This week’s post is by Peter Friederici
Investment banks and other financial giants have been acting like panicked polar bears drifting too far out on a warming sea, jostling and occasionally cannibalizing one another as they compete for the dwindling space available on their melting ice floe. The carnage is of Biblical proportions: Then, lo!, did Bank of America smite Merrill Lynch a mighty blow, and Lehman Brothers was sore afraid. But it’s predictable too. They’re big and powerful, but also hungry and scared; you’d do the same in their situation.
They inevitably make me think of flesh-and-blood polar bears, many of which really are drifting out to sea. I heard a story recently about how a marine biologist was flying high above the Arctic Sea and saw polar bears swimming across the endless expanse of blue. The polar icecap has been melting at a record pace, and the bears have had to swim farther than ever before to reach the sheltering ice on which they hunt seals.
The image was arresting: white bears swimming, on and on, looking for the distant white glare of salvation in a cold ocean. At three years old my son knows polar bears from pictures. Will he ever have a chance to see one in the wild? Or will global climate change, which scientists agree is driven by the emissions we pump into the atmosphere, continue to melt the ice until the polar bears have no place to live?
It’s a question highly relevant to the current parlous state of our economy, because dealing with both these issues involves figuring out how to respond to uncertain risks.
The Bush administration says that the risk of the economy crashing—though impossible to quantify—makes it imperative to stabilize financial markets through government intervention, even if the cost runs into the many, many billions of dollars.
It has not had the same opinion about the risk of the environment crashing.
How likely is it that either economy or environment will take a nosedive? In both cases it’s impossible to quantify. It’s worth noting, though, that either is much higher than a 1 percent chance of a terrorist strike against the United States—which the Bush administration a few years ago said was enough of a chance to justify a pre-emptive strike against anyone who might be thinking of committing such an act.
The most recent thorough investigation of the state of the world’s climate, conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, concluded that the global climate has doubtless been warming, and that there’s at least a 90 percent certainty that human activities have been contributing to the warming trend. Looking ahead, the panel—whose reports are approved by governments, and hence much more conservative than most recent scientific findings—concluded that there’s at least a 99 percent chance of further warming in our future. There’s at least a 90 percent chance of more heat waves, at least a two-thirds chance that droughts will expand and hurricanes will be bigger and more frequent.
That sounds pretty bad if you live in a place that’s already hot and dry, or the Gulf Coast, but why might it matter to those of us up in the mountains? Here’s why: warmer temperatures mean less snow and faster runoff. The Southwest’s water comes almost entirely from mountain runoff. Lake Powell has been low in recent years, but that may be only a pale foretaste of what’s to come.
Hotter and drier also means more forest fires. Flagstaff has dodged this bullet for years now, even as other southwestern towns have not; how lucky do you feel next year, or the one after that?
Faced with a strong scientific consensus that our environment faces major problems, the Bush administration has done: nothing. Or less than nothing, really, for it has tried to shut down effective research and planning into climate change.
And now, faced with the prospect of another calamitous crash, we’re expected to pony up immediately.
The dichotomy between how we address economy and environment reminds me of an old woman, manifestly wiser than most politicians and investment bankers, whom I met in Mexico some years ago. She lived a small community that had turned down an offer to log an old-growth forest.
“What were we going to do,” she said, “eat the money?”
Peter Friederici is a writer and a former itinerant field biologist and tour guide. He teaches journalism at Northern Arizona University in between bouts of camping, gardening, and fixing up an old house.