Originally posted at
My Left Wing
A wave is coming. A big wave, one that may well revolutionize politics. Already it has transformed the political landscape and made virtually all else come to a standstill. It is the October Surprise of this young Century.
And it's not being covered at all here in the US.
The wave is the Stern Report, the bombshell study that was released in Britain today. The report prognosticates that global climate change, already well under way, may cost the globe nearly $10 trillion - a catastrophe on par with the Great Depression or World War II, cataclysms that wrecked tens of millions of lives and radically reshaped the 20th century.
The Stern Report was commissioned by Gordon Brown, the Labour Prime Minister-in-waiting, currently the Chancellor of the Exchequer. With Sir Nicholas Stern, former Chief Economist of the World Bank helming the study, credibility was lent to the marriage of climate science and global economics.
The conclusions are simple, and staggering. Global climate change, initiated by human industrial activity which has warmed the planet, will lead to major changes in weather patterns, disrupting everything from agriculture to fishing to electricity generation, having an enormous ripple effect on global society and economics.
The fact that this is an economic report is key. It makes plain the common sense value of tackling global climate change NOW. Spending money now is far cheaper than facing the $10 trillion price tag - an unimaginable number - and it has the chance to head off disaster and preserve the economic growth that opponents of doing something about this issue claim to wish to preserve.
But I'm not here to talk about the details of the study, I'm no climatologist, and the only economics I know are whatever I need to be a good historian. No, what really strikes me about the Stern Report is how seminal a document and a moment it is, and how it is upending the British political scene - and how, properly mobilized, it can do the same here.
As the Guardian notes:
Over the past 18 months, in Britain and beyond, global warming has become as ubiquitous an issue as any green activist could dream of... anxiety about climate change has taken hold in places that decades of other green campaigns failed to penetrate. In a British opinion poll conducted by Ipsos Mori this September, global warming was ranked "the most serious threat to the future wellbeing of the world", beating terrorism and war by almost two to one.
Labour, whose fortunes in the polls are sinking fast, has seized upon global climate change as an issue with which it can restore its electability by presenting to the public the credibility to do something about it - credibility that the free-market, Thatcherite Conservatives lack.
And yet we do not need to look to Britain to see the immense political power of a strong stand on climate change. The key turning point in Bush's presidency, the moment when Republican fortunes began to collapse, was Hurricane Katrina. And Arnold Schwarzenegger, who not 11 months ago saw his political future look very bleak, used the issue to vaunt back into prominence, sealing his supposedly moderate credentials with enough Democratic voters to deny us the California governorship. In both cases, the political turnaround was remarkable.
Some of you may be wondering, then, what place this diary, about a report that is rocking the British establishment, has on dKos so near to the election. I hope the above paragraph has made this obvious. Only the Democratic Party has the credibility with the American public to lead on climate change. On one of the defining issues of our time, we can turn what is right now a tentative wave into something much more dramatic, a much more far reaching remaking of the political landscape. If the issue undid the entire Bush presidency, and saved Arnold Schwarzenegger's Austrian ass, then it can help us retake both houses of Congress.
It's very simple: Americans believe something needs to be done about global climate change, and we're the best folks to do it.
It's hard to say whether the Democrats will embrace this between now and November 7. But neither is it necessary for them to do so. We can do it for them. We can talk to undecided voters and say "who do you trust to lead on climate change? To protect our future? To invest wisely to prevent catastrophe?"
But for that to happen, we need to publicize the Stern Report. Nobody, none of the major newspapers or networks, even have a link to it on their websites. If we spent just a moment e-mailing the networks and papers to insist it get greater coverage - a moment that will not detract from other campaigning - then we get the report and the issue back into the public consciousness, allowing us to speak more easily to undecided voters.
Bush wants a "cataclysmic fight to the death." Instead, let's give them a cataclysmic fight for our very futures.