The Climate is Changing and Humans Are the Cause
/U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu was at the Kennedy School this week to discuss global warming and various solutions. Chu won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for his research in cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. I can’t pretend to imagine what this entails, but it is with relief that he seems to have the common sense needed to serve as our 12th Energy Secretary. He said to the overflowing audience last Thursday: “it’s going to become more and more obvious that the climate is changing and that humans are the cause of it.” I still don’t understand why some people won’t admit to climate change. Apparently, neither does Chu, because he went on, “We have a policy in the Energy Department that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.”
With the adverse risks of climate change, we in the northeast can expect a few things: A 67 percent increase in rain (this June was a taste), meaning downpours in Winter and Spring with droughts in summer… this does not sound like very good growing conditions for my vegetables. In Boston specifically, the number of summer days going over the 100 F mark will increase from one a year to 24 days a year -that’s practically a full month.
And then there is outside the northeast, for example, the thawing of the tundra, which is particularly frightening. Chu made the analogy of taking a bunch of food out of your freezer. It lasts just fine frozen, but once you take it out of the freezer it goes bad within a matter of days. Well, the tundra is melting, and as it thaws at a faster rate than it should it is going bad quickly, emitting more carbon monoxide than we can handle. In fact, it is believed that the tundra holds about 2x as much carbon monoxide than is already in our air.
“We need an industrial revolution,” said Chu. Yes, yes we do. Stop using so much energy, for one. Paint roofs white and roads and sidewalks any color other than black. Invest in wind technology and solar module technology. Develop clean coal technologies if we must keep coal around at all. American consumers: put your money towards home energy efficiency rather than a new granite counter-top.
Chu was introduced by Massachusetts Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Malden). I didn’t know much about Markey before this week, but he is your typical MA politician and therefore I love him. Judge me as you will. Markey has been a leader in environment and energy issues for many moons (he’s been a congressman for 33 years) and among other things, chairs the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, established by Nancy Pelosi in 2007 to address America's oil dependence and the threat of global warming. He is co-author of the Markey-Waxman Bill (with California’s Henry Waxman), also known as the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.”
I don’t mind when politicians are politicians, particularly when they are politicizing about something I can get behind. Add this view to my love of hearing a good sound bite in action, and it’s with a warm giggle that I received Markey’s statement about the fact that he is hopeful that as Americans we can put our mind to the environmental issues at hand, we can progress and “turn to China and India and say that we are no longer teaching temperance from a bar stool.” It’s true!
