Editor's Note

Over the Limit

by Brian K. Mahoney, September 25, 2009

Way back when, in 1988, the world seemed a simpler place. Guns N’ Roses topped the charts with “Sweet Child ‘O Mine.” The Soviets, our archenemies, withdrew from Afghanistan in flaming defeat. We elected Dan Quayle vice president. (Partly due, no doubt, to the ringing endorsement of future presidential candidate John McCain, who commented at the time, “I can’t believe a guy that handsome wouldn’t have some impact.”) International terrorism took the form of putting bombs on planes, as in the Pan Am flight that exploded over Lockerbie, not using planes as missiles.

Then something happened in 1988 that forever complicated our world. A loss of innocence as clear as the smashed conch in Lord of the Flies, though I doubt anyone reading this knew it at the time. In the hot summer of 1988 (I recall, working as a bicycle messenger in Manhattan, a whole week topping 100 degrees) a NASA scientist named James Hansen gave testimony to Congress that carbon emissions were heating the earth. No doubt about it, the problem was our fossil fuel-burning ways.

We’ve spent 20 years debating this point—Is our industrial-based lifestyle really to blame for global warming?—with various smokescreens and diversions thrown up by scientists bought and paid for by petrochemical companies. But that needless argument seems to have been mostly won by the forces of logic and good science. Now, policy makers joust about what are the best solutions to our addiction to carbon. Michael Grunwald, Time magazine’s senior national correspondent, sheds some light on the subject in “Seven Myths About Alternative Energy” .

Even energy companies are now acknowledging that climate change is real. In late September, Pacific Gas & Electric, a large utility company in Northern California, dropped out of the US Chamber of Commerce for what it described as the Chamber’s “extreme position” on climate change. (The Chamber has been one of the biggest opponents of climate change legislation, claiming that regulations would strangle the economy. Bill Kovacs, senior vice president of the Chamber, has also suggested that the Obama administration is secretly hiding evidence that climate change isn’t a real threat.)