Should Earth Day spur us to climate action, or to humility about our impact on Earth? | Pro/Con

Wednesday, April 22, is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. As people worldwide gather digitally to consider climate change and other environmental issues, the head of the Sierra Club debates a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: Should we use Earth Day to galvanize climate change action, or to reconsider our predictions with greater humility?

By Michael Brune

Scientists warned our leaders about the danger. Our leaders ignored them, undermined them, and disbanded their programs. It was clear that politically difficult choices would be necessary to save thousands, perhaps even millions, of lives, and that the earlier we acted, the better off we would be. Continuing business as usual would be deadly.

Our leaders’ initial failures to act imperiled all of us, but especially the most vulnerable: people of color, indigenous people, the medically fragile, the disabled, the unhoused, and those earning poverty wages.

The parallels between the COVID-19 crisis and the climate crisis are unmistakable. Just as President Donald Trump and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis failed to act boldly and decisively to protect people and workers from the ravages of the coronavirus, they and like-minded predecessors spent the last four decades missing opportunities to flatten the curve of human-caused global warming.

This year’s Earth Day is historic, and we’ll use it, in part, to take stock of the past. After decades of denial and delay, there’s still a lot of work to be done. But there are also reasons for optimism.

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Over the past decade, more than 300 coal plants have closed, and many of them replaced by affordable clean energy. The price of renewable energy is now so low that many of the world’s coal plants will be unprofitable this year. We’re moving beyond coal and all dirty fuels faster than would have seemed possible even a few years ago.

We can also demand in innovative ways the just and equitable future we all deserve. The youth leaders planning for the biggest climate strike yet changed their plans to a 72-hour livestream of strikers, divestment activists, and everyday people invested in the health of this planet.

Participants in Earth Day Live will pressure all the centers of power in this country to take rapid action to protect our homes and our families against the floods, fires, and storms that are already locked in — and to keep worse ones from becoming inevitable.

Already, we’ve seen that some of the world’s largest companies can be moved by moral protest.

The youth organizers of the climate strike will harness the power of community to share stories from those on the frontlines of both crises. Later on, we will confront those big banks, asset managers, and insurers that continue to support the fossil-fuel industry. Already, we’ve seen that some of the world’s largest companies, like asset management giant BlackRock, can be moved by moral protest. The company has pledged to undertake one of the largest-ever divestments from coal.

Next, we planned a massive youth voter drive aimed at amplifying young people’s voices leading up to the 2020 elections and beyond.

Congress has been hammering out more COVID-19 stimulus aid. Will legislators take their opportunities to make a down payment on a more just and sustainable economy, and put millions of Americans back to work, this time in family-sustaining jobs building the green infrastructure of the future?

As brutal as they are, both the climate crisis and the COVID crisis offer a chance to rewrite the rules of our society and our economy so they work for everyone who lives in this country — not just the wealthy and connected.

If nothing else, this pandemic has shown us that we’re capable of changing almost everything about how we live in the name of love, solidarity, and collective survival. These are lessons we must return to not only during the Earth Day celebration but during the fight for our future.

Michael Brune is the executive director of the Sierra Club. He first wrote a version of this piece for InsideSources.com.

By Patrick J. Michaels

The first Earth Day was born in the height of fears of the population bomb, global famine, miasmatic air, and the rapid decline of the West into post-civilizational chaos.

How did that all work out? The dire predictions were wrong, but there is one lasting legacy: On Dec. 2, 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was born. It was purposefully and politically recobbled from other parts of the federal bureaucracy by Richard Nixon into one central agency granted eternal life in Washington, D.C.

Failed predictions aside, there were some serious air quality problems, especially in urban airsheds. The EPA along with the states did a pretty good job of cleaning things up — low-hanging fruit the agency could easily pick off.

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A much larger, less manageable problem was acid rain. While rainfall is naturally a bit acidic, the addition of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, mainly from the combustion of coal, increased acidity. Air quality around coal-fired power plants was pretty bad, but local solutions resulted in multistate problems. The mantra of those days was “the solution to pollution is dilution,” so power plant chimneys moved skyward. The clustering of generation facilities along major rivers like the Ohio, where they had easy access to coal, left large regions of the East subjected to increasingly acid precipitation, as new plants injected sulfate aerosols high enough in the atmosphere to travel hundreds, even thousands of miles.

Acid rain became a regional problem in the Eastern United States and Europe. Our power plants had to shift to low-sulfur coals and capture sulfates with scrubbers. Environmentalists and academics predicted horrible things would happen to extensive forests, but a comprehensive review published in 2004 in the journal Environmental Science and Policy concluded that “fortunately, the dramatic forest dieback feared by some scientists in the 1980s never materialized.”

Over time, the scope of environmental concerns spawned by the first Earth Day expanded, culminating with global warming. The EPA’s reach increased proportionately, justified by the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA that granted the agency the power to regulate carbon dioxide if it deemed the gas “endangered” human health and welfare. The EPA issued its official finding of endangerment in 2009.

The EPA’s sole metric to determine future endangerment consists of complicated computer models for future climate. Anyone who is watching the coronavirus saga (and who isn’t?) knows that future prospects are completely dependent upon very fuzzy and plastic assumptions. How effectively will people continue to “socially isolate”? No one really knows. How many “silent” cases are out there contributing to an undetected herd immunity?

Satellite data suggests our planet is rapidly becoming greener.

Ditto.

Climate models are largely incapable of modeling the three-dimensional structure of climate change in the Earth’s vast tropics.

The dreaded sea-level rise on the East Coast also appears pretty much the same now as some three centuries ago, or long before the Industrial Revolution and the initiation of our ability to significantly modify the global atmosphere. Satellite data suggests our planet is rapidly becoming greener, thanks to the fertilizing effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The effect about 10 times larger than we see from the increasing nitrogen deposition noted above.

In observation of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and the subsequent founding of the EPA, it would be great if the agency “for once” ate some humble pie and reversed its finding of human endangerment from carbon dioxide. That would really be cause for an Earth Day celebration.

Patrick J. Michaels is with the Competitive Enterprise Institute and is author of “Scientocracy: The Tangled Web of Public Science and Public Policy.” He first wrote a version of this piece for InsideSources.com.