Mark Hertsgaard is the author of five books on a variety of topics including music, politics, and the environment, and his work has been featured in The Nation, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He talked with TAP about his upcoming book, Living Through the Storm: Our Future Under Global Warming, in which he tackles the ways our civilization must adapt to climate change.
What is the focus of Living Through the Storm?
Most people, quite understandably, [think] that stopping global warming is like turning off a light switch. You turn it off and boom, it stops. But it's really more like a heavy train that we've accelerated up to 300 miles per hour, we have to pull the brake, but it's not going to stop for a very long ways down the track. We don't know what's ahead, we can only see the next mile and a half, after that it's fog and it's pretty ominous fog.
Early scientific findings are showing that there's not going to be any ice in the summer in the Arctic by 2030. Polar bears are basically doomed; they will two-thirds gone by then. There are islands going under in the South Pacific. The 2003 heat wave in Europe killed 70,000 people.
My book is about this shift. We've entered a new era of global warming where it no longer this distant threat, it is something that we're going to be living with for the rest of our lives and for my little two-year-old daughter, it's going to most of her life, too, even if we do the right things.
[For the book] I've been interviewing scientists like David King, politicians like Al Gore, and then people on the ground in New Orleans; the Netherlands, which you may not be surprised to hear is the country that is most advanced in dealing with adaptation; and Bangladesh, which is essentially ground zero for global warming.
The reason that political leaders and environmental leaders don't want to talk about this is that they're afraid that if people knew it they'd say, 'Oh what's the use, let's not bother to switch to a green energy source'. I understand their thinking, but I think that putting your head in the sand is not going to help. The fact is, there is a lot we can do to prepare against these rising temperatures and above all, the most important thing we've got to do is pull the break as soon as possible.
What were the strongest messages to come out of September's UN climate summit?
It had virtually all of the world's heads of government saying that we have to deal with this problem and what we need is a tough follow-up agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. We have not seen quite that level of unanimity and urgency on the part of heads of government in a long time. You've also got the head of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, not too obliquely dismissing the U.S. position, and saying there's no time to wait, and that the UN is the proper place to do this. I think it's pretty clear now, except for the lame duck in the White House, that the world is ready to do this.
The European Union has already pledged 20 percent reductions in [greenhouse gas] emissions from 1990 levels by the year 2020. There's a lot going on in the state and local governments, even in the U.S., and the real question is when will Washington get aboard?
In this presidential campaign, who's got the best plan to address climate change?
Of the Democratic candidates, in my eyes, the one who comes closest to that is John Edwards. He's made the strongest statements about climate change. He also talks about linking the fight against climate change to a broader economic agenda, which means 'green collar jobs', as Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, Calif. puts it.
Marrying environmental methods with economic methods is really important for at least two reasons. One is that it extends the appeal beyond the traditional environmental constituency of, let's face it, upper-middle-class white people who do not live paycheck to paycheck and therefore do not have to worry as much about the economic impacts of increased prices or loss of construction jobs. This is about going out to lower-income communities and saying this isn't about global warming, this is about giving you good paying jobs that cannot be outsourced. When you put solar panels on houses, they can't send that job to China.
The other reason is that it speaks to a broader American public in a way that is encouraging and upbeat, as opposed to gloom and doom. There's plenty of gloom and doom in climate change, so if you want to motivate people it's important that you know the risks, but it's equally important to know the benefits. The amount of jobs it will create, the healthier communities and the shift to cleaner air, is all part of that.
Should we be more concerned, at this point, with repairing the environment or preparing ourselves for violent climate change?
We've got to do both. We've absolutely got to pull the brake on greenhouse emissions as hard and as fast as possible. Otherwise, our civilization is not going to survive more than two or three more generations. We've got to shift to a low-carbon economy if we want any chance of surviving. In the meantime, we've also got to prepare to live through the storm.
New Orleans is going to be remembered as one of the first casualties of climate change, Bangladesh likewise, and also the 2003 European summer heat wave. We have to keep the losses to a minimum to maintain a livable planet for my daughter and her generation all around the world.
We need a new paradigm that says from now on this is a new ballgame. The battle to prevent global warming is over and lost, and the race to survive it has now begun.
