When it comes to doing right by our planet, I am a perennial optimist. In 1971, inspired by the first Earth Day a year earlier, I started the John J. Audubon Nature Society at my elementary school. As a young reporter in the 1980s, I organized my newsroom to start recycling. In 2007, I took my 12-year-old daughter to hear Al Gore. And in 2012, I signed on to work for a nonprofit that organizes religious people to address climate change. Turns out they really needed a fundraiser and a data base wrangler, not a communications pro, so we parted ways after a year–but amid the ongoing politicization of climate science, I was inspired to learn how people from many faith traditions saw protecting the planet as a moral calling.
I am also a realist, which is why General Motors’ announcement that it will stop making gas-powered cars by 2035 strikes me as a very big deal. President Biden has already reversed many of his predecessor’s anti-environmental moves, which Donald Trump had in turn reversed from the Obama era. But GM knows it prefers certainty over the regulatory roulette of policy by executive order, so the automaker isn’t waiting for government to tell it what to do: It’s proactively committing itself to electric cars. It’s a bold and important move for a legacy American company, especially since transportation is the number one source of carbon emissions in the United States.
The year 2035 also is the Biden team’s target for zero fossil fuel emissions from power plants, which are the second largest source of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, after transportation. As climate reporter Coral Davenport said on “The Daily” from The New York Times this week, this benchmark, coupled with another Biden goal to eliminate all carbon from the U.S. economy by 2050, “is also exactly in line with what scientists say is required to avoid the most devastating effects of a warming planet.” We all know that those effects—severe storms, fires, drought, and rising seas—have already begun, and they’re not going away. Rather, this is about keeping the planet safe for people to inhabit at all.
American business and the new administration agree: It’s time to think big. Think about how, within 14 years, we could slash pollution as big transportation companies go electric and our electric plants go renewable. It would mean good new jobs for the folks who used to work in the oil, coal, and gas industries. It would mean America leading the world in a cause that really matters. Yet 14 years is not a long time at all. It’s been 14 years since I took my kid to hear Al Gore say that yes, the country that ended slavery, gave women the right to vote, fought World War II on two fronts, beat communism, beat apartheid, fought for civil rights, and went to the moon could win over global warming.
We all used to talk about 2020 vision, and we all know how that worked out. Now, 2035 vision appears to be in sight. It’s not as catchy as 2020 vision, but if we can stick to these timetables—if we refrain from moving the goalposts yet again—we have a decent chance to halt the ultimate pandemic.
Click here to hear “The Daily” on Biden’s climate plan and here to read my account of Al Gore at Boise State in 2007. Thank you for reading Surely Joy!