US Senate vote advances fight against climate change

FOR anyone worried about the devastating impact of greenhouse gas emissions on a warming planet, the news coming out of Washington and elsewhere in recent months has been depressing.

More specifically, the rising inflation, igniting a major rise in the price of gas, exacerbated by Western economic sanctions on Russia, a major oil producing country, have put pressure on the American president and other world leaders to take action to increase the production and supply of oil, and in the process, set back the global effort to deal with the climate crisis. Moreover, even before the war in Ukraine, President Joe Biden’s ambitious climate legislation has been stuck in Congress in the face of opposition from Republicans and two Democrat senators. The conventional wisdom has been that the White House’s proposals were dead on arrival.

So last week’s unexpected passage in the Senate of a US$370 billion bill designed to move the United States away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and other renewable energy comes as a major piece of good news. Indeed, Americans and the rest of the international community who want to see their leaders take action to combat the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- the result of burning oil, gas and coal -- and avert a planetary catastrophe, have cause for cheering.

If as expected, the US House of Representatives passes the legislation and President Biden signs it into law this week, it would be a historic event, the United States’ first major climate law which is supposed to cut the nation’s greenhouse pollution by about 40 per cent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade.

This development comes after more than five decades during which climate scientists have been spreading public awareness of the severity of climate change, and environmentalist activists and public figures, such as former Vice President Al Gore, have been calling on lawmakers and policymakers in Washington to do something before it was too late. But strong opposition from the powerful oil, gas and coal companies, backed by the majority of pro-business Republicans on Capitol Hill, some of whom have denied that the earth is warming, has helped kill even the modest attempts by previous Democratic presidents to fight climate change, mostly by imposing carbon taxes on energy companies.

Against the backdrop of extreme wildfires, droughts, storms and floods affecting every state in the country, however, it has become clear to the majority of Americans that climate change is a real threat not only to polar bears and sea turtles but to their communities, causing destruction and death, and that mitigation action was required ASAP. At the same time, environmentalists and their allies in Washington have concluded that providing financial incentives to businesses and communities to switch from using fossil fuels to clean sources of energy could prove to be more effective in the long run than taxing polluting companies.

And, indeed, the legislation that passed in the Senate last week offers, for example, tax incentives to steer consumers toward electric vehicles and, for businesses, billions of dollars in tax perks for zero-emission energy sources like wind, solar and nuclear. And not least, the new legislation provides political momentum for the forces leading the fight against climate change.