Tag Archives: climate change

Green Technology Race

“When it comes to climate change, the United States should compete, not cooperate, with its rival.” (Andrew S. Erickson, Gabriel Collins; “Competition With China Can Save the Planet,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2021)

The United States’ relations with China are among the most important in the world today. While the relationship is complicated, the authors suggest one area in which the U.S. should definitely compete, not cooperate.

The authors cite China’s commitment to coal technology, as seen by their continued building of coal-fired power plants. The authors believe that “cooperation” with China in the field of climate change would mean the U.S. would have to give up its own progress toward climate friendly energy generation.

Instead, they suggest, the U.S. should strengthen competition in green energy technology. “Carbon taxation now attracts serious attention on both sides of the Atlantic, and the world’s democracies are generally significantly ahead of China when it comes to both meaningfully pricing carbon and having the industrial energy-sourcing preconditions in place to make the transition to a future of net-zero carbon emissions viable.”

A race to find better energy technology? Much better than an arms race.

Whatever Happened to Puerto Rico?

We haven’t heard much lately about the hurricane damage in Puerto Rico. Maybe by the time Hurricane Maria devastated the island, we were bored with hurricane coverage.

After all, we had already followed Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida. Time to switch to more cheerful stuff, perhaps the latest breakup of a celebrity couple or our Facebook accounts of what we ate for lunch.

Bill McKibben, writing in Sojourners (‘Earth’s New Vulnerabilities,” December, 2017), recounts some of the devastation in Puerto Rico we may not have noticed. “Gone were airports and roads. Eighty percent of the island’s crops were destroyed . . . Almost all the cell towers. . . . Electricity was suddenly a thing of the past . . . Modernity retreats.”

To be sure, the aftermath of all three major U.S. hurricanes, not to mention the wildfires in California, strain our resources.

McKibben draws a deeper lesson. “We’re starting to realize how unbuffered the whole planet is . . . everywhere new vulnerabilities emerge almost daily.”

He calls on us to “staunch the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. Maria is what happens with 1 degree Celsius of global warming. We’re currently on a path for an increase of 3 to 4 degrees Celsius. That would be enough to join the whole planet in a community of collapse.”

Anybody for bringing back those forbidden words “climate change”?