Together For Earth

John Kerry, President Biden's special envoy on climate change, has announced a deal between the United States and China to work together on combatting climate change.  As the top two greenhouse gas-emitting countries on the planet, the U.S. and China have recognized the need to push forward a bold climate agenda to get the ball rolling on stopping or at least slowing carbon emissions before it's too late.

The main goals, taken form the State Department's official communique on the meeting between Kerry and Chinese officials, are as follows:

• Policies, measures, and technologies to decarbonize industry and power, including through circular economy, energy storage and grid reliability, CCUS, and green hydrogen
• Increased deployment of renewable energy
• Green and climate resilient agriculture
• Energy efficient buildings
• Green, low-carbon transportation
• Cooperation on addressing emissions of methane and other non-CO2 greenhouse gases
• Cooperation on addressing emissions from international civil aviation and maritime activities
• Other near-term policies and measures, including with respect to reducing emissions from coal, oil, and gas

This is a big deal, coming as it does in advance of a two-day virtual climate summit President Biden is hosting today, Earth Day, and tomorrow, and not because of Trump's effort to stop anything from being done about climate change.  It's because the Americans and the Chinese haven't been able to agree on anything, trading insults recently at a bilateral meeting just a few weeks ago over COVID.  Instead of blaming each other for the problem of climate change (the European Union is already doing something about the problem while blaming both countries for it!), the U.S. and China are putting differences aside for the good of the planet and giving great impetus to getting some sort of an agreement to go forward at the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference, to be held this November in Glasgow.

If John Kerry sounds like he needs to get this issue under control as soon as possible, it's because he does.  The efforts to combat climate change will be ineffective after we reach the tipping point, possibly as soon as 2030.  And if there's a Republican President in 2025, it will really be too late after that.

Earth Day - Fifty Years

After fifty years of Earth Day and trying to take care of the planet for that long, we seem to have mixed results.  Rivers don't catch fire anymore and air is easier to breathe, but a lot of the progress we've made since 1970 has been undermined by our carbon footprint, which has resulted in riding sea levels, snowless winters, monster hurricanes, and Paris being hotter than Kinshasa in June.  Efforts to curb pollution have been stymied by business leaders and government leaders around the world who have great difficulty admitting that we have a problem - and for American leaders, that goes double. 

We have so much disrespect for our leaders that those of us who actually care about doing anything to save the planet try to do what we can ourselves, like walking a mile to the store instead of driving (many of us don't live close enough to stores to that, of course) and taking part in cleanup activities in early spring that, alas, have been canceled this year because of COVID-19, which could last into '22.  We so distrust the politicians that we forget that it was a politician who started Earth Day in the first place - Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin.  (Underscoring our disdain for politicians is that the new U.S. Earth Day postage stamp issue this month neither pictures nor mentions Nelson, who died in 2005.  Back in the fifties, commemorative stamps for U.S. senators were quire common.) 

Ironically, the pandemic has done more for the environment than we humans could have ever done by keeping us from going out in our cars and powering our places of business, thus dramatically lowering our carbon footprint.  (It won't be enough to mitigate the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, alas, which is till expected to be fierce.  And severe storms in America are already wreaking havoc on the South and the Northeast.)  To those of you who hoped that 2020 would be your year - myself included - sorry, this year belongs only to Mother Nature, and God's bratty kid sister is getting her sweet revenge. Earth Day now seems sadly quaint.

And in that spirit, here's a song from the year of the first Earth Day that still fits the times, fifty years later.

Earth Day, Forty Years Later

Earth Day is once again upon us, and it's the fortieth anniversary of the first Earth Day. Call me cynical, but I'm beginning to think of Earth Day as the one day we're all environmentalists much like St. Patrick's Day is the one day we're all Irish. We talk a good game of saving the environment, but when the rubber hits the road, it's supporting a gas-guzzling SUV. And even if some of us do drive sensible subcompacts, are we willing to spend a little more money for one of those newfangled light bulbs that look like soft ice cream in a cone? And breaking one of those things would be like breaking a thermometer - it's too dangerous.

What about all the plastic bags we take groceries and other necessities home in, likely from stores we can't walk to or bike to? What if we buy a single item at a store we could walk or bike to but still take the car, because it's convenient and it "saves time?" And even though we all want to live in suburbia and be close to nature - or a chemically fertilized version of it - city life is actually very environmentally friendly because we use or cars less, take public transportation, and take up less space. And by living in cities we free space outside the cities for local agriculture rather than for a development called "Coventry Estates" populated by people unconnected to English nobility or a condominium called "Forest Glade Village" where's their no forest or no glade because both were bulldozed to build condos. But that would require us to live next to people who look or think differently than we do - can't have that.

Are you content to dust with a feather duster, or do you use a cleaning solvent made out of those same poisonous chemicals that produce dump sites in New Jersey?

To be fair, the environmentalist movement has brought positive change. More people recycle newspapers, many of us who can walk when it's feasible to do so, organically grown fruits and vegetables are somewhat popular (but still pricey), farmers' markets are gaining favor, and we're using more paper bags, the better to have something to recycle newspapers in. Some of us use reusable shopping bags. And the great Lakes are cleaner than they've been in a long time. We're readier than we've ever been to do something about climate change and the depleted ozone layer.

Now if we could only figure out what to do.

For the record, Earth Day was started by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat who chose April 22 as the first Earth Day in 1970 because it fell on a Wednesday that year, and it fell during a period when college students were likely to be available to help promote it when there was less competition from other mid-week events. April 22 was also the birthday of Julius Sterling Morton, a U.S. Secretary of Agriculture who had started Arbor Day (his son founded the Morton Salt Company in Chicago), and it was also the birthday of noted actor, humanitarian, and environmental activist Eddie Albert, for whom green acres was more than a TV show.

Unfortunately for Nelson, April 22, 1970 was also the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin, which, despite being a coincidence, linked environmentalism to Communism. Nelson was swept out of office in the Reagan Revolution a decade later. Nelson remained active in environmentalism until his death in 2005.