My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

 

Dozens of times as a kid, I shivered and hopped around waiting for the school bus on dark northern Minnesota mornings that were minus 25 degrees or less. The lights of the heated bus bouncing through the trees up the gravel road was the most welcome sight in the world.

Living in the “banana belt” of Minnesota as an adult has been nice -— it’s still Minnesota, with the edge taken off the cold. My children don’t know what the colder temperatures feel like yet, so I’m excited for them to walk outside into possibly less than minus 20-degree air.

The blast of winter predicted for this week used to be a lot more common in Minnesota. If you have kids or grandchildren here, make a memorable experience of it with them, because these extreme cold events are becoming more and more rare.

2018 was the fourth hottest year on record. Only three other years have been hotter — 2016, 2015 and 2017. The impacts of climate change in Minnesota so far are being felt most in warming winters and heavier rainfalls. We have all observed this ourselves. Meteorologist Paul Douglas calls it weather “weirding.”

We are used to change happening around us constantly, but for most of recorded human history, climate has been a stable factor in the background. It’s difficult to overemphasize how that stability has underpinned societal achievements and technological advancements. This constancy is no longer the case. The climate keeps getting weirder.

The cost of not doing anything to meet these future climate challenges, of charging recklessly into the future on a coal train with a head of steam, will be grievous. Fossil fuels are a dead end. We have already packed enough carbon into our oceans and atmosphere to disrupt climate for the foreseeable future, and every molecule more we add, the worse the damage will be.

Don’t listen to fossil fuel interests that have carbon in the ground they still want to dig up and pump out. A corporation’s mission is to maximize money for shareholders, not consider environmental impacts and the future of humanity. These coal and gas interests have spent over $2 billion perverting the science of climate change, and their pockets remain deep. They have already done irreparable harm by slowing our response.

Younger voters, who will live to see more impacts of our carbon dioxide emissions, are taking climate change seriously. This is true of both liberal and conservative millennials.

Older conservative voters, sadly, are still enthralled to the fossil fuel industry’s messages which are repeated by the gutless or willfully blind Republican congresspersons in their pockets. Many of these voters have grandchildren who will be living in a future where global population is projected to reach 10 billion around 2050 (no thanks to Republicans blocking family planning resources to African women) at the same time as a warming planet disrupts agricultural production. Global food stocks are already taking hits from climate change-related crop failures.

This is precarious. As Americans, we don’t have a collective memory of what happens when food runs short and prices spike. The last time bread riots occurred may have been during the Civil War in the South. Everybody should take seriously this Spanish proverb: “Civilization and anarchy are only seven meals apart.”

The future that is coming if we follow the status quo and live paralyzed by fear or deliberately misleading information will be bad for almost everybody who isn’t exceptionally wealthy. We must choose to act.

An idea that has been around for about a decade but is gaining broader appeal is the “Green New Deal.” This is an excellent name for the effort we need, because it will have to be multi-faceted, mighty and well-administered like the last New Deal.

FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression was composed of programs for relief, recovery, and reform. A Green New Deal’s purpose will be to transform the world’s largest economy to a net carbon neutral one.

The original New Deal gave power to the people in many ways, through job creation, new local democratic structures and sometimes literal power distribution, like rural electrification and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Freeborn County still has its REA. Albert Lea’s impressive art deco post office was also built with funding from that period.

Rural areas were winners in the New Deal. A Green New Deal could bring new jobs and power to rural areas once again, this time with green energy like solar and wind power, generated locally.

The future will not be cold, but it doesn’t have to be hot and hungry.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.