This commentary is by Richard Czaplinski of Warren, president of the Will Miller Green Mountains Veterans for Peace Chapter 57 and board member of Friends of the Mad River. He spent six years on the Vermont Natural Resources Council and for 15 years was a water resources planner for the Vermont state government.
Vermont is trying to do its part to meet the climate crisis with the passage of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2020, which created the Climate Action Council.
This begins the process and work toward changes that are needed for Vermont to meet the greenhouse gas emissions targets set by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as agreed in Paris in 2015 by 190 countries plus the European Union.
It is widely recognized that any one country or state cannot solve the problem alone. As the continuing pandemic clearly illustrates, we are in this together. We must cooperate, not compete.
How do we get out of the climate crisis jam? Not easily. Most of the so-called solutions are predicated on ramping up renewable energy and phasing out fossil fuels and giving financial incentives for doing so.
Yet, at the same time, building of fossil fuel infrastructure continues. The Line 3 pipeline has just been completed and is carrying tar sands crude from Canada into the U.S. U.S. government subsidies to fossil fuel industries continue, last year estimated to be $650 billion, approaching $780 billion, the amount of the 2022 National Defense Authorization.
Einstein’s words from decades ago are relevant now in thinking about how to face the climate crisis. He said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
The world economy, based on continual growth, encourages consumption even though each item we buy has a great percentage of fossil fuel in its embodied energy (energy used to make it and get it to you), adding to the problem.
It’s clear that the future economy needs to be based on frugality, consuming less and using less energy, since renewable energy will not be as easily available as fossil fuels for quite a while. This means changing the basic operating rules of the economy. How these rules need to be changed is a good question for economists to be urgently working on.
Yet even good, solid cooperation among countries, states and individuals isn’t going to happen quickly, if at all. What’s in the way? Well, Admiral H.G. Rickover, from his experience in getting nuclear ships into the U.S. Navy’s fleet, said it well. “Bureaucracy cannot stop what it is doing, unless drastic force is applied from the outside.”
There is no drastic outside force to prompt human beings into the action needed except the climate crisis itself. This force is gaining traction and — even with the increased flooding, hurricanes, fires, hot weather, species extinction — we are collectively not prompted to the actions needed.
Why haven’t we learned from history? I was born a few months before the U.S. entered World War II in 1941. I was old enough by the end of the war to remember the rationing of gasoline and materials. Everyone was compelled to make the sacrifices needed for the war effort, no exceptions. War was the drastic force applied from the outside. It was a national emergency.
Today is no different. Our well-being is at stake. Yet each one of us as individuals is not even asked to change our ways to reduce our fossil fuel use, much less required to do so. “It’s a free country. I can do what I want.” I’ve heard this many times as I’ve made suggestions to owners of idling cars to shut off the car engine they left running. A small thing, but indicative of the general attitude we have to overcome.
In the biggest crisis we have to face, there is no rationing of gasoline for transportation and electricity use, the two biggest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions.
I suggest we take Einstein’s and Rickover’s wisdom to heart and fashion a response to the climate crisis that has some chance of meeting the challenge. Vermont can’t do it alone; the U.S. Congress can’t do it alone. The nations of the world must act together.
Hopefully there will be some concerted and effective action soon to meet the climate crisis. I hope that the Climate Action Council will urge everyone, right now, to use less fossil fuel — drive less, fly only for emergencies, buy less, and waste less.
In the meantime, I will keep doing these things and I hope everyone else will too.
