We recently saw a chart that was incredibly depressing: Even though the amount of greenhouse gas emissions (GGE) by the United States has decreased by about 15% since 2000, the rest of the world has increased its GGE by 50%.
Right now, the U.S. contributes only an estimated 13% of the total greenhouse gases world-wide into the atmosphere. (By contrast, in 1950 we accounted for 40%.) So even if the U.S. were to become carbon-neutral tomorrow, it would barely make a dent in the ever-increasing world output of GGE. In 1950, total greenhouse emissions in the world (excluding the U.S.) were 3.6 billion tons. But today, the world (excluding the U.S.) spews about 31 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
In other words, we in the U.S. can reduce our individual and collective carbon footprints, but it won’t make one bit of difference to stave off the looming effects of climate change.
So as a practical matter, what does this mean? In general, we should continue to do everything we can to make our air, water, and environment cleaner because these measures will reduce pollution and improve our health.
But we need to be very strategic about how we spend our resources on these projects because, as we noted, no matter what we do, they are not going to do anything to stop the inevitability of climate change.
Rather, we need to devote most of our attention and resources to minimizing the effects of the climate change catastrophe that we are facing by spending money on resilience measures. For example: Instead of creating bicycle lanes that very few people ever will use, we should use those tax dollars to harden our critical infrastructure to protect against the effects of bigger and more frequent storms, floods, drought, wildfires, and sea-level rise.
California has spent billions of dollars on climate-change initiatives — but its biggest city proved wholly incapable of fighting a fire, with tragic consequences.
Climate change is here and it’s only going to get worse. We need to stop fighting what already is a lost cause and instead spend our scarce resources on preparations for the climate catastrophe that already is here — and getting worse.