Poisoning the Well

Torsten Blackwood/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 The right wing is in absolute denial that there is such a problem; some yahoo just recently said that all the snowstorms we're having proves that there is no such phenomenon as global warming. It's socialism's agenda, another way to grow government.

Hertsgaard, to his credit, refuses to sugarcoat these facts. For all the justifiable fears about flooded coastlines, he writes, the “overriding danger” in the coming years is drought. “Floods kill thousands, drought can kill millions,” one expert told him. Within two decades, the number of people in “water-stressed countries” will rise to three billion from 800 million.

Only when they see the palpable truth will naysayers admit there is a problems, if then.


“Scientists had actually underestimated the danger,” he writes. “Climate change had arrived a century sooner than expected.” What’s more, given our current trajectory — economic, cultural and, most important, political — it’s guaranteed to get a lot worse before it gets any better. (Significant impacts like sea-level rise are now “locked in.”) And it won’t get any better — indeed, it will become truly unmanageable — if we don’t make the necessary cuts in global greenhouse emissions.

When the FDR Drive is underwater, what will skeptics say then?

This leads Hertsgaard to what he calls the new “double imperative” of the climate fight. “We have to live through global warming,” he writes, “even as we halt and reverse it.” In other words, while deep emissions cuts (what experts call “mitigation”) remain the top priority, that alone is no longer enough. We also have to do everything we can to prepare for the effects of climate change.

Cap and trade is anathema to the right wing.

Wealth and technology clearly matter, but politics and culture may trump them. Take Louisiana: efforts to prepare for future hurricanes, Hertsgaard writes, “have been crippled by the state’s history of poor government” along with “its continuing reluctance — even after Katrina — to acknowledge the reality of global warming for fear that might harm oil and gas production, and an abhorrence of taxes and public planning as somehow socialistic.”