Goldmark: Climate change will be costly

Peter Goldmark, a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.

For the past seven years, I worked on the challenge of global warming.

The signs -- both visible, such as the pace of natural disasters and sea-level rise, and invisible, such as the deadly acidification of the ocean and releases of heat-trapping methane from the melting permafrost in Alaska and Siberia -- are all around us. The planet is warming. People will shake their heads in disbelief, in future years, that anyone could have questioned this scientific reality, just as we laugh now at anyone who continues to think the Earth is flat.

But the emergence of full-throated, know-nothing opposition to doing anything about global warming by the extreme right in this country, combined with timidity and lack of imagination in the center and fuzzy liberals, has for now paralyzed any near-term action to block global warming by the United States.

And it is precisely near-term action that we need if we are to avoid this oncoming disaster at any reasonable cost. The sooner we start turning around the global increase in greenhouse gas emissions, the safer we will be and the less it will cost. What the problem requires today is action now by China and the United States. They are the two largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, and neither has yet taken significant national action.

China is wrestling with what to do; there will probably be no serious decision until the new paramount leader takes office next year.

And in the United States we are paralyzed. There are some Republican candidates for president who understand the global warming threat and know we need to act, such as Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney. But in the present poisonous political atmosphere, they have retreated. President Barack Obama has offered leadership on this issue that has been halfhearted at best -- and at worst inept, as when the White House last spring spooked key Republican supporters of comprehensive climate-change legislation in the run-up to a Senate vote, after it had passed the House.

The American democratic system often works its way forward slowly and sloppily, and I'm confident that some day it will work its way back to a willingness to try to prevent frying the planet. Demographic change alone assures this eventual outcome, because most young people, including many young conservatives and evangelicals, "get it" on climate change.

But that wait may cost us five years or more. And global warming is a singularly unforgiving issue: We probably do not have that much time to squander on posturing driven by ill-informed, right-wing extremists and funded by pro coal-and-oil billionaires like the Koch brothers.

No one really knows how much time we have left; the warming dynamic is slow and complicated. But if we do have five or more years in which to act, one thing is clear: It will cost us much, much more to wait and act later than it would to start now.

Who'll pay that increased price? The next generation.

That would be a perverse outcome of the fulminations of that wing of our political spectrum that professes to be most concerned about the financial burden on future generations caused by irresponsible policy today.

To my mind, almost nothing could be more irresponsible than this: to oppose action on a clear danger of massive, planet-threatening proportions, in the face of overwhelming scientific opinion, in a way that will exacerbate the danger and increase sharply the cost of addressing it in the future.

Imagine if those blocking us from acting on global warming had been near Boston in 1776. When Paul Revere came riding through to warn "The British are coming," they probably would have shrugged. "The British don't exist," they would have said, and gone back to sleep.