Gov. Jerry Brown’s Cap-and-Trade Program Is a Step in the Right Direction, but Little More
Photo by Kevork Djansezian
The California Assembly voted Monday, in a rare bipartisan effort, to extend the cap-and-trade carbon emissions program promoted by Governor Jerry Brown as a model not only for his state to tackle climate change, but as a beacon for the world to learn from and implement in their own states and countries.
“I’m not here about some cockamamie legacy that people talk about,” Brown said in a speech to the Senate Environmental Quality Committee. “This isn’t for me. It’s for you and it’s damn real.” Brown, a 79 year old career politician, has made climate change a main issue of his late years as Governor of California.
Despite his genuine efforts to take action on the most impending issue facing humankind, Brown’s cap-and-trade program falls short of making the revolutionary changes found in his rhetoric. However, the fact that the legislation stops short of facilitating the Green Energy Revolution will not obstruct Brown’s achievable goal of establishing the program as a model for the world to make deals with fossil fuel companies and keep the carbon emitters happy with a seat at the table. All while the science clearly shows we should be completely eradicating the industry and dramatically restructuring the way human life progresses towards the future with clean power and renewable energy.
Eight Republicans joined Democrats in a break with party leaders to support the extension of the climate change legislation, and it is no surprise that this is what made them hop on board with climate policy. But the cap-and-trade emissions program—a free market incentive plan that has fossil fuel companies and other carbon emitters buying and trading emission credits—fails to address the real root cause of these problems: a global economic system that is based upon exploitation of the planet’s resources.
By keeping incentive in the for-profit model of greenhouse gas emitters, Brown is prolonging the unavoidable and imminent shift to a sustainable, clean energy system of renewables to which the world must transition in order to survive and save the life we’re already destroying on our perfectly positioned and resource-gifted planet.
Even now, scientists conducting studies on the topic of animal population sizes are warning that we are entering an era of “biological annihilation” and mass extinction not unlike the inverse of the Ice Age, but with the exception that this period of warming is mainly being caused by human pollution, forest degradation, and the overall heating climate that is primarily the result of human carbon emissions.
While there is talk of limiting the amount of carbon and other harmful greenhouse gasses being pumped into our atmosphere from the fossil fuel industry and other corporations, the world has already permanently passed the crucial threshold of 400 parts per million according to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the Mauna Loa Observatory—who are both monitoring carbon dioxide emissions—never again to return to the levels before 2016.
Already we’re seeing the consequences of this apocalyptic truth. Sea levels are rising, glaciers and ice sheets are melting, plant and animal ranges have shifted, and trees are even flowering sooner. People who live in the cities of Miami, San Francisco, and New York will have to migrate elsewhere. One of the largest icebergs ever recorded, a sheet of ice the size of Delaware, recently broken off Antarctica. Scientists are predicting droughts, storms, wildfires, disease; a planet the likes of which we have never seen.
The carbon dioxide warming the Earth has never been higher in recorded history, and yet even the most progressive state in the US regarding the issue responds with tepid solutions to appease the culprits who created this mess.