We're Screwing the Environment the Same Way We Screwed the Economy

Lately, the United States hasn't been very good at looking down the road. Its captains of industry and government admittedly blew the economic meltdown, even as its sellout media kept urging buys on stocks that were mostly worthless. Too bad the environmental meltdown is following the same, lame script.

According to a new study from the United Nations Environment Program, countries combating catastrophic climate change aren't lacking in resources or reasons; they're simply lacking ambition. It seems that, as with the economic meltdown, they'd rather wait until the crisis has already ripped the roof off the world as they knew it, before doing anything significant about it.

"The U.S. is in danger of losing the race in the new global energy economy," Angela Anderson, program director of the U.S. Climate Action Network, explained to AlterNet. "The reason is simple power politics. The entrenched fossil fuel industries are fighting tooth and nail to maintain their supremacy. They are fighting with campaign contributions and scare tactics that do nothing but block the actions Congress and the president could take to make the U.S. a real leader."

And they're succeeding wildly. After the so-called ClimateGate crap-sling purposefully peaked during last year's Copenhagen summit, global warming skepticism apparently rose in the UK and no doubt elsewhere. Consistent denier drumbeats from Fox News and its jackasses like Glenn Beck and others have further poisoned the well. Worse, there are allegations that even officials in the Obama administration, such as David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, are actively standing in the way of catching the U.S. up on global climate change efforts, as they forage among more domestic issues like the cratered American economy or the health care hornet's nest for worthier poll-bait.

But they are missing the obvious, as usual: Like Earth itself, America's regional and international problems are intricately networked, and they can all be ameliorated by accelerating the development of tomorrow's global energy economy today. More jobs, less waste, annihilation averted. Seems like easy street, right? Wrong.

"There are political strategists in the party who don't see this as the winner it is, and this is something we push back against," Andrew Light, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress told AlterNet. "You've got a huge campaign on the right to mobilize in favor of every specious claim against climate science. But there's not enough of our own mobilization on the ground to counter that."

Light feels that the non-binding Copenhagen Accord still cleared enough hurdles to avoid being a political laughing-stock. "Many will complain that the Copenhagen meeting did not achieve its goal of delivering a new final climate agreement," he wrote in an analysis published in February. "But it avoided a much worse outcome, namely locking in a legally binding agreement that would not reach climate safety."

He's being kind. Last year, China overtook not just the United States but also Denmark, Germany and Spain to become the world's largest manufacturer of wind turbines, which is to say the engine of the wind-power economy. China also passed a law in December demanding that its energy companies buy all their energy from renewable resources. "China is spending more of their economic stimulus on moving away from coal," Light told AlterNet. "They're doing more in terms of efficiency, solar power and transportation, and they have a more ambitious fuel-economy sector."

Meanwhile, Brazil voluntarily passed a law mandating a 39 percent reduction in emissions by 2020, the international deadline for peak emissions, which must necessarily decrease thereafter if we have any hope at all of restricting our global temperature increase to a still-lethal 2 degrees. According to the new UNEP study, that may still not be enough to avoid escalation of our current war on terra.