Myers: If climate change is not stopped

In about 1971 when I was an Army police officer in Germany, I read in Stars and Stripes that a German town was being abandoned because it was polluted beyond saving as a result of the activities of a local business. The inhabitants were being relocated to a new town.

I don’t remember the name of the town, and when I went online to try to find it, I found other German towns this happened to, such as Immerath and Atterwasch. I did not find the town I read about.

Germany isn’t the only place this happened, of course. The U.S. has places like Pilcher, Oklahoma (mining toxins), Times Beach, Missouri (dioxin), and the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls (commercial and military chemical wastes).

Implicit in much of the news coverage of these episodes was the knowledge that society was going to learn from them, that laws would be passed, regulations would protect, and practices would change. The abandonment of the town I read about in Germany happened not long after the first Earth Day, which signaled the growing awareness of all of us of the environment.

Today, however, we have a different kind of problem. Things are happening to the earth because of climate change and there is a determined effort by some in the business community to avoid learning, to prevent protection, to stop legal changes, to continue the same practices that caused the problem.

Last week the New York Times reported on its front page about the eradication of Lake Poopo, Bolivia’s second largest lake. Heavy surface evaporation, silting, and water diversion for mining and farming have dried up the lake. It has had difficult times intermittently in the past but always recovered. No one expects that this time.

Regrettably, in a story taking up more than two full pages in the Times, there is very little devoted to the causes. Most of the story deals with the cultural impact of the lake’s death on residents. (Readers can see before-and-after NASA photos of the lake at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=87363.)

This kind of thing is happening around the world, including just over the border from Nevada’s Mineral County. The Times story reads, “Lake Poopo is one of several lakes worldwide that are vanishing because of human causes. California’s Mono Lake and Salton Sea were both diminished by water diversions; lakes in Canada and Mongolia are jeopardized by rising temperatures.”

To be sure, this is an overstatement. The Salton Sea was not diminished by water diversion. It was CREATED by a water diversion caused by humans (tampering with the Colorado River by irrigation engineers in 1905 that caused the river to jump its channel) and is now drying up and thus returning to its natural state. That kind of sloppy journalism plays into the hands of denialists.

But there is no blinking at the fact that climate change is causing great changes in the planet – and in the way our children and grandchildren are going to have to live. Some businesspeople, like the convicted corporate polluters David and Charles Koch (number 13 on the Political Economy Research Institute’s Toxic 100 Air Polluters), are paying for organizations that try to discredit the science of climate change. (One of those groups, the American Legislative Exchange Council, said recently it no longer denies climate change.)

And while in the 1970s, our leaders may have tried to deal with the problems of pollution, often aided by businesspeople, today many businesspeople and their representatives say humans should just adapt—move north where it’s cooler, that kind of thing. Economist magazine of London has advised that political leadership and global action won’t stop climate change, so people should adapt: “Ideally, there would be opportunities to move to cities in other countries, too; the larger the region in which people can travel, the easier it is to absorb migrants from struggling areas. This is one reason why adaptation is easier for large countries or integrated regions. Within the EU, Greeks and Italians will be better placed to move to cooler climes than inhabitants of similarly sized countries elsewhere.”

Is this the kind of world you want for your children?

Dennis Myers is an award-winning journalist who has reported on Nevada’s capital, government and politics for several decades. He has also served as Nevada’s chief deputy secretary of state.