The Climate Challenge

“As leaders of the world’s major economies,” noted the G-20 communiqué from Pittsburgh, “we are working for a resilient, sustainable, and green recovery. We underscore anew our resolve to take strong action to address the threat of dangerous climate change.”¹

Climate change, like economic recovery, is another major problem nations must face together. The way forward on climate change is fairly clear, but the magnitude of this challenge is far greater than any other issue on the horizon. At this point, the scientific evidence of climate change is unequivocal. If we don’t take strong enough action on climate change, the consequences could be catastrophic for everyone.

According to a study published in the journal Science, climate change could cause the global production of staple crops to fall by 20-40 percent.² The worst-hit regions will be in the developing world, but areas of the United States—the southeast and southwest in particular—will suffer from persistent drought. As the Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu, has pointed out, California is our largest agricultural producer and water shortages in that state alone could lead to dire consequences for the nation’s food production.³

More than anything, it was Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that shattered Americans’ complacency about climate change. The ferocity of the storm moved the discussions of climate disasters out of the realm of the theoretical and into a harsh new reality. In other parts of the world, especially in developing countries, the effects have been obvious for some time; droughts have become more common and once-productive farmland has turned to desert, exacerbating chronic hunger and malnutrition.

It’s not too late to avert the worst-case climate change scenarios. We must reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), the most abundant of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. Other countries must do the same, but the United States produces more CO2 emissions per person than any other nation. The size of our contribution to the problem means that the United States has a responsibility to show we are serious about reducing emissions.

Top Ten CO2 Emitting Nations' Share of Global CO2 Emissions, 1950-2007

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require the cooperation of every country, but  this does not mean that all nations should be expected to cut emissions at the same rate. Developing countries are well aware that they did not cause the problem, so it’s not surprising that they ask why they should limit their own industrial development when the United States and other developed countries achieved high standards of living without restrictions. They have a point. In 2006, China overtook the United States in total annual emissions, but China’s per capita emissions remain significantly lower than those of the United States. Looking back over the years since 1900, China and India—countries with more than 1 billion people, whose economies are among the fastest-growing in the world—have contributed less than 10 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions.⁴

Clean energy resources like wind, solar, and hydroelectric power account for less than 10 percent of total U.S. energy production. But the Department of Energy issued a report in 2008 showing that the United States could generate 20 percent of its energy needs from wind power alone by 2035, and production is now ahead of schedule.⁵ Solar power offers almost unlimited potential to produce energy. The amount of energy that reaches the Earth from the sun in two hours is equivalent to all the energy produced by humans in a year.⁶ “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy,” said Thomas Edison back in 1931. “What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

At the end of the 1970s, the United States was a world leader in research and development of clean energy technology. By the 1990s, it had ceded its leadership to other countries, who are now rushing ahead. China, India, Japan, and the European Union are all modernizing their energy infrastructure. Climate change leaves no choice: clean energy investments will be crucial to long-term economic growth.

The technical barriers to harnessing larger quantities of solar, wind, and other renewable sources of clean energy are small compared to harnessing the political will to scale up investments in these technologies. The question is not whether we dare to dream of a future that relies less on fossil fuels and more on clean, renewable sources of energy, but rather whether we have the courage to do what we know we must.

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