—done. Comprehensive immigration reform was, after years of personal investment by President Bush, finally scrapped; ratification of the Kyoto Protocol was quietly shelved by the Clinton Administration. At least Hillarycare went down in a passionate and ignoble blaze.

Americans began to worry that Congress would never get anything done. And then, about two weeks before the Global Carbon Report was released, the bottom fell out of the economy.

Within days, Washington snapped into action. Secretary Paulson strode into the Capitol building with a now-infamous $700 billion rescue package, and even wounded egos and weekend flights could not dampen the urgent sense that something must be done, overtime pay be damned. At first, his plan did not pass—a common fate of laws that are divisive, unwanted, and absolutely necessary. This time, however, the crisis intervened. The bill was put to another vote and signed into law with bipartisan and hysterical relief—because there was nothing else to be done.

The crisis continues. We’ve learned by now that the first bailout was not nearly enough; another one will be necessary, and another one—each more politically difficult than the last, as the sense of frantic emergency fades into quiet resignation. Elected officials, burned for supporting action in this year’s elections, have begun to wonder if there is any point to saving General Motors or Chrysler or whether we should just wait until the companies collapse, until their own hands are forced, and another crisis begins.

This attitude is nothing new. Indeed, the social problems that are so damaging now, when our resources are more strained and our future more precarious, have become so out of negligence when times were better. It is deeply and morbidly ironic that the times when Washington is most prepared to act aggressively are also the times when it is most constrained in its range of action.

Relying on crisis to mobilize us is a luxury we have never been able to afford. Infrastructure decays slowly, and yet roads erode, bridges collapse, and levees fail. Some problems have existed so long that we forget there is any alternative until the Europeans figure it out first: universal health care, lower teenage pregnancy, access to higher education. Some, like the national debt, have become so large that successive administrations have simply passed them on and hoped they explode on someone else’s watch.

And when the recession ends—if it ever ends—it may well leave us a dramatically changed country. Unless we are vigilant, however, it will not cure the pathologies of our politics. As long as we continue to hand the real work of compromises, creativity, and difficult governance to later generations, we allow the true catastrophes to creep up on us, gaining traction in our denial.

Even as the international economy stands at the brink of collapse, parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change complete their 14th meeting in Poland today in what may well be our last real chance to prevent environmental calamity in our lifetimes. It was inevitable that even this, the most critical of meetings, would be contaminated by the current recession, on the grounds that the first priority must be dealing with the problems facing us right now.

Of course, focusing on the present is precisely what led to the calamities we face today. It was too late in September to stop the financial crisis, and one day it will be too late to stop the climate crisis. The sky will fall before we pay it any heed. And the world will end—again.

Elise X. Liu ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Cabot House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.