Climate watch: Political will is missing in the climate change fight

Wildfires, floods, and hurricanes are signals of the alarming results we must expect from climate change. What can we do about it? We often hear that all we lack is the political will.

For years, the problem has been the same. Engineers have confidence that they can meet the challenge of climate change in terms of science and technology, but America needs the political will.

Over a decade ago, Scientific American published “A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030,” making the promise that “Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels.” The engineers Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi laid out the path specifically: 3.8 million large wind turbines, 89,000 photovoltaic and solar power plants, and 900 hydroelectric plants would suffice.

The obstacles, they assured us, were “primarily political.” Later, Jacobson compared the level of political will necessary to that mustered for the Apollo space program or the construction of the interstate highway system.

Here we are, three presidents later, and our problem remains the same. Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs expressed it this way in a New York Times article printed Dec. 16, 2020: “One question is whether net zero by 2050 can become a consensus national goal, the way building the interstate highway system or going to the moon were.”

In the same article, Susan Tierney said that the current “modeling studies” for dealing with climate change “can show us how to get to net zero technologically, but not how to solve all those pesky real world political and social challenges.”

In his influential 2019 book, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming,” David Wallace-Wells saw the problem the same way, “If we could wish a solution into place by imagination, we’d have solved the problem already ... We just haven’t yet discovered the political will, economic might and cultural flexibility to install and activate them.”

Since the days, long gone, of bipartisan problem-solving, our politics took a turn for the worse. Political will has been fractured. Just imagine: the bill establishing the interstate highway system in 1956 passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 89 to 1. The bill establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958 did not even require a roll call vote.

The successful negotiations between Democrats and Republicans on the infrastructure bill offer hope for real political will once again. Of course, there are fanatical politicians and voters who still regard bipartisanship as a sign of political spinelessness, ideological impurity, and moral perfidy. But they have no record of accomplishment like the interstate highways and the landing on the moon to point to. The “path to sustainable energy” must be paved with the political will we had two generations ago.