Choosing to fight climate change -- Aug. 12, 2021 column

By MARSHA MERCER

As if fires in the American West, floods in Europe and more intense storms everywhere weren’t enough of a wakeup call, a United Nations panel Monday issued a “code red” warning on global climate change.

“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land,” states the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, urging immediate action to avert more dire effects of climate change.

The report, based on 14,000 studies, the most comprehensive summary ever, was approved by 195 governments. It says human-caused emissions have pushed the average global temperature up 1.5 degrees Celsius since the pre-industrial average.

“We can’t wait to tackle the climate crisis. The signs are unmistakable. The science is undeniable. And the cost of inaction keeps mounting,” President Joe Biden tweeted.

Biden wants to put the United States on a path to net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation is a key contributor to emissions, and the bipartisan infrastructure bill the Senate passed Tuesday includes $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations and $7.5 billion to replace school buses and ferries with lower-emission ones.

A separate $3.5 trillion budget blueprint Senate Democrats passed Wednesday – dubbed the Build Back Better plan – promotes sales of electric vehicles, clean energy manufacturing and a Civilian Climate Corps.

Both bills face hurdles in the House. To some congressional Democrats on the left, the bills are too lean, and to congressional Republicans on the right, they’re too fat.

Republicans continue to insist the climate is always changing, American jobs will be sacrificed, and, besides, our Chinese competitors are worse climate offenders. Our reducing emissions will only benefit them.

With COVID-19 again surging across the country, this may seem the worst possible time to bring up behavioral changes individuals can make to help ameliorate climate change.  

But the changes the pandemic brought to our lifestyles over the last year and a half can be helpful as we consider how we want to live moving forward.

What can one person do to fight climate change?

n  -- Contact your elected representatives

n  -- Eat less meat and dairy

n --  Fly less

n  -- Leave the car at home

Those are among nine steps Imperial College London, a public research university devoted to science, engineering, business and medicine, says individuals can take.  It also proposes reducing energy use, protecting green spaces and planting trees, investing responsibly, minimizing waste by donating items, and talking about the changes you make.

It quotes Al Gore’s mantra: "Use your voice, use your vote, use your choice."

I like the list because it’s straight-forward. I found U.S. government sites so fearful of offending someone they larded up very similar suggestions with “where possible,” “where feasible,” “where affordable,” and “where practical.”

Yes, of course, no one can do what’s impossible or unaffordable, but such qualifiers muddy the message.

Nobody pretends individual actions alone can end climate change, but individuals can raise a sense of urgency, which can lead to change.

Maybe we don’t resume flying to in-person conferences and continue to meet virtually. Embrace Zoom? That, I know, is a reach.

Go on foot or bike to the store. Choose a plant-based diet and make ourselves and the planet healthier. Explore charity organizations or Freecycle groups to give unwanted household items a new home, rather than sending them to the landfill.

“While individuals alone may not be able to make drastic emissions cuts that limit climate change to acceptable levels, personal action is essential to raise the importance of issues to policymakers and businesses,” Imperial says.

Bill Gates writes in his new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”:

“When somebody wants toast for breakfast, we need to make sure there’s a system in place that can deliver the bread, the toaster, and the electricity to run the toaster without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. We aren’t going to solve the climate problem by telling people not to eat toast.”

Gates is right. Telling people, “no toast” is a non-starter. But if more of us voluntarily take small steps now, we can help reduce our carbon footprint and stave off disaster.

©2021 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Trump commits U.S. to more trees, maybe -- Jan. 23, 2020 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Nobody would mistake President Donald Trump for a tree hugger.

He has dismissed climate change as a “hoax,” rolled back many Obama-era environmental and clean energy policies that reduce carbon emissions, and is withdrawing the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

But as his impeachment trial was poised to begin in Washington Tuesday, Trump announced during a campaign-style speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the United States would join in the forum’s 1 Trillion Trees initiative. What?

The forum launched 1t.org to connect, support and fund the international movement to plant 1 trillion trees around the globe in coming decades to fight climate change.

Billionaire entrepreneur Marc Benioff, founder of the software company Salesforce, and his wife Lynne are providing financial support for the 1t.org digital platform. Benioff said his company also intends “to support and mobilize the conservation and restoration of 100 million trees over the next decade.”

Trump’s announcement that the U.S. will join 1t.org drew applause from the global business and government leaders in Davos, but it’s unclear what happens next.  

“We will continue to show strong leadership in restoring, growing and better managing our trees and forests,” Trump said, but offered no specifics.

Although he described himself to reporters in Davos as “a very big believer in the environment,” Trump has proposed cuts in the U.S. Forest Service, opened public lands to drilling and mining, and pushed for new logging in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.

In Davos, Trump downplayed climate fears saying, “This is not a time for pessimism; this is a time for optimism. . . this is a time for tremendous hope and joy and optimism and action.”

He also indirectly called out Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist from Sweden who was in the audience. She urges all countries to heed the call by the United Nations environmental panel to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over a decade to avoid intense climate impact. That will require reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% between now and 2030.

But Trump said: "We must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse. They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers.” He also lambasted “radical socialists” who would ruin the U.S. economy with environmental regulations.

Forests remove carbon dioxide from the air and store the carbon in trees, vegetation, the forest floor and in the soil. This carbon removal, or sequestration, “makes the forest a type of carbon sink by absorbing more CO2 than is emitted. This absorption partially offsets the contribution of carbon to the atmosphere from carbon sources such as the burning of fossil fuels,” the Virginia Department of Forestry says on its website.

Some nations have acted. Ethiopia planted more than 350 million trees in 12 hours last July, setting a new world record. India had held the record for planting 66 million trees in 2017.

Trump’s comments in Davos reflect the shifting politics of climate in Congress. House Republicans who recognize they’re losing young voters concerned about climate issues, are developing an alternative to the Democrats’ Green New Deal, Axios reported this week. The Green New Deal would remake the economy to fight climate change. The GOP plan stops short of envisioning major changes in how we work and live.

Rep. Bruce Westerman, Republican of Arkansas, is drafting a Trillion Trees Act that will set a target for growing more trees “for the purpose of sequestering carbon,” according to a summary of the bill Axios viewed, but so far does not include an actual numerical target.

Who doesn’t like trees? Planting them makes people feel good, but that by itself won’t come close to solving the climate crisis. It’s estimated reforestation could provide only up to one-third of the climate solutions needed by 2030 to meet the 1.5 degree goal, the forum reported.

“Nature-based solutions will only be effective if undertaken in conjunction with other efforts to transform energy, heavy industry and the finance sectors,” the forum said.

We in the United States should plant trees as a first step, but we, the Trump administration and Congress will need to do more to fight climate change.

© Marsha Mercer 2020. All rights reserved.

Trump's war on facts a losing gambit -- Jan. 26, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

I am 5’10,” speak French like a native and play the piano flawlessly. Oh, and Donald Trump just released his tax returns and resigned as president.

Not one of those facts is real. They’re falsehoods, fibs, fantasy. OK, whoppers.   

They would be lies -- and I a liar -- if I intended to deceive you. I don’t. Like most Americans, I respect facts, evidence and truth, which is more than you can say for President Trump.

Trump’s revolution showed its disdain for science by scrubbing the White House web site of all mention of climate change and gagging the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A president has every right to change policy, but stopping the free flow of facts is wrong. It goes against the grain of our history.

Long before the American Revolution, John Adams, later our second president, said in 1770: “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Americans have prized truth in our leaders, sometimes honored in the breach more than in the observance, since George Washington. The myth of the boy, his hatchet and the cherry tree -- “I cannot tell a lie” – gave generations a role model.  

In the 20^th Century, Jimmy Carter won the White House promising: “I’ll never tell a lie.” People rolled their eyes, but Carter’s earnestness was refreshing after the lyin’ Nixon years and Watergate scandal.

Politicians and presidents do lie, of course, but we’ve never had a president like Trump, who wields fake facts as emotional prods to rile up his followers.  

Trump tried for years to prove the lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and said Hillary Clinton and her 2008 campaign started the rumor – claims that were repeatedly debunked and yet built him a following.

He backed off last September when the lie began to impede his path to the White House, still insisting that Clinton started it.

Trump won despite his loose affiliation with truth during the campaign. As president, he has turned to alternative facts.

“Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts” that the crowds at Trump’s inauguration were the biggest ever, despite photo evidence to the contrary, Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump aide, said last Sunday on “Meet the Press.”

Chuck Todd, the show’s moderator, replied, “Alternative facts aren’t facts. They are falsehoods.”

The phrase, alternative facts, was a chilling reminder of George Orwell’s “1984,” a novel published in 1932 that envisions a dystopian future where the Ministry of Truth subverts facts and history. This week, “1984” jumped to No. 1 on Amazon.

Sales of  “1984” have soared 9,500 percent since the Trump inauguration, and publisher Penguin is rushing out a reprint of 75,000 copies.

The Amazon Top 20 included “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis, about the election of an authoritarian president wonderfully named Buzz Windrip, and “Brave New World,” by Aldous Huxley, also a dark view of the future where an authoritarian regime quashes thought.  

If Trump’s alternative facts were as benign as his wish for longer fingers or thicker hair, we could ignore them. But he’s no longer a billionaire private citizen with kooky ideas or a candidate crying “rigged election” in case he loses.  

Unable to let go of his baseless claim that he would have won the popular vote were it not for up to five million people illegally voting for Hillary Clinton, the president tweeted his call for a “major investigation” into voter fraud.

No matter that state election officials insist there’s zero evidence of widespread fraud. Voter fraud is one of Trump’s unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

It’s “a longstanding belief he’s maintained,” Sean Spicer, White House Press secretary, told reporters.

It’s encouraging that some powerful Republicans in Congress want no part in investigating this particular longstanding belief of Trump’s.  

“I don’t see any evidence,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told reporters. “But the president has 100,000 people at the Department of Justice, and if he wants to have an investigation, have at it.”

Facts are stubborn things, and people want a president whose facts they can trust. Playing fast and loose with truth is no way to govern.

As someone who hates to lose, Trump should realize this gambit won’t win.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.