“Lessons adopted” is a much more important concept than “lessons learned.” Lessons adopted requires the learning of lessons, but it also requires a more important and more difficult step – the application of the lessons. As we wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed, the coronavirus pandemic has retaught us a lesson from 9/11 – heed and act on the warnings of experts. One of the key questions for our nation today is whether we will apply this lesson to one of the most dangerous threats we face – climate change.
The United States remains in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some 100,000 Americans have died from the virus, with a potential of hundreds of thousands more to come. Unemployment stands at its highest level since the Great Depression, with the potential to go even higher. All this damage occurred despite multiple warnings from experts over decades that a severe pandemic was a certainty at some point in the future – warnings that generated little to no action to mitigate the risk and to prepare for it if mitigation failed.
On 9/11, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the largest terrorist attack in our country’s history. This, despite multiple warnings from CIA over several years that al-Qaida was coming – warnings punctuated by successful attacks against two US embassies in East Africa and a US warship off the coast of Yemen and an attempted but failed attack on the US homeland during the Millennium. 9/11 is another example of multiple warnings with little action to mitigate the threat.
This pandemic serves as an important reminder of the need to start acting on the warnings of experts because we have been sitting on another set of long-running warnings and doing little to nothing about them – this time with regard to climate change. If we fail to heed these warnings, the potential damage from a warming climate could make 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic look insignificant in comparison. And, unlike both 9/11 and COVID-19, which were and are temporal, the climate crisis will be persistent and in certain regions of the planet, existential.
According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the average global temperature on Earth has increased by a little more than 1° Celsius (2° Fahrenheit) since 1880. Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975, with records showing rapid warming in the past few decades. The last decade has been the warmest.
It is time to accept that human activity, through the release of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, is causing much of this warming. Some 97 percent of all climate scientists and thousands of peer-reviewed research studies underpin this assessment. The CIA, in which we all served, could only dream of having this much consistent, multi-sourced, empirical evidence to underpin its analytic assessments.
Climate change is already having a significant effect on human life and on our economy. Just take extreme weather events, which are growing rapidly. Since 1980, there have been 69 weather disasters with a price tag of over a billion dollars; nearly a quarter of these have occurred in just the last five years. Extreme weather events since 1980 have killed some 13,000 Americans – four times those killed on 9/11 – and the cost to the US economy has been over $1.75 trillion, equivalent to the annual GDP of New York State.
On its current course, the climate will affect the American people in far-reaching ways, from its toll on human health due to extreme heat and spread of disease; agriculture, food security, and water supply due to drought and flooding; transportation and energy disruptions caused by extreme weather, melting permafrost and coastal flooding.
The world is on track for some 3-4°C rise over the next 80 years, a pace that the International Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – an organization that advises governments on the causes and impacts of climate change – notes can contribute to substantial species extinctions, large risks to global and regional food security, more poverty and mass migrations, and an inability to work outside—and even live—in some areas of the world.
We need to act on these warnings – now. We must focus on creating a national climate policy, one that sets targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and permanently removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We need to create a national program that disincentivizes activities that create carbon dioxide and incentivizes efforts to develop greener solutions to, among other industries, energy, transportation, and construction, including rewarding innovative approaches.
We need to lead the world on climate mitigation because the United States cannot solve this on its own and because our future is intertwined with other countries’ climate actions. Right now, the US is not leading. In fact, we are a major obstacle to progress. The 2020 Climate Change Performance Index, a ranking of which of the world's most emission-intensive economies working hardest to protect the climate, for the first time, ranked the United States last among all 61 nations in the index. One place to start in addressing this is for the US to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement.
Climate change mitigation is often seen as a tradeoff between climate and the economy. But we don’t have to sacrifice our economy to deal with climate. We appreciate there will be economic losers from these policies – carbon-based energy companies and workers, for example. But there will be two groups of economic winners: the first, those companies gaining new jobs and opportunities in solar and wind energy, construction that focuses on refitting buildings to green standards, carbon dioxide removal technologies, and manufacturing electric vehicles, among others. The second, companies that would have lost out to the damages of climate change, such as agriculture, fishing and insurance.
The US green economy already employs some 9.5 million people, and it could grow significantly with a sound national policy in place. A 2018 Global Commission on the Economy and Climate study estimated that aggressive action could result in 65 million green jobs globally by 2030.
Climate scientists assess that the international community has 20-30 years to respond before economic damage and humanitarian crises become much more frequent and severe. That sounds like plenty of time until you remember that the Intelligence Community in 2000 predicted a serious global pandemic sometime over the next 20 years.
We can avert a climate disaster, but the longer this takes, the more difficult the challenge will be. We need to get moving by adopting the lessons of 9/11 and the pandemic to our climate policies.
Michael Morell is a former acting director and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Kristin Wood is a former deputy director of innovation and technology at the CIA’s Open Source Center and is Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. Mary McMahon is a former CIA climate analyst and is a Master in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
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