Climate Change - Mitigation and Adaptation
Channel: Ernie Whiteside
Date: 08/07/2020

It was hot yesterday … really hot!

Maybe it’s time to talk about climate change.

Some people are … I think the polite phrase is … climate skeptics. I have no time or energy for them. My words are for those who understand that our climate is changing and we are changing it.

Responding to climate change involves two possible approaches: 

• reducing and stabilizing the levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this is called “mitigation”; and/or 
• adapting to the climate change already in the pipeline, this is called “adaptation”.

We are doing neither!

Humans have never lived on a planet with carbon dioxide levels over 400 parts per million. We passed carbon dioxide levels over 400 parts per million in 2013. Carbon dioxide levels over 400 parts per million had not previously occurred for probably more than 300 million years.

No public policy has in any way slowed down the steady and regular increase in carbon dioxide levels over my lifetime.

I can only conclude this; for all of our hemming and hawing we are NOT doing anything, at least NOT anything effective, to mitigate climate change.

Did you know that it takes ten years for the carbon dioxide emitted today to make it way up into the atmosphere where it plays its role in the Greenhouse Effect? The next ten years of warming are locked it! And we are doing what is effectively nothing to make the ten years after that any better.

Let’s stop pretending that the odd wind or solar project is going to rescue us from our inevitably climate changed future.

I am sorry; I really am very sorry that I had to say that.

Nobody, young or old, wants to hear just how hopeless our future is. We do not want to hear about how many tipping points we have passed in the last few decades. We do NOT want to hear that the time to act, if we hoped to mitigate the consequences of climate change, was not just a few decades ago but maybe a half century in our past.

If voters elected tens of thousands of people just like me to represent them in government, we would bring the very smartest people we could find into the room and enact the most effective policies available to us so that we could assure as many generations as possible of a habitable Earth on which to live. 

This is the point at which I am supposed to offer you, the voter, something that sounds like hope. 

…

If we can’t, or won’t, mitigate the consequences of climate change what we must do is adapt and absolutely nobody is talking about adaptation.

Oh the odd conversation is had about how rain gardens might help us cope with the impact of periodically heavy rainfall, but that is about as serious as it gets.

If the inland portions of continents, including our own, become arid and it becomes difficult or impossible to grow grains at scale, how will we meet the caloric needs of a growing population? Do the state and local leaders even feel that it is any part of their responsibility to make sure that the population of people they represent will have sufficient food in a climate changed future? 

Systemic failure is a prospect that each elected representative should be preparing for whether that failure occurs due to climate change or some other cause.

It is a conversation so difficult that we cannot have it and any political figure who dares to bring it up, myself included, will lose the support of those who are made uncomfortable by it.

Perhaps I will lose your support? Perhaps I never had it?

And so I will make the boldest statement on the subject that I dare make and I will wait to hear from you,

The ecological footprint of humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth upon which we live and we have been in a state of population overshoot for at least three going on four decades. Climate change is just one of the consequences of our failure to address the problems outlined in 1972 by MIT scholars in their report to the Club of Rome entitled “The Limits to Growth”.

Candidates and voters who view growth as the way out do not understand the place in which we find ourselves. 

I feel that we owe it to our current and future generations to leave this planet as habitable as possible by mitigating as many of the consequences of climate change as we can and by adapting to as many of the unmitigated consequences of climate change as we can. And, if I am elected, I will work to do just that.

I am Ernie Whiteside and I am asking for your support to be the next State Representative for Michigan House District 56.

[Video produced at no cost by the Committee to Elect Ernie Whiteside]