The Boston Globe--Editorials|Opinions
This story ran on page A27 of the Boston Globe
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
By Bill McKibben
December 8, 1999
The bad news - and it's plenty bad, as usual - is that the Arctic is thawing out. Studies published Friday in the journal Science show that an area bigger than Massachusetts melts each year, almost certainly because of global warming due to our burning of fossil fuel.
But the good news - and when you talk about global warming, it is unusual for there to be any good news - is that the political climate may finally be starting to thaw a bit as well. Ford Motor Co., the people who first figured out how to make gasoline a commodity for the masses, announced on Monday that it is quitting the Global Climate Coalition, the business umbrella group that has devoted itself for the last few years to blocking any action that might actually slow down the rate at which we are heating the planet.
In a letter to Sister Patricia Daly, the nun who has helped lead the campaign against the coalition, Ford's chairman, William Clay Ford Jr., wrote: '' Our intent at Ford is to move forward in progressive and constructive ways to address environmental issues.''
Which is pretty much the opposite of what the Global Climate Coalition has been up to. In the last few years the coalition has spread outdated science - the contention, for instance, that satellite data shows that the earth is not heating up. Peer-reviewed papers published last year in Nature showed that the satellite data did, in fact, show heating, but the coalition continued to distribute disinformation.
It also promoted the work of obscure scientists simply because they went against the nearly unanimous scientific consensus about the dangers of global warming.
Even though the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of more than 2,000 scientists, has predicted rises of as much as a yard in sea levels in the next century, the coalition found a single Bermuda-based researcher who said otherwise and spread his work as widely as it could.
It has also pushed scary economic studies that purport to show the cost of saving the planet's climate but don't factor in the costs of sea-level rise or other climatic disruptions.
In short, the coalition has been the most effective force at persuading the public that the jury is still out on global warming even though the scientific jury returned its findings long ago and convicted us all of great folly in conducting a planetwide experiment that carries enormous risk.
Ford's defection from the coalition matters enormously - most of all because the company has been far more an environmental sinner than an environmental saint. Just this fall it launched the single largest sport utility vehicle ever, the Ford Excursion.
Ford fits in much more easily with the coalition than it does with, say, the upstart environmental organization Ozone Action, which has coordinated the anticoalition effort and helped persuade Ford to leave.
But Ford can read the writing on the walls - not just the angry graffiti that environmentalists left behind in Seattle last week but the graphs and charts of the climatologists and atmospheric physicists and the specs that a new wave of engine designers are putting forward for fuel cell cars, gas-electric hybrids, and other vehicles for a postcarbon future.
Around the country, students have begun to organize in an effort to force colleges to divest stock in the companies that still belong to the coalition. Ford' defection will make that effort much easier. Maybe it will help Exxon, General Motors, Texaco, and Union Carbide to read the writing on the walls as well. It is possible that we have waited till far too late to start this fight. Ford's announcement won't help the Arctic ice in the short term, or the farmers facing droughts or the coastal residents facing harsher hurricanes. We have already spewed so much carbon into the atmosphere that we are going to see serious, maybe crippling, change. But at least the race to do something about it seems finally to be underway.
Bill McKibben is the author of ''The End of Nature,'' which w as recently reissued by Anchor Press.
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