Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution by Bernie Sanders

Author:Bernie Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

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SIX

COMBATING CLIMATE CHANGE

YES, IT IS REAL

The vast majority of the scientific community agrees: climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is already causing devastating harm here in the United States and all around the globe.

To my mind, global climate change is the single greatest threat facing the planet. It poses an actual existential threat to our country and our world. We are the custodians of the earth, and it would be a moral disgrace if we left to future generations a planet that was unhealthy, dangerous, and increasingly uninhabitable. We must transform our energy system and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is no alternative.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution began more than two hundred years ago, we have been burning increasing amounts of carbon-based fossil fuels—principally oil, natural gas, and coal—to heat our factories and homes, generate electricity, and power our vehicles. And for most of that time, we have been dumping the by-products of that combustion, some of which are highly toxic, into our atmosphere, our soil, and our waterways. Over the years, we have become better at scrubbing out certain pollutants, including sulfur oxides and particulates that contribute to acid rain and smog, but an incontrovertible fact remains: when we burn carbon-based fossil fuels, we release significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In fact, today, humans release between 35 billion and 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year.

BY-PRODUCT: a secondary substance made in the production of something else

According to NASA scientists, in the past 650,000 years the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has never exceeded 300 ppm (parts per million). At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, carbon levels were about 280 ppm. Since then, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen, slowly at first, but at an increasing rate as we burned more and more fossil fuels. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the country’s premier atmospheric research facility, the carbon dioxide level crossed the 400 ppm threshold for the first time in 2013 and continues to rise by an average of 2.6 ppm every year. So what does this mean?

Carbon dioxide is a “greenhouse gas” that traps heat from the sun and earth in the atmosphere. The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the stronger the greenhouse effect, and the more the atmosphere and the oceans warm. This is hardly a new idea. Nor is it, as some would have you believe, a theory. In fact, scientists started connecting fuel emissions to the climate in the mid-1800s, and in 1917 Alexander Graham Bell used the now-popular term when he reasoned that with air pollution “we would gain some of the earth’s heat which is normally radiated into space.… We would have a sort of greenhouse effect,” turning the atmosphere into “a sort of hot-house.”

And while carbon dioxide accounts for 81 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, it is not the only problem. Methane, which

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