Attitudes Towards Warming Effects Are Too CoolBy Jane Holtz Kay Talk about the weather - about the heating, freezing, wild swings of weather caused by global warming---has spread across the land. Even in New England's "if-you-don't-like-the-weather-wait-a-minute" climate, the weird weather locally and the extremes internationally have turned up the heat on environmental concerns. Abetted by images of the North Pole's Big Meltdown and the recent report from the World Wildlife Federation and Cool Air-Clean Planet, the consequences of climate change have come closer to home. "Speed Kills," their document, alerted a larger constituency to the speed of climate change doing the work of 1000 years in 100, faster than native plants and creatures can endure. In the Northeast, the damage from that hot-cold quick step could end the reign of the sugar maple, spruce and fir trees, and eradicate countless other species and ecosystems. The news reinforced what uneasy witnesses --from scientists to a populace of winter skiers facing snow-less slopes - have felt. Citizens in this state born along an elongated coastline, residents in this hub city stilted over water and defended ---if barely---from the sea by the Charles River Dam, are reacting. News from the local (the hottest summer in two centuries) to the global (two to four degree temperature rises in the next century) carry an omen of the world's oceans rising to new heights and weather to new extremes. And have begun to promote action. The dismal science says that the aquarium of life once chug-a-block with life is shrinking in plenitude and variety, that the terrarium of the planet is day by day depleted of its biodiversity, and that our celestial surroundings are packed with globe-altering gases. The uplifting element is that good environmental policies and climate-protecting ones can heal these planetary ills.
By early fall, Arlington, Cambridge, Medford, Somerville, Boston, Brookline, and Newton had followed the lead of the U.S.' 350- member Cities for Climate Protection to put their piece of the planet. Lodged under the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) whose annual meeting in New Orleans at the end of November held 150 officials, such cities look to shrink carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gas emissions to comply or better the 7 percent reduction by 20l0 framed in the Kyoto Protocol. The mission is clear. Simply put: as fossil-fuel emissions climb and forests fall, the greenhouse gases play havoc with our climate. Reducing them by cutting fossil fuel from our cars, our homes and industry, by ending subsidies and finding new sources of energy could slow the process. Less simple are the percentages and procedures. Michael Charney's e-mail chain of Boston-area events on the Cambridge Climate Calendar enlightening citizens how to do so can run 40-meetings deep. Choosing a suitably watery locale (the Aquarium) the Boston Climate Action Network has geared up to rouse a sluggish political leadership. Circling a round table for two hour discussions, their attitude is deservedly critical of the work accomplished. Boston lags behind the nation's progressive cities. "It's another example of the people being ahead of the politicians," says MassPIRG director Rob Sargent. While Green Portland, Oregon, has committed to a 20 percent emission reduction, New Orleans mayor hosted the ICLEI conference and efforts are underway from Burlington, Vermont, to Los Angeles, 344 other Bay State communities remain aloof. Nationally, too, 25 states, including Bush-bound Texas, have begun to clean up their climate-heating act, many goaded by bad air reports from the EPA. Here politicians put the climate cause on the back burner, say advocates. Way back. The state's Executive Office of Environmental affairs has less than a half-staffer to attend to the issue. The city of Boston's has had none, save a summer intern, and a call found them unapologetic about the lapse. "The city's position is to lead by example," says environmental secretary Toni Pollock. "Leading by example" means turning out the lights i.e. nothing more than an in-house or in-City Hall housekeeping. The state, too, though beginning to make carbon dioxide cleanup a priority, has pinned its labors on existing environmental policies, over-relying on iffy utility re-structuring. "Whether we have a plan, we're doing some of the pieces," says Sonia Hamel, director of clean air. Without such a plan or inventory of energy uses, however, a lack of purpose and the overwhelming nature of the job can deflect and delay repair. "It's easy to be disinterested," James McCaffrey, director of Boston's Sierra Club chapter, says regretfully. Who, where and what to take on is complicated, says MassPIRG's Sargent. "Everyone wants to just point the finger." The utilities people point at the dwindling forests which could be the "carbon sinks" to absorb co2. The forest people blame the dirty power plants shooting bad air. The power plants criticize polluting cars. New England attacks the midwest whose emissions darken eastern skies. Still, says Sargent, "the tide is turning." Another recent scorecard from the World Wildlife Federation and the Tellus Institute furthered that turn. The report documented how safeguarding the climate could save money. Those economic benefits of sustainable policies could sway industry as well as individuals. This good-business-is-good-environmentalism message, a staple of preservation and environmental arguments already embodied in companies like Stonyfield Farms and Malden Mills, won a dozen-plus endorsements from the Union of Concerned Scientists to Cape Clean Air. The pocketbook productivity of climate control inspired universities like Tufts to do building conservation and Harvard Medical School to explore the renewable energy of fuel cells. In fact, Adam Markham, executive director of Cool Air-Clean Planet, feels New England's high-tech, talented network "could be the epicenter" of that clean brain corps. Sophisticating and practicing New England's "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" ethos would not only cut emissions but further the smogbusting, open space-saving, water-cleaning and car-curbing that simultaneously cure climate threats. Today's weather cooling efforts focus on the two biggest contributors to the gases that heat and smother the earth,says Breslow. The first, the coal-generated electrical plants, Massachusetts' so-called "Filthy Five" polluting the poorest communities, are on the agenda from restructuring of power plants, say state environmental officials but the Climate Coalition's Charney disagrees. "Celluci has been very weak on the regulations. He's caved to PGE, caved on the 'Erin Brokavitch' (i.e. polluting) industry," says Charney. "The state was supposed to come forward with a climate a climate action plan. Celluci is a zero on that." The second heavy, the automobile, continues to produce more carbon dioxide than any other single degradation as road widenings like route 3 and "The Big Dig" undercut public transportation and encourage asphalt and sprawl across open space that might ameliorate climate change. We know that each time a Wal-Mart or other Big Box store is opened, it produces 10,000 car trips per day. We know that each gallon of gas spent on those trips releases twenty pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We know that saving that open space is essential to climate-saving stewardship. Yet the state's lax planning assaults all greening. Only last month, threats to the state's largest swath of open land and premier old growth forest at Wachusett for a ski-board park sent the Sierra Club to court against the state. The environmentalists won but the war goes on while lack of planning continues to eradicates parklands and plant schools across greenfields. Environment secretary, Bob Durand responds to such criticisms by listing improvements to air quality, tougher car inspections, 57,000 acres of saved open space since 1998 and a crackdown on midwest emissions. Yet the state's environmental chief still calls the argument to save Wachusett "legalistic," citing the "economics of recreation." "Saving open space is a scam if they're not protecting it," McCaffrey responds. Meanwhile, on the global scale, another New Englander, Dr. George M. Woodwell, founder of the Woods Hole Center for Research on Cape Cod which promoted the policies behind the Kyoto Protocol, works to defend the largest open space of all, the Amazon rain forests, and worries about the future: What will happen if the snows slide into the Arctic seas and their winter-white, heat-reflecting world becomes a black mass of heat absorption? he asks. "I don't know," says Woodwell. "We're passing a hill in the dark with our lights off. That's just madness." After 40 years of witnessing such earth-shattering, or, more precisely, earth-drowning, news Woodwell works on. "If we could get our people behind it, we could move very nicely in the next century to stabilize the atmosphere at 60 or 70 percent. That's a big order," he says. But stabilizing is what's necessary." Some of that stabilizing has started here. With visions of eroding coastlines, vanishing habitats and shifting seasons has come the push for sorting, inventorying-and, above all, proceeding to protect them. Hopefully, the ever-more inflamed discussions of climate control will raise political temperatures in this state and enlist officials to help do the job. "Is it important?" asks Woodwell. "You bet your sea boots it is." A condensed version of this article ran in the editorial/focus section of the Boston Globe, October 8, 2000.
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The urge to think global, act local has galvanized grassroots activists and officials from city to city. Despite the failure of Washington to support the international climate restraints on emissions, and the dallying of our state and city politicians to respond, advocates are allying. "With the federal government doing nothing and the state doing very little," activism has hit the ground-level, says Marc Breslow of the Mass. Climate Action Network. "United we bargain, divided we burn," might be their bumper sticker.