Calling out the delayers
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Posted May. 27, 2014 @ 1:40 am
The steady accumulation of recent landmark climate reports is drawing a new form of pushback: not denial, but delay. In a world where denial has no scientific basis, delay provides a fig leaf of legitimacy. But actions speak louder than words and by this metric, delay and denial are indistinguishable.
The latest assessment, the Third National Climate Assessment, raises an obvious question: with so much evidence, why has there been no action? In my home state of Oregon, warming is projected to threaten our iconic forests and the industries they support, and reduce fresh water available for agriculture and industry through declining snow pack. Sea level rise and inundation pose threats to homes and business throughout the Northwest, where ocean acidification (another sad consequence of climate change) is already imperiling our fishing industries. You'd think people would be convinced, but some still find creative ways to rationalize their inertia.
"Delayers" often profess agreement with the scientific consensus and support for climate action, at least in theory. Voices like Bjorn Lomborg, Roger Pielke Jr. and others at the Breakthrough Institute have pioneered this tactic, which establishes credibility and grants entrance into a mainstream media increasingly closed to the denial of basic science. But after token acknowledgement of the problem, a litany of excuses for inaction begins, often on economic grounds. At its heart, the delayer argument is to wait: for better technology, for other countries to act first, for greater scientific certainty or even for other problems to be solved first, like poverty or inequality or growth (as if we can only tackle one problem at a time).
None of the standard delayer excuses hold up against the most current scientific and economic analyses. For example, new evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that addressing climate change is practical and affordable. The report explicitly recognized that effective policies in some countries have already started to decouple economic growth from emissions growth, meaning economic growth need not be compromised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Other countries are already acting. In fact, according to a 2013 World Bank study, about 20 percent of world emissions are already covered by some form of carbon price. Even China has a pilot program underway. Far from acting alone, the United States is actually trailing other developed nations.
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