An urgent warning on climate change

What happened

Global warming is “unequivocal” and will bring “irreversible changes” without immediate action, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said last week in its much-anticipated final report. Even if carbon emissions could be stopped cold, the IPCC said, greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere would warm the planet by more than 3.5 degrees, imperiling millions of people and putting 30 percent of all plant and animal species at risk of extinction. If emissions continued to rise after 2015, much of the developing world would be ravaged by hunger and disease, and up to 70 percent of all species could go extinct. “What we will do in the next two, three years will determine our future,” said IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri.

The report, the first since the IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore last month, sets the stage for an international conference in Bali next month. Diplomats at that summit will begin drafting a treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The dangers of global warming are “so severe and so sweeping that only urgent global action will do,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. “We are all in this together.”

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What the editorials said

There “is a considerable ray of hope” buried in this gloomy report, said The New York Times. The IPCC argues that we can save the planet by investing heavily in alternative energy technology that already exists. This is a crucial message “for those who say there’s no point in spending money on the problem because the game is already lost.” The scientists have done their job. “Now it’s time for world leaders to do theirs.”

Al Gore certainly must be smiling, said The Wall Street Journal, and for more reasons than one. As the newest partner in a venture capital firm that funds alternative-energy projects, Gore “has the chance to achieve enormous wealth.” Gore may be most famous for pounding the drum—hysterically, we’d say—on global warming. But he also deserves credit “for creating an entire new industry—the global warming business.” Unfortunately, taxpayers could end up footing the bill, in the form of enormous government subsidies.

What the columnists said

Once again the media is proclaiming that “the debate is over,” said John Stossel in Realclearpolitics.com. But the IPCC comprises scientists picked by their governments, so their work is “inherently political” with a bias toward “government action.” Meanwhile, new research from the University of Alabama finds that replacing 10 percent of all existing power plants with carbon-neutral ones would slow warming by no more than 0.2 degrees per century. In short, draconian schemes to cut greenhouse gas emissions would accomplish little, while the global economy would be devastated.

But climate change is one problem only government can solve, said Allen E. Smith in The Boston Globe. “Our preoccupation with letting the free market determine our national energy policy is wasteful folly.” Markets seek only to maximize profits; it takes government to pursue the greater good. The first step should be to force automakers to double fuel efficiency in all new vehicles. The resulting savings of 7 billion barrels of oil a year would be a good “down payment” on any long-term climate change solution.

There’s one solution that’s bound to fail, said Gerald D. Skoning in the Chicago Tribune: Green guilt-tripping. As someone who drives a fuel-efficient Honda and who dutifully recycles, I’m sick of “greenies” making me feel like a monster because I fly frequently for my job and don’t ride a bike or reuse grocery bags. Thanks to environmental nags, “the carbon footprint hangs like a huge wet blanket of shame over every choice we make.” That only makes ordinary folks like me want to tune out and give up.

What next?

Efforts in Bali next month to develop a new global environmental treaty are likely to be undermined by the developing world’s growing addiction to coal, said Alan Zarembo in the Los Angeles Times. This “dirtiest fossil fuel” is cheap and plentiful, which makes it irresistible to developing nations. Since 2000, China has built 603 new coal plants, while India has built 133. Even if the U.S. and Europe totally eliminated their carbon emissions, the pollution from new coal plants would continue to heat up the planet indefinitely.