Editorial: Politicians Won’t Solve Climate Change

Earlier this year, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill committing Illinois to substantially decrease its carbon footprint by 2025, in line with the nationwide goals set in the Paris Agreement prior to the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from it. The University of Illinois has also committed to a different set of ambitious goals, and is largely on track to meet them. These achievements are certainly impressive and worthy of the praise they have received.

But these local successes have not been reflected at the national level. After Donald Trump’s inauguration in early 2017, a period of rapid environmental deregulation began. Lobbyists from the energy industry were appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency and other important regulatory agencies, leading to a lack of oversight that resulted in a substantial increase in carbon emissions in 2018. Even before the Trump administration, emissions had not been falling fast enough to avert climate disaster.

Internationally, progress has also been gravely slow. Global emissions reached a record high in 2018, and a majority of the countries that are part of the Paris Climate Agreement are currently failing to meet their emissions goals.

In light of a generation of failures from the world’s foremost politicians and scientists to sufficiently address climate change, what power do we have to make real change? Clearly, it’s not working to address it as just another political issue. It can’t be ignored: in the last decade, more than 200 million people have become climate refugees. Entire countries in the Pacific and Caribbean are beginning to be submerged. It’s not a faraway problem, either. Floods, droughts, wildfires, and dangerous levels of heat will become routine here in Illinois. This is not a question of polar bears. It is life or death for millions of human beings. This scale of issue cannot be addressed with the voluntary goal-setting in the Paris Agreement, or the slow progress produced by most legislative action.

When American colonists were taxed while being denied their due representation in parliament, they did not ask for approval from their government to address the crisis. They stormed boats and destroyed cargo to make their point clear. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King didn’t make change by calling their representatives or signing a petition. They saw that their people were being oppressed, and they took to the streets to stop it. At what point do we, too, choose to treat climate change as more than just a typical issue? How many more people have to be displaced? How many more have to die?

These questions are impossible to answer. There’s not even a consensus on if anything can be done at this point to mitigate climate change. But regardless of all the ignorance and apathy surrounding the issue, when humanity is faced with the closest thing we’ve ever seen to the apocalypse, we cannot choose to simply fade away.