The great French writer Victor Hugo said that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. I believe that the inverse is also true—that there’s nothing more destructive than an idea whose time has come and gone, but which people refuse to give up. The climate change debate is full of these: climate change is not a big problem; human activity is not the main cause of it; and reversing it would require prohibitive constraints on economic growth.
These statements aren’t true, but they continue to have a firm hold on millions of people.
For decades now, we’ve watched the evidence pile up that the planet is warming at an alarming rate, and that human activities and unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions are the primary causes. Temperatures are rising, ice caps are melting, species are disappearing, and weather patterns are growing more severe and unpredictable. And with each passing day, the entire system that we take for granted gets a little closer to the point of collapse.
We’ve also learned that when we take shared responsibility for the ecological challenges we face, our unsustainable habits can be corrected without sacrificing economic growth. For example, the successful efforts to reduce chemical pollution following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and those that mitigated the threats of acid rain and ozone depletion, or improved water and air quality, all demonstrated that sustainable economies can increase broad-based prosperity.