Red Alert!

Quite coincidentally, when the climate change conference was in full swing in Paris last week, the Chinese government issued a "red alert" smog warning:

Starting Tuesday and continuing for three days, the more than 20 million residents of Beijing will have heavy limitations imposed on their daily activities. Schools will be closed, outdoor construction will be halted, and as the BBC reported, “cars with odd and even number plates will be banned from driving on alternate days.” It’s the first time China’s highest alert has ever been enacted in the city. 

Beijing, December 2015

In recent years cities in China, India and Iran have been socked in by suffocating smog, often for days at a time. Scenes like the one on the right are becoming increasingly common.

We used to see these sorts of things here all the time in the United States and in Europe. In 1952 London experienced a "killer fog" that killed about 12,000 people. On December 7th visibility was reduced to one foot. At noon it was pitch dark. The air was so filthy that the coal smoke penetrated people's clothes and made their underwear filthy.

London, December 1953

For decades Los Angeles had terrible problems with smog. New York City experienced killer smogs in 1953 and 1966 that resulted in the deaths of hundreds. Donora, PA had a killer smog that killed 20 in 1948.

As in China today, most of the smoke in London came from burning coal. Londoners heated their homes with coal, in addition to using it to generate electricity (China has the same problem today).

In the United States, the pollution that caused deadly smogs came from automobiles, industry (steel plants and smelting), coal-fired power plants, and so on. By the late Sixties it was clear that business as usual was no longer possible. So on January 1, 1970, Republican Richard Nixon signed the legislation that created the Environmental Protection Agency.

New York, November 1966

The EPA drafted regulations to clean up power plants and industry. The EPA enacted standards to reduce emissions from automobiles and increase mileage.

Because of the EPA, cities like New York and Los Angeles have much lower smog levels, and our skies are blue most of the time. Literally millions of American lives have been saved because of EPA regulations.

Yet when you hear Republicans, especially Republican presidential candidates, talk about the EPA, they just bitch about "burdensome" regulations or the "war on coal."

The same pollution that causes the smog that kills vulnerable adults with asthma, children, and the elderly also causes climate change. The same coal plant emissions that poison our lakes and rivers with mercury and other heavy metals also cause climate change.

Republicans like to think of themselves as rough and ready individualists. They idealize freedom as driving a big 4x4 pickup truck that gets 10 miles a gallon and belches black smoke. They cast it in terms of the lone hunter going hunting on the back 40.

But the Republican ideal of individualism doesn't scale up in modern life with antique fossil-fuel technology. We can't all drive inefficient pickup trucks to work in New York and LA and Houston and Chicago, or even Minneapolis and Milwaukee. We can't build that many freeways -- or parking lots -- and the atmosphere can't absorb that much pollution and CO2.

The same thing is true for generating electricity: you can't generate electricity for 350 million Americans with coal: it's just too dirty and inefficient. Natural gas is better, but it still generates CO2, which is causing climate change.

Now, nearly every Republican elected official denies the fact of climate change. They pretend scientists are perpetrating a gigantic hoax and a conspiracy, but we all know for a fact they deny it because they're paid to do so by the oil, gas and coal industries. How do we know this for certain? Because they also want to eliminate EPA regulations that regulate power plant and automobile emissions that were originally enacted by Republican themselves because, as we saw for decades since the industrial revolution, pollution kills people. By calling for repeal of EPA regulations, they are denying that pollution kills people in exactly the same way they're denying CO2 causes climate change.

Our population has simply grown too large to continue to burn things for energy and heat: just as we had to move away from wood-fired fireplaces and coal-fired pot-bellied stoves to oil- and natural-gas-fired furnaces, we now now have to move away from all forms of combustion.

We could continue to burn fossil fuels -- if the population of the United States and the world were what they were five centuries ago: the earth's natural systems can absorb a limited amount of CO2 and other air-borne toxins. But to do so we'd have to wage a major campaign of limiting population growth, but also of actively reducing the world's population.

Are Republicans advocating we commit mass genocide so they can continue to burn coal and drive gas guzzlers?

In order to maintain and perpetuate the kind of individualistic lifestyle that Americans are accustomed to -- and the rest of the world wants to attain -- we have to turn to renewable, clean sources of energy. We have to drive cars that run on electricity or renewable fuels, like hydrogen generated by non-polluting carbon-neutral processes.

Republicans still refuse to acknowledge this reality, but the business world already has: the stock of coal mining companies has tanked and several have gone bankrupt. The prices of gasoline and natural gas have dropped precipitously as demand has dropped and supply has spiked. However, they'll almost certainly go up again as drilling companies go bust, the production bubble bursts and demand increases. (Market economies are notoriously volatile and unstable, aren't they?)

Now is the time to begin phasing out coal completely, because there's nothing good about burning coal: it's dangerous to mine, it leaves wretched scars in the earth, it's bulky and expensive to transport, it produces toxic pollution and CO2 when burned, and presents a huge waste disposal problem with millions of tons of toxic ash that spills on regular basis, killing millions of fish and poisoning our waterways.

We can replace all the jobs lost in coal mines with better jobs building, installing and maintaining wind and solar facilities: instead of working in dark and filthy mines, workers can build wind turbines and solar panels in high-tech factories and install them in the clean, fresh air.

Rugged American individuals can install their own solar panels and Tesla Powerwalls, achieving their own energy independence, something that's impossible with fossil fuels. A clean renewable independent energy future is much more in line with historical conservative ideology, rather than toadying to oil barons like the Kochs and petro-dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia.
In any case, we're going to run out of oil, gas and coal at some point. Fossil fuels are dinosaurs, literally and figuratively. We need to switch to the next thing while we still have the energy and resources to do so, instead of descending into war and chaos over dwindling fossil fuel supplies.