It’s Time for the US to Declare a National Climate Emergency

Rising seas pose serious threats to major American cities, including Boston, Charleston, Miami, and New York, while, in recent years, millions of acres of the Midwest have been flooded by climate-related extreme weather events. Had a foreign enemy inflicted the kind of damage caused by such floods, or the firestorms that swept California and the Pacific Northwest in 2020, or the hurricanes and droughts the nation has begun experiencing with increased frequency, the US would have immediately mobilized for war. Now, this country needs to do exactly that to face the climate crisis, but (even forgetting the horrifying possibility that Donald Trump could win the coming presidential election and sink any possibility of moving on climate change nationally for years to come) how to get our act together?

As French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his classic 1943 novella, Le Petit Prince, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” In other words, a national climate action plan is urgently needed.

In the Trump years of climate-science denial, any progress in controlling emissions resulted from actions by states, cities, and businesses or institutions. Over the long term, however, climate policy is far too important to be left to a hodgepodge of laws and policies haphazardly applied across some of our 50 states and thousands of cities and businesses. What this country needs is a plan guided by scientific and technical analysis and based on an ambitious but attainable set of greenhouse-gas-reduction quotas. Its point would not be to override the climate agendas of any city, state, or group, or the aspirations of the Green New Deal (House Resolution HR 109). It would simply be to provide a reliable toolkit of measures and policies along with analyses of their costs and benefits—a compass for getting to negative carbon emission as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

This country today has no comprehensive climate action plan that proposes clear, enforceable targets, timelines, and road maps for climate protection and restabilization—and it desperately needs one. Call it America’s Energy Transition: Achieving a Clean Energy Future and imagine that it would build on previous authoritative studies, analyzing renewable-energy-generating and distribution technologies in terms of their costs, commercial readiness, resource constraints, and potential efficiency. It would formulate and model competing scenarios with clusters of complementary technologies, each requiring different policies for its implementation.

From such an exercise, Americans would learn how to achieve the greatest greenhouse gas reductions with the most speed and cost-effectiveness, as well as the fewest unwanted impacts, while best meeting this country’s ongoing energy needs. Such a study would also reveal the demands on natural resources of each scenario along with its costs and the manufacturing capacity required.

To build trust and engagement in the final plan, regional advisory councils made up of scientists, engineers, businesspeople, and major stakeholder representatives should be created to offer recommendations on how best to adapt such a plan to conditions in each part of the country. The final policy road map would then be designated as the “optimal energy path scenario” for the nation and provided to Congress, so that it could use the findings as a basis for funding and implementing new climate legislation.

Without Political Action, Don’t Hold Your Breath for a Bold Climate Plan

Left to its own devices, without strong public pressure, Congress might basically ignore or fail to enact legislation to implement the results of a National Climate Action Plan, especially if Congress were still controlled by the fossil-fuel-loving Republican Party. A Republican stranglehold on Congress and/or the White House would undoubtedly stymie both the creation of a national climate plan and the implementation of its findings, as well as the clean-energy transition it would facilitate.

To prevent such a setback from occurring, a strong popular constituency must be built nationwide capable of exerting powerful pressure on Congress to ensure the creation of a climate plan and the appropriate legislation to make it functional. Otherwise, no matter how sound the PR campaign on its behalf, serious political obstacles would stand in the way of its adoption, even by a Democratic Congress.

Through its lobbying, think tanks, public relations arms, and advertising, the politically and economically powerful fossil-fuel industry has, for decades, blocked meaningful climate legislation in both Democratic and Republican congresses. The creation of a powerful, broad coalition of constituencies—environmental, labor, public health, faith-based, and even progressive elements of the business community—could serve as a popular countervailing force against the mighty fossil-fuel industry. But as a first step, that coalition would need support, guidance, and a common accepted platform both to stand behind and to mobilize the public. The American environmental community could produce that platform. Yet this would not be a simple matter, due to the way that community is siloed, with each major organization catering to its own constituency, interests, and funders.

To create a common consensual vision around which the national climate movement could mobilize, a broad civil society gathering should be convened to attract the leadership of all environmental and climate action groups and set the stage for the National Climate Action Plan. That gathering would, of course, focus on the roadblocks to implementing such a plan and to a swift, national clean-energy transition—and how those roadblocks could be dismantled.

Put all of this together and you would have a nation mobilized against the fossil fuel industry, ready to create a climate action plan and mobilize Americans in an all-of-society effort on behalf of slashing national carbon emissions in a radical fashion, accelerating a clean-energy transition, and protecting our endangered world. What more could you ask for?