We Didn’t Start the Fire – Billy Joel
Deadline
It’s a lot like the lists from the famous Billy Joel song We Didn’t Start the Fire. This week alone, the lyric might go: “…Derek Chauvin, Matt Gaetz, Infrastructure, Columbus Cops, Russian Armies, Vaccines, Helicopters on Mars! We Didn’t Start the Fire…” Even though we are no longer in the continual state of “impending doom” of the Trump Administration, there are so many things happening so fast, it’s hard to take the “long view”. Fires of immediate crisis light up every day. Putting them out seems to be more than enough to consume our attention.
But there is one hard and fast deadline that refuses to budge to any current crisis. We are faced with the “red line” of climate change. What seemed far in the future when “Earth Day” began back when I was in eighth grade in 1970, now is current. We knew then that what our modern society was doing to the environment would ultimately have devastating consequences. Now, fifty-one years later, we are much clearer about what those consequences may be.
Dancing Naked
It’s not about dancing naked in the fields, picking daisies and chanting at the puffy clouds (Earth Day really wasn’t like that back in eighth grade either. Eighth grade is not a good “dancing naked” age). Now it’s immediate: rising tides, more radical temperature shifts, changing climate zones, and vast inhabited areas of the globe changed. It’s the southern border migration situation here in the United States. It’s the number of category Four and Five storms that wrack our shores each fall. And it’s the rising levels of skin cancers in our hospitals.
The science is clear. We have a limited number of years, maybe not even twenty, to change the amount of carbon we are putting in the environment. The United States isn’t the only country on the list – but we are number two.
Science
This is the number – in billions of tons. Let me say that again, a billion tons of hydro-carbons.
China leads the world – 10.3 billion tons of hydrocarbon emissions per year. The United States is second, 5.3 billion tons, while India is a distant third with 2.2 billion tons. Russia and Japan round out the top five, with 1.7 and 1.2 billion tons a piece.
And that massive dump of hydro-carbons into the environment is earth-changing. It’s literally raising the average temperature of the globe. It’s melting ice caps and raising sea levels. If you live in a nation like Bangladesh, the entire nation may be flooded out by the next typhoon. And that typhoon is likely to be even stronger. Heat equals energy when it comes to killer storms, so a warmer world means more violent weather.
And once that temperature is raised, it will “tip” the earth into a different cycle. The world that I grew up in for the last fifty years since the first “Earth Day” will not be the world my grand nieces and nephews will experience. There world will be harsher, and filled with “climate refugees” who have lost their traditional homes. That includes those in the Northern Triangle of Central America, already feeling the impact of the current changes with failing crops and more powerful storms.
The Cure
There’s still a chance to gain control. If the top five countries radically cut their emissions in the next decade, the earth “warming” would slow. But to stop those emissions, it requires reduction in the burning of fossil fuels: coal, petroleum, natural gas.
Coal is a huge culprit. It is dirty – there is no such thing as “clean coal”. It’s why China, with huge reserves of coal, leads the list with almost double the pollution. The Chinese leap into the modern world economy has been coal fired. And while the United States has generally moved away from coal, our addiction to individual gasoline powered transportation (cars) is keeping us high on the list of polluters.
None of this is “new news”. We’ve known for at least fifty years what course we were on, and what was going to happen. And for the past twenty years we knew that the crisis wasn’t in some “far future”, but in the mid-twenty first century. So it’s 2021, and we are entering that mid-twenty first century. We have done the “easy” things here in the United States. Our cars are cleaner, and our power plants no longer belch the coal-fired smoke. But it’s time to make the “hard” choices.
Our Kids
We aren’t making those choices for some indefinite future generation. This time – now — it’s for our kids, our eighth graders, and what their world will be like. We have continued to “light the fire” with hydro-carbons, and we are burning their future world. We didn’t start the fire, but it’s our direct responsibility to replace it, with new technology that already exists. That will make their world a place where we would want them to live.
Maybe that won’t go dancing naked in the fields, but if they do, they won’t have to travel to Canada to find daisies.
