Year 3, Month 7, Day 15: Time For A Declaration of Independence?

The Toledo (OH) Blade is shrill:

Searing heat, violent thunderstorms, wildfires, smog, power blackouts, crop losses. These things aren’t new, yet their recent magnitude raises new questions about human influence on climate.

Climate change is real, despite the stubbornness of a denial movement that shrugs off both the problem and the science that documents it. Although such change is partially inevitable, the question of human influence and how to mitigate it demands a central role in this year’s political debate.

Recent heat waves, in Ohio and Michigan and elsewhere, point to greater warming of the Earth. As this part of the country basked in an unusually warm March, northern Michigan’s cherry crop was devastated by early growth followed by frost. Now comes word that 90 percent of that state’s apple crop is destroyed.

Problems associated with climate change are not limited to extreme events. There are more subtle signs. Growth of toxic algae begins earlier, stays later, and becomes more dominant in the western Lake Erie region.

An additional month of dredging is scheduled for the second straight year by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to keep the Toledo shipping channel navigable despite excessive silt that enters waterways after storms.

Ozone-induced smog, allergies, and diseases transmitted by mosquitoes also drive up costs. Much of northwest Ohio remains abnormally dry or in a drought, even after hail and heavy thunderstorms swept across the region this week.

Lobbyists have convinced lawmakers — at least, those who want to be convinced — that much of the evidence of man-made climate change is merely anecdotal. They have blocked cap-and-trade legislation that would provide incentives to industry to reduce emissions related to warming.

Always good to quote Upton Sinclair. Sent July 4:

Almost a century ago, Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” His words perfectly describe the politicians who, bankrolled by powerful corporate interests, have been consistently obstructing our progress towards rational energy and environmental policies.

Coal, oil and gas are the energy sources of the past — privileged by tradition and by a false pricing system that ignores externalities: pollution cleanup, health impacts, resource wars, and global climate change. Even if the deniers were right, getting our country onto renewables is the right thing to do, for countless reasons.

But the deniers are wrong, as this incendiary summer confirms to all but the most avariciously self-deluding. It’s time for our politicians to start refusing paychecks from those who would let us burn rather than surrender even the tiniest fraction of their astronomical profit margins.

Warren Senders