Receiving my first standing ovation in the middle of a speech was unexpected. I was speaking to an audience involved in agriculture and land conservation. I clearly remember how shocked I was that a simple comment had incited such a response. All I had said was, “Climate change is real, and man is having an impact on our environment.”
This is the basic fact I learned in the summer of 1996 when I studied journalism abroad in Mexico City. One morning I left my host family’s home on my way to class, and everything seemed different. It was like I was walking in a different neighborhood than I had all the previous weeks. I stopped. I looked around. I tried to orient myself. Wait a minute, are those mountains? Mexico City is surrounded by mountains? The smog that had covered Mexico City during the duration of my stay had lifted. I was able to see the Sierra Madre mountains that encircle the city.
I didn’t know anything about Mexico City before I showed up. Prior to my freshman year in college, I had only been outside of Texas three times: Alexandria, Indiana, for Grandma Alice’s funeral; Langston, Oklahoma, for a high school engineering seminar; Santa Clara County, California, to visit Stanford.
I was unaware that the most populous metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere was in the base of a massive bowl formed by the meeting of two mountain ranges. Those mountain ranges could be seen from the city on a clear day, and this was one of those rare clear days.
Mexico City had been designated in 1992 by the United Nations as “the most polluted city on the planet.” Six years later, it earned the infamous honor of “the most dangerous city for children.” By 2020, through herculean effort, Mexico City had dropped to 926 on the list of most polluted cities. Having traveled back to Mexico City many times since studying there, I’m amazed at how much cleaner it is.
The pollution in the ’90s wasn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon. It was the product of humankind. The improved air quality wasn’t the result of inaction, it was the result of thinking big and taking local action.
In my speech, I was simply trying to communicate this understanding, but I realized the applause was a result of the perception that I was an outlier in the Republican Party. I’m not an outlier, most GOP members do believe that climate change is real and believe we need to take steps to address it. But these Republicans have been overshadowed by the outspoken GOP, elected officials, and conservative writers who have questioned inaccurately the science of climate change and humanity’s role in it. The number of climate deniers who identify with the Republican brand is more than I would like, but it’s far from the majority.
We need to reframe the conversation around climate change. It’s not a matter of “protecting the Earth.” Mother Nature is not going to lose a fight. Dealing with climate change is about humans changing our behaviors to prevent a response from Mother Nature that will ruin us and the rest of the biological ecosystem of which we are a part. Mother Nature is undefeated.
Biologists have determined that about 99 percent of species that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct. While the vast majority of species died from what was essentially old age, the planet has gone through five mass extinction events. The worst of these, 250 million years ago, wiped out 96 percent of marine life existing on Earth and three of every four species on land. The Earth kept spinning on its axis and it kept circling the Sun. Our Earth is going to stay undefeated, because time is on her side, not ours. Planet Earth doesn’t need us. We need Planet Earth.
Unfortunately, because conflict sells advertising on television and garners clicks on social media, the conversation around environmental issues is defined by the fringes—extreme environmentalists versus climate deniers. This is a dangerous choice. The question we should be asking ourselves is how we maximize human advancement while sustaining harmony with our home.
The air pollution I witnessed in Mexico City is part of a much larger crisis. Every year, more than seven million people die from air pollution. Reducing air pollution saves lives. But climate change is an existential crisis that threatens to cause the sixth mass extinction, extreme weather events (which we’re seeing already), widespread hunger, and mass migration. An overabundance of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air is exacerbating the warming of the Earth. Carbon dioxide helps our planet hold the energy from the sun so that it doesn’t escape back into space. Plants take in CO2 and give away oxygen, which we breathe in then exhale CO2. A circle of life. Once a carbon dioxide molecule escapes into the atmosphere, it can hang around for hundreds of years.
When this cycle of carbon outputs and carbon absorption is balanced, we are all good. However, the Industrial Revolution began to affect this balance, and this imbalance has only been exacerbated in recent history. More than half of all the industrial carbon dioxide emissions released into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution have occurred in close to the last thirty-five years. And we can’t deny that much of it is the result of human activities, such as how we make things, power things, and grow things.
I think of it this way. We have a 10-gallon barrel catching water from a faucet. There is already 9 gallons of water in this barrel, and the goal is to not let it overflow. We can address this problem two ways: ensure the least amount of water goes into the barrel, as well as figure out how to get water out of the barrel.
In this metaphor, what we do in the present and the future to address CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions is addressing the water going into the barrel. How we absorb the CO2 already in the atmosphere is dealing with the water already in the barrel. The result of water overflowing? More and worse human calamity due to heat waves, droughts, wildfires, famines, and flooding.
Preventing further provocations of planet Earth is a balancing act, and our challenge is staggering. According to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide worldwide have to fall by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net zero by around 2050 to prevent a global catastrophe.
Here is what will happen if we stay on our current trajectory and allow global temperatures to increase 1 or 2 degrees Celsius (this is 1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Storms will get worse. Hurricanes and floods will destroy homes, roads, and critical infrastructure that took time to build and will take even longer to rebuild. While some places will see more rain, other places will experience worse drought. When air gets hotter, it sucks up more water from soil and plants. Droughts will threaten water supplies, severely reducing drinking water and irrigation of crops responsible for feeding and hydrating tens of millions of Americans.
Drying plants and trees makes everything more prone to burning, so we will see more fires. While some places are getting drier and others are burning more, our coasts will witness rising sea levels. The extra heat caused by increased CO2 will restrict the livable habitat of plants and animals, leading to a reduction in crop yields and animals that produce less milk and live shorter lives, which ultimately drives up prices of food at the grocery store.
Dealing with COVID-19 shows us how not to deal with climate change. The economic destruction brought on by a global economic standstill reduced greenhouse gas emissions by less than 10 percent (some estimates suggest around 5 percent), but hundreds of millions of people lost their jobs and hundreds of thousands of businesses failed.
COVID-19 showed us that we can’t close down the economy. To combat climate change, we must modernize our economies. We need governments, trade alliances, and innovators to make clean technologies the most affordable option for continued human advancement, and we need a market that encourages the development of tools we don’t yet have or are too expensive today. This is how we decarbonize to the extent that we can in the most economically responsible way to achieve “net zero” emissions or “carbon neutral”—a state where emissions are balanced by absorbing an equivalent amount from the atmosphere.
Net zero versus zero emissions is a big difference. Having 100 percent of our energy needs coming from renewables is impossible, especially in the transportation sector, based on our current understanding of science. Fossil fuels will still play a role in our world, and the oil and natural gas boom in places like my home state of Texas has led to American energy independence. Energy independence is an important tool in foreign policy, and innovation in the oil and gas sector has led to the use of artificial intelligence to drilling less wells, using no fresh water, and storing the results of carbon capture.
Additionally, we still have 940 million of the least of our brothers and sisters around the world who still don’t have access to electricity and three billion without access to clean cooking.
When I speak to schools, I show pictures from my travels around the world, and the last image I display is a picture of a traditional village in South Asia. I ask the kids what’s missing from the picture. Nobody guesses correctly, and I reveal the answer is no power lines, meaning no electricity. This always elicits cries from the audience: “No Xbox!” then “No TV!”
I always add: “What about no refrigerator?” The room goes silent because these kids’ minds are blown, having never considered a life without something we accept as a basic necessity. Having a refrigerator and lights at night dramatically improves quality of life across the globe, and people are in dire need of affordable energy right now—not just in 2050.
We know which industries, like the transportation sector, need to be transformed. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has broken down the five industries that produce greenhouse gas emissions: transportation (29%), electricity production (25%), industry (23%), commercial/residential (13%), and agriculture (10%). But this has to be a partnership between government and the private sector—either one can’t do it alone.
We know what tools we have in our tool kit—tools like renewables (wind, solar, and nuclear), efficiency measures, reforestation, afforestation (planting trees in an area where there was never a forest). We know some of the tools we need to develop—carbon capture and energy storage technologies. But we must remember the United States is not operating in a vacuum.
In 2019, nearly 90 percent of the two hundred most polluted cities in the world were in China and India. China was the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in 2018, responsible for 28 percent of global emissions. The United States was second, with responsibility for 15 percent. But another quarter of greenhouse gas emissions was made up by the European Union nations (13%), India (7%), and Russia (5%).
The world must work together on this shared problem through international agreements that make sense. There has been a lot of debate around the Paris Climate Accord. It is a legally binding international treaty adopted by more than 190 world leaders in Paris that set specific targets for limiting global warming to achieve a climate neutral world by mid-century. President Obama signed it, President Trump withdrew from it, and President Biden got back into it. The international community has criticized America for its inconsistency, but this is what happens when international agreements are joined through executive action rather than Senate approval. Regardless, the Paris Accord allows the Chinese, the Russians, and the Indians to produce more carbon dioxide emissions.
Instead of letting countries like China, Russia, and India produce more CO2, we should be using trade deals and foreign aid to help countries modernize their economies faster than what the rest of the industrialized world has done so they don’t have to go through a period of increased CO2 production. Parts of India where they still burn dung for heat don’t have to transition to electricity powered by coal like many in the industrialized world did. With the help of the international community they can transition to electricity provided by natural gas with carbon capture or nuclear energy.
Some countries are turning to nuclear power as a path to a low-carbon future. So let’s ensure they do it with American-developed technology. Our success in the commercial nuclear energy sector not only grows the largest carbon-free source of energy in the U.S. but also enables us to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. We can’t solve climate change without nuclear power, so proposals like the Green New Deal are dead on arrival if nuclear power is excluded as a solution.
While authoritarian regimes like China and Russia are increasing their nuclear energy capabilities, we are seeing trends where America’s use of nuclear energy is on the decline. A viable commercial nuclear energy industry in the United States is a national security imperative.
Preventing our planet from ruining us can’t be accomplished by national governments alone. We need to see a boost in climate cooperation at subnational levels—states, counties, and cities. Subnational governments and local stakeholders should further their local-level cooperation with non-state actors and the private sector—from investing in smarter energy infrastructure to increasing the use of public transportation and microtransit.
But stopping planet Earth from teaching us a lesson is going to be hard. An increase in deaths around the world may not be enough to convince people that climate change is real and action is urgently needed, especially if the deaths climb gradually rather than suddenly and dramatically.
Even the significant deaths resulting from COVID-19 were met by a surprising callousness by much of our population. Some political leaders minimized the lethality of the disease and used it to appeal to their fringes rather than coming together to confront the foe. Unfortunately, some among us may react to climate change as we did to the pandemic deaths: by simply learning to live with it, especially since those most harmed by climate change are people who inhabit the poorest, hottest parts of the world. Sadly, they are the ones least responsible for causing it.
Climate change is one of the most urgent issues confronting us. Failing to act will result in disaster, and it’s going to take all of us—citizens, government, industry—to develop creative, doable solutions that keep our country economically healthy while addressing this existential crisis.
That means, even in these times of uncommon partisanship, it is especially important to find common ground. When it comes to the environment, we need to all recognize we live in a city surrounded by mountains.