In Brief: Every day, the folly of pretending that there is no connection between how much oil, gas, and coal we burn and a rapidly warming world becomes increasingly evident. For years, many have speculated on global warming's impact on other parts of the world, but it is becoming more and more apparent that climate change will have a massive human and financial cost right here in the US.

10/15/05

Buried in the news of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is the connection between those dramatic weather events and our use of fossil fuels -- oil, gas and coal -- that is changing the climate of our planet.

Recent years have been among the warmest ever, and 2005 is shaping up to be the hottest yet. Rising world temperatures are warming oceans, where higher surface temperatures are generally understood to fuel the tropical cyclones called hurricanes.

While the exact relationship between the frequency or intensity of hurricanes and warmer oceans is not yet certain, we do know that something unusual is occurring: the four hurricanes that struck Florida in 2004 were the second, third, fourth and sixth most damaging to hit the United States until this year; Katrina is likely to become the most damaging ever, and Rita will probably wind up somewhere among the worst ten. And this year's hurricane season is not yet over; 2005 has already tied the record for named tropical storms and many predictions are for higher-than-normal tropical storm activity to continue through November. The cost in human life in the last two years stands at well over 1,000, and economic losses will probably total more than $200 billion just in the last two years.

Many descriptions of how higher temperatures fostered by greenhouse gas emissions suggest that climate change will affect other parts of the world-the polar ice cap or Bangladesh. We may now be seeing a preview of what a warmer world might look like here in the United States, where the development of coastal areas has put more people into the path of danger from violent hurricanes.

That warning is falling on deaf ears in Washington -- the Bush Administration remains committed to an energy policy written by industry that takes as a founding premise that global climate change isn't a worry. It assumes instead that we can safely produce and burn even more oil, gas and coal than we do now, and that doing so will make our country safer and better off economically. The House of Representatives used the Gulf Coast tragedy as its excuse last week to relax air pollution controls that protect human health and to increase subsidies for oil companies. Later this fall, Congress will decide whether or not to sacrifice the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. Energy efficiency (mentioned only reluctantly by the President as a stopgap measure until Gulf Coast refineries are back to normal) and other means to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels that are changing the earth's weather have gotten no more than lip service

Across public lands in the West and in Alaska, the push to mine more, drill more and burn more fossil fuel goes on without pause. In what would pass for irony were it not tragic, our national energy policy calls for the places like the Powder River Basin, a 20,000 square mile grassland spanning southeast Montana and northwest Wyoming, to become the site of more than 80,000 new coalbed methane wells that will permanently pollute the region's water supplies. The gas from those wells, and new drilling proposed for other areas like New Mexico's Otero Mesa, will then allow us to keep heating up our planet for a little while longer and set the stage for more extreme weather long into the future. The sacrifice of those places in the name of fossil fuel production will not buy much extra time for America to change the way it produces and uses energy, a task that the Bush Administration does not intend to tackle anytime soon.

The hurricanes of the last two years should be understood as reminder that delaying that change imposes formidable costs to our economy as well as risks to people, homes and property. Exploiting the Powder River Basin, Otero Mesa or even the Arctic Refuge might not, by themselves, create another Katrina, but the policies that drive such exploitation as the solution to energy needs, however, may. We need to make that change sooner -- without devastating some of our most precious landscapes along the way, and without risking the public's health or our economy's long-term international competitiveness. Pretending, as the Bush Administration does, that there is no connection between how much oil, gas and coal we burn and a rapidly warming world is a tragic mistake.

Vawter "Buck" Parker, Executive Director
buckparker@earthjustice.org