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A NATIONAL CLIMATE ACTION PLAN, WHY WE NEED IT AND HOW TO DO IT  
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John J. Berger
June 18, 2024
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]


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_ It could hardly be clearer that the world is already in the throes
of a climate catastrophe. That means it’s high time for the U.S. to
declare a national climate emergency to help focus us all on the
disaster at hand. _

, Shutterstock

 

While April and May are usually the hottest months in many countries
in Southeast Asia, hundreds of millions of people are now suffering in
South Asia from an exceptionally intense heat wave that has killed
hundreds. One expert has already called it the most extreme heat event
in history
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Record-breaking temperatures above 122º F were reported in the Indian
capital of New Delhi and temperatures sizzled to an unheard of 127º F
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parts of India and Pakistan.

Nor was the blazing heat limited to Asia. Heat waves of exceptional
severity and duration are now occurring simultaneously in many areas
of the world. Mexico and parts of the United States, notably Miami
and Phoenix, have recently been in the grip of intense heat events. In
southern Mexico, endangered howler monkeys in several states have been
falling dead
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from trees in their tropical forests due to heat stroke and
dehydration. Below-average rainfall throughout Mexico has led to
water shortages
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in Mexico City and elsewhere. In some places, birds and bats, not to
speak of humans
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are also dying from the heat.

All of this is no coincidence. The hot and heavy hand of climate
change is now upon us. Last year was the hottest on Earth in 125,000
years, and the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) in
the atmosphere was the highest in four million years
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and still climbing at an ever-increasing rate. Meanwhile, global sea
surface temperatures also reached
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causing severe massive coral bleaching in all three major ocean
basins. 

The World Bank is projecting that, by 2050, there will be more than
200 million climate refugees
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20 times the 10 million refugees that have already destabilized
Europe. Climate change is also putting an increasingly heavy burden
on our social safety net, which could ultimately cause social order to
begin to break down, generating chaos.

Nobel Prize-winning former Energy Secretary Steven Chu now claims
it’s no longer possible to keep the global temperature from rising
more than 1.5°C above the historical average, as the 195-nation
signatories to the 2015 Paris climate agreement had hoped. In fact, he
projects
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the target of 2°C will also be broken and that, by 2050 the global
temperature will have risen above 3°C. Nor is his pessimism unique.
Hundreds of other scientists have recently forecast
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a strong possibility of hitting 2.5°C, which should hardly be
surprising since, for well over 30 years now, global leaders have
failed to heed the warnings of climate scientists by moving decisively
to phase out fossil fuels and their heat-trapping gases.

What to make of such dire forecasts?

It could hardly be clearer that the world is already in the throes of
a climate catastrophe. That means it’s high time for the U.S. to
declare a national climate emergency to help focus us all on the
disaster at hand. (Or as famed English poet Samuel Johnson put it
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centuries ago, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,
it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”)

Such a declaration of a climate emergency is long overdue. Some 40
other nations have already done so
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including 2,356 jurisdictions and local governments representing more
than a billion people. Of course, a declaration alone will hardly be
enough. As the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation, and the
one that historically has contributed the most
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greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the U.S. needs to develop a
coherent exit strategy from the stranglehold of fossil fuels, a
strategy that could serve as an international example of a swift and
thorough clean-energy transition. But at the moment, of course, this
country remains the world’s largest producer and consumer
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gas and the third largest producer of coal — and should Donald Trump
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win in November, you can kiss any possible reductions in those figures
goodbye for the foreseeable future. Sadly enough, however, though the
Biden administration’s rhetoric of climate concern has been strong,
in practice, this country has continued to cede true climate
leadership to others.

Despite the laudable examples of smaller nations like Iceland, Norway,
Sweden, Paraguay, and Costa Rica
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that are already at, or within a percentage point or two, of being
100% powered by clean, renewable energy, the world sorely needs the
U.S. as a global role model. To make a rapid, far-reaching, and
unrelenting break with our fossil-fuel dependency — 79% of the
nation’s energy
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is now drawn from fossil fuels — a national mobilization would be
needed, and it would have to be a genuine all-of-society effort.

NATIONAL MOBILIZATION AMID CRISIS

Fortunately, there is a historical precedent for just such a
comprehensive mobilization of government and citizenry in dire
circumstances: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal
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the World War II years provide examples of the scale and intensity
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of the response needed today to reverse climate change. However,
instead of gearing up to produce jobs for the unemployed or planes and
tanks for a war, a concerted nationwide industrial effort is needed
now to upgrade our electrical grid and produce millions of solar
panels, wind turbines, batteries, carbon-capture machines, and
zero-emission vehicles. All too sadly, this country and the world are
now in a situation even more perilous than either the Great Depression
or World War II.

Rising seas pose serious threats
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cities, including Boston, Charleston, Miami, and New York, while, in
recent years, millions of acres of the Midwest
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have been flooded
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by climate-related extreme weather events. Had a foreign enemy
inflicted the kind of damage caused by such floods, or the firestorms
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in 2020, or the hurricanes and droughts
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the nation has begun experiencing with increased frequency, the U.S.
would have immediately mobilized for war. Now, this country needs to
do exactly that to face the climate crisis, but (even forgetting the
horrifying possibility that Donald Trump could win the coming
presidential election and sink
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any possibility of moving on climate change nationally for years to
come) how to get our act together?

As French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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wrote in his classic 1943 novella, _Le Petit Prince_,  “A goal
without a plan is just a wish.” In other words, a national climate
action plan is urgently needed.

In the Trump years of climate-science denial, any progress in
controlling emissions resulted from actions by states, cities, and
businesses or institutions. Over the long term, however, climate
policy is far too important to be left to a hodgepodge of laws and
policies haphazardly applied across some of our 50 states and
thousands of cities and businesses. What this country needs is a plan
guided by scientific and technical analysis and based on an ambitious
but attainable set of greenhouse-gas-reduction quotas. Its point would
not be to override the climate agendas of any city, state, or group,
or the aspirations of the Green New Deal (House Resolution HR 109
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It would simply be to provide a reliable toolkit of measures and
policies along with analyses of their costs and benefits — a compass
for getting to negative carbon emission as quickly and
cost-effectively as possible.

This country today has no comprehensive climate action plan that
proposes clear, enforceable targets, timelines, and roadmaps for
climate protection and restabilization — and it desperately needs
one. Call it _America’s Energy Transition: Achieving a Clean Energy
Future_ and imagine that it would build on previous authoritative
studies, analyzing renewable-energy-generating and distribution
technologies in terms of their costs, commercial readiness, resource
constraints, and potential efficiency. It would formulate and model
competing scenarios with clusters of complementary technologies, each
requiring different policies for its implementation.

From such an exercise, Americans would learn how to achieve the
greatest greenhouse gas reductions with the most speed and
cost-effectiveness, as well as the fewest unwanted impacts, while best
meeting this country’s ongoing energy needs. Such a study would also
reveal the demands on natural resources of each scenario along with
its costs and the manufacturing capacity required.

To build trust and engagement in the final plan, regional advisory
councils made up of scientists, engineers, businesspeople, and major
stakeholder representatives should be created to offer recommendations
on how best to adapt such a plan to conditions in each part of the
country. The final policy roadmap would then be designated as the
“optimal energy path scenario” for the nation and provided to
Congress, so that it could use the findings as a basis for funding and
implementing new climate legislation.

WITHOUT POLITICAL ACTION, DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH FOR A BOLD CLIMATE
PLAN

Left to its own devices, without strong public pressure, Congress
might basically ignore or fail to enact legislation to implement the
results of a National Climate Action Plan, especially if Congress were
still controlled by the fossil-fuel-loving Republican Party. A
Republican stranglehold on Congress and/or the White House would
undoubtedly stymie both the creation of a national climate plan and
the implementation of its findings, as well as the clean-energy
transition it would facilitate.

To prevent such a setback from occurring, a strong popular
constituency must be built nationwide capable of exerting powerful
pressure on Congress to ensure the creation of a climate plan and the
appropriate legislation to make it functional.  Otherwise, no matter
how sound the PR campaign on its behalf, serious political obstacles
would stand in the way of its adoption, even by a Democratic Congress.

Through its lobbying, think tanks, public relations arms, and
advertising
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the politically and economically powerful fossil-fuel industry has,
for decades, blocked
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meaningful climate legislation in both Democratic and Republican
congresses. The creation of a powerful, broad coalition of
constituencies — environmental, labor, public health, faith-based,
and even progressive elements of the business community — could
serve as a popular countervailing force against the mighty fossil-fuel
industry. But as a first step, that coalition would need support,
guidance, and a common accepted platform both to stand behind and to
mobilize the public. The American environmental community could
produce that platform. Yet this would not be a simple matter, due to
the way that community is siloed, with each major organization
catering to its own constituency, interests, and funders.

To create a common consensual vision around which the national climate
movement could mobilize, a broad civil society gathering should be
convened to attract the leadership of all environmental and climate
action groups and set the stage for the National Climate Action Plan.
That gathering would, of course, focus on the roadblocks to
implementing such a plan and to a swift, national clean-energy
transition — and how those roadblocks could be dismantled.

Put all of this together and you would have a nation mobilized against
the fossil-fuel industry, ready to create a climate action plan and
mobilize Americans in an all-of-society effort on behalf of slashing
national carbon emissions in a radical fashion, accelerating a
clean-energy transition, and protecting our endangered world.  What
more could you ask for?

Copyright 2024 John J. Berger

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John J. Berger is an energy and environmental policy specialist and a
senior research fellow at the Pacific Institute. His 11 books include
_Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save
the Earth_
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(due to be published this October) _and _Climate Peril: The
Intelligent Reader’s Guide to Understanding the Climate Crisis_,
which won the 2015 International Book Award for Science. His
journalistic work has appeared in _Scientific American_,_ The
Nation_,_ The Progressive, The Los Angeles Times_,_ The Boston
Globe_,_ The Christian Science Monitor,_ and many other publications.

_Follow _TomDispatch _on Twitter
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* Climate Emergency; Climate Action Plan; Energy Needs;
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