After 9/11, the phrase “United We Stand” was quite popular. People posted it as bumper stickers, wore it on T-shirts, and said it during speeches. The ones who still remember 9/11 and want others to remember still display it, because standing together to fight an unrelenting foe is a never-ending effort.
The catchphrase is useful not only for coalescing patriotic zeal, but also for encouragement during any drawn-out battle. United We Stand, therefore, could be the perfect motto for the battle we face when it comes to rising ocean levels and other weather-related events that could, as scientists are telling us, threaten everyone’s way of life.
Climate news is all around these days. In Paris, global leaders have been meeting during the first two weeks of December to strike an accord regarding how to effectively limit carbon dioxide emissions without ruining the current and future economies and lifestyles of developed countries, as well as undeveloped countries. It’s a most complicated issue with many sides forming. Developed areas like America, Europe and China are responsible for much of the CO2 in the atmosphere. Developing countries such as India, on the other hand, who want to someday attain the lifestyle enjoyed by the West, are worried climate negotiations will leave them wanting. They say unrealistic greenhouse gas output limits would prevent them from developing their economies unfettered, as the West has done since the Industrial Revolution.
As a sort of appeasement/goodwill measure, leaders are discussing reparations, in the form of billions paid by the West to the developing world in exchange for their commitment to decrease CO2 output. Some reports say the United States could be on the hook for $250 billion, if a treaty is ever brokered. So, if you think the effects of climate change, or at least the politics surrounding it, won’t affect you in this lifetime, you could be wrong.
While we hope the doomsayers are wrong about climate change, we also see the increasingly clear realities of global changes in the environment. We read stories and see photographs of how a rising sea is making life difficult, if not impossible, for island nations. A story last week in The New York Times profiling the Marshall Islands, in which inhabitants of the low-lying Pacific island nation must keep rebuilding protective barriers and abandon seaside houses due to increasing water levels, was particularly poignant. The country’s foreign minister said to the Times reporter: “We see the damage [from climate change] occurring now. We’re trying to hold back the sea.”
We’re not scientists, but these stories and images – such as rivers of blue water gushing out of glacier canyon walls in the Arctic – have us concerned. In these times, the United We Stand slogan comes to mind. Instead of the Us versus Them dichotomy in which climate-change believers and skeptics cast stones at each other based on their own sets of data, we’d like to see some unity formed, since obviously rising sea levels are occurring, and the cause can only be one thing: a warmer environment.
So, where’s the halfway point? Where can these skeptics and believers meet in the middle? We don’t see people wanting to decrease their output of CO2, especially those in developing nations. So, the answer, as we see it, is to unite around developing technology to get us out of our jam.
Using new technologies, scientists and innovators have already made great gains in wind, solar and other clean technologies that don’t spew greenhouse gases. A new report last week by Environment Maine Research & Policy Center says wind power has grown exponentially in Maine in the last dozen years, and now supplies enough energy to power 100,000 homes. Last year alone, wind turbines from Mars Hill to the Fox Islands produced enough energy to reduce carbon pollution from 114,000 cars, the report found.
Beyond wind and solar, we’ve even heard of new efforts to create a machine that gobbles up CO2 like a champ. Thoughts of such a machine are tantalizing for sure, but show that there are options other than everyone walking to work and sitting frigid in their apartments in an effort to retard the greenhouse effect. Rather than regressing into a pre-Industrial Revolution sort of world, more technological advances is what the situation calls for.
There are a lot of people who say human beings are on the brink of extinction. We don’t agree. We are encouraged with recent technologies that are replacing fossil fuels with clean alternatives. Even greater advances are on the horizon. We think governments, instead of wasting money on reparations to developing countries, should encourage the private sector to super-charge their efforts for renewables and technology that actually reduces gases in the atmosphere. That’s something people on both sides of the climate-change issue can unite behind.
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