as the United States suffers through its worst drought since the 1950s. A new report from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows nearly 60 percent of the country is now affected. About 1,300 counties have been designated “drought disaster” areas.
The combination of heat and dryness has taken a major toll on corn and soybean crops. This is a farmer, Bob Bowman, who says his cornfields in and around Welton, Iowa, look green, but his plants are less than half the height they should be.
Mark Hertsgaard talking:
that shot from Iowa reminds me of—I was just out doing reporting in Minnesota myself and talking to the farmers there. The quote that comes to mind is from a plant biologist at the University of Illinois who looked at the drought and the heat in—hitting the Farm Belt of this country, and he said, “This is like farming in Hell.” We’re going to see an enormous impact already on the agricultural output in this country.
And, you know, we forget sometimes, the United States is the world’s leading agricultural superpower. But this summer, we’re already seeing in the futures markets for corn and soybean, prices are shooting up because of what’s going to happen to the harvest. And let’s remember what happened the last time that food prices went up around the world in 2008. We saw food riots in 12 countries that almost toppled governments. So these are some of the impacts that climate change can lead to.
And, you know, we’re just at the start of this also, unfortunately, which is why we’ve started Climate Parents, you mentioned—thank you very much for that—because our kids are the ones who are going to have to deal with this. The climate future that we are handing off to them is really, frankly, quite terrifying. And so, to me, one of the things I asked in that Newsweek/Daily Beast article is, why is it that parents aren’t more involved in this? Why aren’t we up in arms about it? And so, we’re starting this group, climateparents.org, as an effort to help parents find their voice on this issue. And I must say that the initial response to that article has been very gratifying. I’ve heard from literally scores of parents all across the country who are saying, “Yes, I have felt scared about what my kids are facing because of climate change, but I’ve also felt powerless and paralyzed. And I didn’t know what to do.” Well, we’re going to try and change that, because, at the moment, we think that parents are probably the single most under-organized constituency on climate change, which is pretty bizarre, considering the threat that climate change poses to what all of us hold most dear in our lives, which is our kids. So we’re going to find a way to change that.
I think most people’s response, especially when they’re listening to the mainstream media, if they care about this, is, “OK, well, what can I do? Well, maybe I can bicycle to work, or I’ll take the kids on mass transit instead.” And don’t get me wrong: those are good first steps, if only because they make you think about how your own individual actions affect the collective future. But those things alone will never suffice.
You’ve got to go after what are the main drivers of climate change, and those are government policies and corporate practices. We just spent the earlier part of this program looking at what Shell is going to do, wants to do, in the Arctic. I was a little surprised that you didn’t mention what Interior Secretary Salazar has said about that. When they asked him about the possibility of an oil spill, he says, “Well, I don’t think there will be an oil spill.” Somehow that’s not very reassuring to me.
We’ve got to change those kinds of practices. We’ve got to change the fact that right now there is no price on carbon pollution in this country. You are allowed to pollute, to put your waste into the atmosphere, for nothing. And those are because of government policies that not only make it free, we actually subsidize Shell and Exxon Mobil and Peabody Coal and all of these big fossil fuel companies. We subsidize them to wreck the planet for our kids. That has to change.
We spend billions and billions of dollars every year, including subsidizing these kinds of exploratory drilling. We subsidize the production of coal. We subsidize all of the highways that are used to consume that oil. If you actually look at the amount of subsidies, it’s up in the billions of dollars. And this, by the way, is for the richest industry in history, the fossil fuel industry. Why are we doing that?
Well, right now, there are 60 members of Congress—senators and the House of Representatives—who have signed on to a bill, led by Keith Ellison in the House, of Minnesota, who are calling—and I think Bernie Sanders of Vermont—who are calling for an end to those subsidies. If you can’t get that through the Congress, I think that it’s just a sign of what a corporate control there is in Washington. But I will say that a lot of the environmental groups this fall are going to be pushing to ask your member of Congress, “Where do you stand on ending those subsidies?” And that’s one of the fights that we hope that Climate Parents will be involved with, as well.
we’ve had two, maybe three, landmark heat waves in the history of man-made global warming. The first was 1988, which put global warming on the map, when Jim Hansen, the NASA scientist, went to Congress and said global warming’s begun. The second was 2003 in Europe, where we lost 71,000 people in the space of six weeks, died from that heat wave. But it also pushed the discussion in Europe forward, and government leaders began to recognize it and call for tougher policies.
We will see if 2012 is going to be the third landmark heat wave, because it doesn’t just require—to become a landmark, it’s not just about the meteorological conditions, it’s about the political and the social reaction to it. And one of the things I really want to do is to call on my colleagues and the rest of the media, who so far have been ignoring the climate’s signature on this heat wave of 2012. We have our own federal government scientists saying this is what global warming looks like. We need to start taking that seriously. And above all, we need our politicians to begin to talk about this.
– source democracynow.org
Mark Hertsgaard, environmental correspondent for The Nation and fellow at the New America Foundation. His new article for The Daily Beast is called “Parents Need to Act Against Climate Change for Their Kids’ Sake.” He’s also the author of the book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.