That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [111]
Why is that attitude so hard for America to duplicate? Why has the United States failed so abjectly to meet the related challenges of climate change and energy?
Of Science and Political Science
For starters, climate change occurs gradually and may not produce an equivalent of Pearl Harbor—until it is too late. That is, it’s another one of those slowly unfolding problems—like the deficit—in which there is a fundamental mismatch between the cause and the people who cause it, on the one hand, and the effect and the people who will be most affected, on the other. The effects lag far behind the causes.
So, for example, whatever global warming effects we’re experiencing today, which are relatively mild, are the product of CO2 emissions from decades ago, before China and India and Brazil became economic powerhouses. And the emissions that we are pouring into the atmosphere today will be felt by our grandchildren in 2050. When people cannot see any immediate effect of what scientists tell them is harmful behavior, generating collective action to stop that behavior is extremely difficult. But this also means that if and when the environmental equivalent of Pearl Harbor does come, the response will have to be sweeping and disruptive.
“Time here is indeed the enemy,” said Hal Harvey, the CEO of the ClimateWorks Foundation, which promotes the best practices for energy management and climate-change mitigation around the world. “Things that happen suddenly, like a pinprick or a tornado, capture our attention. But we don’t even notice things that unfold over years or decades.”
Another reason we keep putting off action on global warming is that the solution requires putting a price on carbon and setting stronger energy-efficiency standards. Since politicians don’t want to propose either of those, they prefer not to talk about the problem. This did not use to be us. Under the leadership of presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the United States reacted to the 1973–1974 Arab oil embargo by putting in place higher fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks. In 1975, Congress, with broad bipartisan support, passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which established corporate average fuel economy standards that required the gradual doubling of efficiency for new passenger vehicles—to 27.5 miles per gallon—within ten years. As a result of that, said Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, “we raised our oil productivity 5.2 percent a year for eight years from 1977 through 1985; oil imports fell 50 percent and oil imports from the Persian Gulf fell 87 percent. We broke OPEC’s pricing power for a decade by cutting their sales in half.” Oil tumbled in price to below $15 a barrel. “Just think,” added Lovins, “with today’s innovations, we could rerun that old play so much better, and imagine what the impact would be.”
It was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who signed into law the first pieces of major environmental legislation in the United States, which addressed our first generation of environmental problems—air pollution, water pollution, and toxic waste. In particular, Nixon pushed Congress to pass the landmark Clean Air Act of 1970, and to oversee environmental protection, he also created both the Department of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency.
It was Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, who oversaw the negotiation of the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer—a landmark international agreement designed to protect the stratospheric ozone layer that shields the planet from damaging UVB radiation. And it was President George H. W. Bush who introduced the idea of “cap and trade” to address an environmental problem. Yes, you read that correctly.
In an article entitled “The Political History of Cap and Trade,” published in Smithsonian magazine (August 2009), Richard Conniff details the