'Climate is a test; if we pass, we get to keep earth'

A recent change in climate policy by the Trump Administration threatens to change everything on earth–from the fast-warming planet itself to all the life on it.

On July 29, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” The White House, reported the New York Times, planned to “erase limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks on the nation’s roads.”

The action, the Times continued, “…flatly denies the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change.”

The decision dovetails with earlier Trump Administration choices to “scrap restrictions on pollution from power plants, halt key measurements of greenhouse gases,” and since July, cancel most federal “wind and solar energy projects…”

In essence, the people who want to Make America Great Again also want to Make the World Hot Again. (The last time the earth was this hot was 120,000 years ago.) If they do, climate chaos will be the rule by the end of this century.

That’s what the facts point to. For example:

* According to the National Oceanic and Atmosmospheric Administration (NOAA), the atmospheric concentration of CO2 prior to the Industrial Revolution was, for almost 6,000 years, a steady 280 parts per million (ppm).

* Then came the age of coal and oil and by 1925 the CO2 content was 305 ppm and climbing fast. Today, 100 years and 1.5 trillion tons of atmospheric CO2 later, it’s an even faster-climbing 425 ppm.

* If we, like the Trump Administration, deny “the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change,” atmospheric CO2 will soar to between an off-the-charts 670 and 700 ppm by the year 2100.

In his new book, We Are Eating the Earth, Michael Grunwald puts those numbers into context. For example, “The earth hasn’t heated up this quickly in 485 million years” and “…the last 10 years were the 10 hottest years ever recorded.”

Worse, “We’ve emitted more heat-trapping greenhouse gases” since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first international agreement to limit CO2 in the atmosphere, than “we emitted in all human history before Kyoto.”

Grunwald says all these facts point to our growing “land problem.”

“We need to start treating the limited land we’ve got as our most precious resource,” he explains, “because it needs to produce much more food to sustain us and absorb much more carbon to save us.”

Instead, we’re doing the opposite. “Our agricultural footprint is already the size of all of Asia plus all of Europe, and the more it expands, the more nature’s footprint shrinks, expelling the carbon stored in its soils and vegetation into our overheated atmosphere.”

In short, we are eating the earth: the more we expand today’s meat-rich, biofuel-focused agriculture, the more we doom coming generations to climate failure or worse.

“If current trends hold,” he writes, “the world’s farmers will need to clear at least a dozen more Californias’ worth of land to fill nearly 10 billion bellies by 2050. That would wipe out the Amazon rainforest and other natural carbon storehouses that are… our best defense against climate change.”

We can change that trajectory, he explains, and, no, it doesn’t involve recent food flops like “vertical farming,” and lab-made meat or too-slow regenerative agriculture. (More on these solutions in the future.)

One thing we cannot do is what the Trump Administration is now doing: declare climate change a hoax and simply walk away. It’s not a hoax.

In fact, “The climate is a test,” Grunwald explains, paraphrasing a former environmental clairvoyant; “if we pass, we may get to keep the planet.”