We must act on climate change now

By TIMOTHY E. WIRTH

On the night of his historic election, President Obama identified the principal challenges he would face — “two wars, a planet in peril, and the worst financial crisis in a century.” Just five months later, he has developed far-reaching plans for Iraq and Afghanistan and taken bold action to address U.S. and global economic challenges. The remaining challenge, however, may be the most daunting — the climate crisis that puts the entire world at risk.

We deal every day, each of us, with risk. We calculate whether to step off a curb and jaywalk. We decide whether or not to smoke, to buy life insurance, to bungee jump. Some of those decisions turn out better than others.

The AIG insurance company, and its partners on Wall Street, made calculations of risk. That was their core business. They decided that a domino collapse of their investments was extremely unlikely and chose to risk it. And now we are all dealing with the ramifications of their decision.

We face a similar choice today on climate change. The risk of a sudden shift in the world’s climate seems slight — but it has happened many times in the Earth’s long history, and the effects would be catastrophic and irreversible. By insurance standards, the risk is not slight — scientists put the chance of catastrophic temperature increases at 1 in 20. AIG thought its risk was much smaller — less than 1 in 1000 — but government regulators will not let them take that chance again.

We would not step off a curb if there was a 1 in 20 chance of getting hit by a truck. We would not get on a plane if 1 out of every 20 crashed. Yet if we do not take strong and immediate action to reduce the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, we face a 1 in 20 chance that climate change will tear apart the economic, political and social fabric of the world. Can we muster the will to prevent it?

Disappearing Arctic ice cap

Clear scientific evidence, mounting daily, demonstrates that the economic, environmental and security costs of climate change will dwarf even the profound global impacts of today’s economic turmoil. To take but one example, the Arctic ice cap, the engine of our weather system, may disappear completely within five summers. The consequences for farmers and others who depend on familiar weather patterns are impossible to predict, but they are unlikely to be good.

President Obama has recognized that two steps are needed immediately. Investment in energy efficiency, renewable energy and building a modern electric power grid will deliver millions of new jobs that can’t be outsourced. These technologies, embedded in the stimulus package and in the president’s budget, will reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuels, especially oil, and lead to “a real and lasting prosperity.”

Step two is a cap on emissions that will put a price on carbon and give clean-energy technologies a competitive advantage, so they can succeed in the market without government intervention or support. This step awaits action by Congress, which would prefer to put off action until it is more politically convenient. That is a mistake we cannot make.

We can recover from an economic calamity caused by a miscalculation of risk, but not from catastrophic climatic change. Saving our “planet in peril” is the most urgent task of our generation. It can also be the foundation of long-term economic renewal. It is time to come together and act.

X Timothy E. Wirth is the president of the United Nations Foundation (www.unfoundation.org). He represented Colorado in the U.S. House and Senate from 1974 to 1992 and served as the first Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.