David Crossley

Climate change crossroads

President, Houston Tomorrow, Mar 30, 09.

Tagged with environment, grand parkway, climate change

Here’s the thing: whenever you’re in some sort of dangerous situation, you want to breathe deep for a moment and list the issues that are coming down on you. If you have the time to reflect on those, you can usually see some quick fix types and some long-term types.

If a Grizzly bear is towering above you and salivating, you have to remember whether you’re supposed to be still, or take off. You hear from time to time that if you are still and put your hands up in the air the bear will think you’re bigger than you are. Of course, the bear no doubt has his hands up in the air, too, and can plainly see that he is a lot bigger than you, unless it’s that bears are mostly blind, which I doubt.

The long-term fix would have come from a moment of meditation at an earlier time, when you got to the sign that said “Bears this way ->” and you went that way. You could have taken another path, and declined to get into a probable bear slaughter situation.

We’re somewhat past the “Climate change this way ->” sign, but not yet at the “Oh, we’re seconds away from being crushed by surging tides that are over our heads” moment. Scientists are spread out along the continuum between, but it is disconcerting that some of the best and brightest are using the term “total collapse” more often than one would hope. Arabianbusiness.com had a headline recently that said “The End of the World is Nigh,” on an interview with Geoffrey West, the president of the Santa Fe Institute, who noted that “Humanity’s way of life is ultimately unsustainable.”

That implies that humanity needs to change its way of life. But in the course of human events, some people get and process information faster than others do. The guy driving the train, for instance, knows long before the folks in the caboose that there’s a dump truck stalled on the tracks ahead.

What this means is that the folks who are looking at something, or looking for something, are the first ones to see what’s going on with that something. So the scientists who look at huge issues like global temperature and carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere were the first people to see that the Earth’s temperature was rising slightly and is likely to go higher if trends continue.

Like the train engineer, they turned around and hollered at the rest of us, but we were dancing to our iPods and Twittering our attention away and many of us just got cranky about all this troubling chatter. Some of us went into total denial and said the scientists were lying for political reasons and mounted enormous campaigns to convince us that if we tried to reduce carbon emissions in order to head off doom, we’d have economic disaster and we’d all lose our jobs, and our homes, and our electric stuff.

Now, as it happened we went ahead and had the economic disaster anyway, and a lot of us have lost our jobs and homes, and we are really beginning to worry about our electric stuff. And our cars.

The current policy momentum seems to be to put our money and treasure into jobs, education, health, and energy, and maybe wait awhile on this carbon taxing idea. When you pass that idea back up the line to the folks watching the glaciers melt and the Dengue fever and the migration of insects, animals, and vegetation to cooler places they sort of take their eyes off the ball and go, really, completely crazy.

No! they shout. Back off! Find something else to do, but for Heaven’s sake cut down on the consuming! Right now!

Well. That’s their perspective.

In the meantime, we are standing at the crossroads and deciding what to do. It’s absolutely clear that in Houston, the worst possible thing you could do if you’re concerned about climate change and economic meltdown is to build a new loop road around your region that goes right through the best farm land and encourages people to build the sprawl form that has caused nearly all of the problems we’re now trying to solve.

Yet, almost to a person, our elected officials with a chance to vote on that project have decided to go ahead with it. Isn’t it amazing?

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