By Patrick Hunter
Guest Column
Hello Carbondale! Can you believe the beautiful weather we are having this year? What a place to live! But, what a name. “Carbon”dale? I wrote a piece for a national magazine on environmental issues that talked about caps and fees on carbon fuels like gasoline and natural gas. A reader sent a comment saying that’s funny, because I lived in a town called Carbondale. Point taken. I’ve been suggesting changing our name to “Sunnydale,” but not getting much traction. Ironically, somebody in charge named the town after a town of Carbondale back east. It was not because of the coal mines in the area.
But, this essay is about the change in climate that is tearing up the state, the U.S. and the rest of the world. As a part time Colorado Mountain College student in the Bachelors of Sustainability Studies program, I have been a careful observer of climate change over the last 10 years. The recent climate news is really disturbing. I’ll explain.
There is an active volcano in Hawaii called Mauna Loa that has a very special recording station at its summit. They measure the components of the atmosphere, especially CO2. CO2 is the primary ingredient that controls the temperature range we have on the planet. As the amount of CO2 increases, it blocks more of the heat that normally radiates from the earth back into space. Science has known this since the 1800s. In fact, based on work done at the time, they predicted that burning wood and coal would increase CO2 and lead to warming. More recently, scientists working for the big energy companies like Exon-Mobil came to the same conclusion. The scientists told the executives. The executives buried the data. Instead of warning us, they mounted a disinformation campaign. So, the country went ahead using fossil fuels in so many ways which are increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses (GHG) that are now driving up climate change.
If the problems of GHG were more common knowledge, we might have avoided car-dependent suburbs and instead built more multi-family homes with mass transit close by. We might have avoided plastics that are now trashing our environment and even being absorbed into our very bodies. We might have avoided chemicals like PFAS, known as forever chemicals that are now in our drinking water and in most of our bodies. We might not be building around 17 million gas burning new cars and light trucks every year which produce evermore GHG.
What was it that caused my alarm? The Guardian newspaper just reported that Mauna Loa has recorded the highest CO2 reading ever at 422.36ppm. The increase is 5.06ppm from a year ago. Ten years ago, it was 395.64ppm. Referring to the year 1993, the article stated, “Then the scientific community worried about the effect on the weather if we were to pass the 400 mark. Now we know: the result is catastrophic heatwaves, storms, droughts, floods and rapidly increasing and unstoppable sea level rise.” It continued, “All the efforts of nearly 200 member states to tackle the menace of the climate crisis have been a failure, so far.”
In climate history, the U.S. has been the worst contributor to GHG. We are responsible for 25% of all of it. We make up less than 5% of the world’s population. We have had the world’s largest economy. We are now experiencing hundreds of billions of dollars in damages. What’s to do?
Millions of Americans are working hard to make changes to cut GHG emissions. There are solar collectors and wind turbines that produce electricity instead of burning coal and fossil gas. There is the introduction of electric vehicles and even battery electric tools for lawn care. There is electric induction cooking instead of natural gas. A major change is the growing use of “heat pumps” for heating buildings and hot water at the tap. This brings me to what we might do locally.
I think that we all have a moral responsibility to bring climate change under control to preserve a livable world for our coming generations. I think every governing body should be doing whatever possible to take on the problem. There are many things that can be done locally. Unfortunately, the current growth in the Valley is taking us in the wrong direction. More buildings, more development, more traffic is just adding to the problem. Can we talk about this?