For more than a decade, the world has been waiting for the United States to step forward and galvanize a global strategy to slow and stabilize the dangerous warming of Earth’s atmosphere and hasten the development of renewable sources of energy.
The world has been waiting because our nation is the economic superpower, and we have been pre-eminent in scientific research. The world waits impatiently because our country – all by itself – is burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) that emit 25 percent of the heat-trapping carbon that is altering the climates on every continent.
By turning its back on the real world, the Bush administration has refused to assume the mantle of leadership. Its excuses have generated dismay everywhere. It has denigrated the findings of our researchers who have been monitoring the warming problem for more than two decades. It has argued that action would “wreck” the economy. And it has asserted that curbing global carbon emissions would probably cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
These are strange arguments for Americans who remember the “impossible” technological leaps of the space program and the Manhattan Project. Removing carbon from the atmosphere is a pollution-control problem, and beginning with the campaign to curtail California’s “smog” in the 1950s, our scientists and engineers have led the way in perfecting technologies to control air pollution. Moreover, these same experts have repeatedly confounded pessimists by devising solutions that were implemented more quickly and cheaply than many predicted.
Today, global warming scientists are telling us that technologies already exist to sequester carbon at electric power stations and transport it in pipelines to underground depositories. This can be accomplished, they report, at a price electric utilities can readily amortize.
Sequestration can be carried out in oil states like California, Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado, where petroleum companies have created huge geological formations where carbon can be safely stored.
Carbon sequestration is a global problem, so it will take an unparalleled, integrated global effort to check the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Unless the industrial nations that have caused the problem work together to devise solutions and share the costs, the best efforts of individual nations will fail. This is the reason it is crucial that these same countries – led by the U.S. – work together on common strategies.
If a president of the United States invited the leaders of these 20 industrial countries to jointly organize a consortium (an organization resembling a non-military NATO), it would be a singular act of statesmanship.
If these countries pooled their resources on an equitable basis, they could create a techno-economic powerhouse that could change the course of history. Optimism would flourish as such a peace-oriented consortium assembled teams of outstanding scientists, engineers and design specials from across the globe.
Would China, which just passed the U.S. as the top emitter of carbon from coal plants, join such a consortium? There are compelling reasons to believe China would want to be a full-fledged partner.
In its rush to increase its production of electricity, until recently China has single-mindedly ignored energy efficiency, and scorned environmental protection. In the process, it has created the most polluted cities on the planet and sacrificed the health and lifespans of its citizens. Events will shortly force China to acknowledge the economic and social shortcomings of its system.
Indeed, all nations must recognize that their future agendas must embrace unprecedented international cooperation, widespread technological innovation and the rapid development of renewable resources.
Stewart Udall is a former Democratic congressman from Arizona and secretary of the Interior under presidents Kennedy and Johnson
