The big bonfire

The U.S. already has a de facto climate policy

My daughter Ren celebrated her 25th birthday last summer. She’s a member of what I call Generation B, where B stands for “bonfire.” Since her birth, more than half of all the fossil fuel consumed in human history has been burned, and more than half the greenhouse gas emissions humans have ever produced has gone skyward.

As it steadily accumulates in the atmosphere, this enormous plume, now measuring 30 billions tons each year, is enough to melt glaciers, strand polar bears on sea ice, shrink the Colorado River, and alter the climate on which life depends.

Earlier this year, hopes for a national policy that would finally tackle global warming ran high, and prospects for an international climate treaty looked promising. But though the House passed a climate bill in June, the Senate (motto: “Where good ideas go to die”) has kicked the can down the road while it struggles with health care reform. And since the Chinese, now the world’s largest polluters, are reluctant to reduce their emissions, December’s climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, seems unlikely to produce much more than “provisional targets” and “tentative promises.”

Lately, I’ve begun to wonder whether that’s all bad. Indeed, we may already have most of the climate policy we are ever going to have, an ad hoc and accidental assemblage of energy policies and economic realities that may prove surprisingly effective at further reducing emissions.

Although global emissions are still rising, and the climate problem is far from solved, U.S. emissions are falling, fast. Since 2007, they are down 9 percent, in large part because Americans are using 2 million barrels less oil each day. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute believes that “the United States has entered a new energy era. Peak carbon is now history. What had appeared to be hopelessly difficult is happening at amazing speed.”

High Country News