Distractions of the Moment Must be Put Aside to Address Global Crisis

 One of the foremost issues facing the U.S. and planet earth is the need to work out a viable policy formation on the relationship between current energy resources and those that will be needed to establish a sustainable world. This must take place within the foreseeable future.

The pressing matter is based on overwhelming scientific evidence. Earth's temperature is rising to unhealthy levels due to human-caused factors which have increased the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Addressing this pressing matter will require intelligent, timely, and concerted action among the nations of the world to keep the global temperature rise at a manageable level for the remainder of the century.

I will bypass precise diagnoses on whether there will be a tipping point in the next 10 years with the proviso that addressing this problem sooner rather than later is the operative challenge. Regardless, I am in sync with Jeff Nesbit, author of This is the Way the World Ends, and the broad scientific consensus in viewing this as an existential crisis of major proportions.

I will also bypass specific roles that government and business should play while stressing the importance of their working together to address the rising temperature problem in an efficacious matter.

While they may be few in numbers, environmentally aware Republicans emphasize more the creativity of private market initiatives in addressing this problem. Democrats will invariably focus more on the importance of government. Any sound energy policy in the U.S. will need to emerge through a creative interface between both sectors.

These creative tensions between business and government are likely to play out over the next three decades in relation to this nation’s transportation needs and the role that more environmentally friendly electric vehicles will play by mid-century, a transition that will be a gradual one as renewable energy sources become increasingly viable.

There will be no sudden shut down of power plants or oil-based energy sources, which, with increased technology, could become part of the solution in sustaining workable national energy policy that can be efficient, relatively inexpensive, and environmentally safe. The bottom line remains that human stimulated global warming is a problem of major proportions which requires addressing in a timely and serious manner.

Whether or not it is already too late to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5 C for the remainder of the 21st century, the warmer the average global increase, the more challenging will be the effort to avert permanent damage to the environment. For the U.S., the critical challenge is the need to establish constructive bipartisan approaches to meeting the environmental problems of the next two decades amidst the current polarization of our national politics.

While one may take issue with the approach the Biden administration has proposed in linking environmental reform with good paying jobs for working- and middle-class citizens and modernizing national infrastructure systems, at least they have been future-oriented. I could wish for nothing better than for the formative influencers of the Republican Party to be similarly future oriented and for policy makers and other influencers across the political spectrum to work toward viable bipartisan (or better, nonpartisan) approaches in identifying the core issues of our time, in which environmental management is one major challenge among several, and in addressing them.

If the current crisis in Ukraine and Russia is any indication of things to come, there is need as well for a well thought, strategically focused foreign policy. This can only emerge through attenuation of sharp ideological polarizations across the political spectrum in the hard work of developing comprehensive domestic and foreign policy goals in which legislation emerges through a combination of rigorous policy analysis and enlightened grass roots advocacy. Such a refocusing to endure, needs to be rooted in this nation’s most constructive traditions inherent in constitutional democracy, a value of the first order that is much at risk in the current political climate.

As imperfectly modeled in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, there were times in the post-World War II era where this was viable. This broad-based consensus, which historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. referred to as vital center, broke down. That occurred with the conflict over Vietnam, assassinations of major national leaders, and various social and cultural upheavals between 1965-1980.The result is increased polarization of the left and right. This, in turn, has adversely affected our political and media-based classes, which focus, to an unhealthy degree, on accentuating this nation’s culture wars.

The result is gridlock. Pushed to extremes, this is a major problem. For a nation so consequential as the United States, it is a global problem.

We could be in a much better place if the nation shifted focus to the substantial challenges that will become front and center in the next several decades. Many other issues require attention, as well, but should be placed in a broader context by concentrating foremost on the nation’s key priorities that could emerge through deft policy analysis and probing negotiations with core constituencies. The vitality of this nation’s capacity to meet the challenges of the next three decades requires nothing less, particularly over the pressing matter of global environmental reform.

How do we get there? Start by preserving and strengthening the underpinnings of a civically aware constitutional democracy, without which we no longer have a recognizable country. Second, given the myriad of global challenges facing the world in the next few decades along with the changing role of the U.S. in it, a long-range, a bipartisan foreign policy is nothing less than indispensable. These three priorities: environmental reform, the strengthening of constitutional democracy, and the development of a coherent foreign policy poised to meet the challenges of the times will be central to what this nation will become by mid-century.