This week, two teams of scientists announced that the West Antarctic ice sheet has begun collapsing, beginning what they call an “unstoppable” process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet over time. “This is really happening,” Thomas P. Wagner, one of the researchers, told the New York Times. “There’s nothing to stop it now.”
The timing was especially unfortunate for Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican senator and 2016 hopeful, who had just cast doubt on the phenomenon of human-induced climate change, telling ABC News, “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.”
Rubio has expressed more reasonable positions on the topic in the past—and he quickly sought to clarify his remarks—but I do not entirely blame him for his rhetorical shift. In an annual Pew poll, only 14 percent of Republicans cited climate change as a top policy priority. That’s down from 23 percent in 2007, the first year Pew included climate change in its priority list. The party has clearly changed in those seven years, and Rubio knows where his voting base for 2016 is on the issue.
This is not simply a problem in the Republican Party, though. The American public routinely ranks addressing climate change low on its list of priorities for Washington. This year it ranked 19th among 20 issues tested by Pew, just behind “dealing with moral breakdown” and “improving roads, bridges, public transit.”
The climate issue is politically challenging not only because it’s at the bottom of people’s priority lists, but also because of overreach on both sides of the debate. Humans aren’t the sole “cause” of climate change, and environmentalists have done a disservice in making that claim too assertively. Our activities are exacerbating natural phenomena, making us part of the problem, but the Earth and its climate has been changing since it was formed. Because of human activity, things are changing faster than nature or humans can adapt, and the sooner we start taking steps to slow things, the better off we will be.
The modern environmental movement arguably began with Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican president who established the national park system. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, and a Democratic Congress created much of our landmark environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. But Republicans have gotten away from those values in recent years. The only way to return the GOP to its roots and, in turn, make headway on climate change is by ensuring that Republicans—and all Americans—recognize the very real economic costs of not protecting our environment.
Scientists have long predicted that one of the consequences of climate change will be more frequent and more severe storms. They can’t predict where and when they will occur, but the extreme magnitude of them reflects climate change. We saw the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and I do not want anyone to have to endure what citizens of the New Jersey and New York coastlines experienced in that storm. Taking just my home state as an example, New Jersey’s 127 miles of sandy beaches contribute approximately $20 billion in economic activity to New Jersey’s economy. More frequent and more severe storms means more homes and businesses destroyed, state economies blighted and of course, most importantly, more lives lost. We simply cannot afford to let that happen.
And the climate’s not the only thing at stake here. Recent studies linking various health and economic impacts of environmental contamination should be enough to give any policymaker pause: the connection between certain pesticides and Parkinson’s, the correlation between elevated lead in gasoline with crime rates and the finding that pregnant women who were exposed to high levels of diesel particulates were twice as likely to have an autistic child. In our necessary mission to grow the economy, we cannot neglect environmental stewardship; the price we pay is much greater than we can afford, both in terms of dollars and human lives.
This is no zero-sum game. In fact, the more our economy grows, the better we ought to be able to protect the planet—and ourselves. Recently economists have hypothesized what is called the “environmental Kuznets curve,” which shows that after a certain point in a country’s development, GDP continues to grow even as the level of environmental pollutants decreases. To use just one example, between 1970 and 2006, U.S. GDP grew by 195 percent, yet thanks to regulatory changes annual emissions of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, and lead all decreased significantly.
I remain confident that economic prosperity and environmental protection are not mutually exclusive goals, and as soon as my party recognizes the exorbitant economic costs of not acting on climate change, I believe we will start to make progress. It is imperative that Congress make this issue a priority. I only hope it’s not already too late.