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Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green
05.19.08 | 6:00 PM
Photo: Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Altitude
The environmental movement
has never been short on noble goals. Preserving wild spaces, cleaning
up the oceans, protecting watersheds, neutralizing acid rain, saving
endangered species — all laudable. But today, one ecological problem
outweighs all others: global warming. Restoring the Everglades,
protecting the Headwaters redwoods, or saving the Illinois mud turtle
won't matter if climate change plunges the planet into chaos. It's high
time for greens to unite around the urgent need to reduce emissions of
greenhouse gases.
Just
one problem. Winning the war on global warming requires slaughtering
some of environmentalism's sacred cows. We can afford to ignore neither
the carbon-free electricity supplied by nuclear energy nor the
transformational potential of genetic engineering. We need to take
advantage of the energy efficiencies offered by urban density. We must
accept that the world's fastest-growing economies won't forgo a higher
standard of living in the name of climate science — and that, on the
way up, countries like India and China might actually help devise the
solutions the planet so desperately needs.
Some
will reject this approach as dangerously single-minded: The environment
is threatened on many fronts, and all of them need attention. So argues
Alex Steffen.
That may be true, but global warming threatens to overwhelm any
progress made on other issues. The planet is already heating up, and
the point of no return may be only decades away. So combating
greenhouse gases must be our top priority, even if that means embracing
the unthinkable. Here, then, are 10 tenets of the new environmental
apostasy.
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