Can We Really Fix Our Environment?

As the nations of the world come together in Paris to make a belated effort to protect our planet it is worthwhile asking whether or not this is possible. As I noted in an earlier post, I have been around the environmental movement since its very origin in the United States in the 1970's. At that time I thought that this awakening as interesting, but I also wondered why a chemist from the chemical industry was being invited to a meeting on protecting the environment that apepared aimed more at achieving political action than a biochemical solution.

I wondered 'do these people know what they are doing?' In some ways they have proved me wrong because they appear to have understood the value of political action. At another level, however, they did not appear to have a real plan for dealing with the chemistry of climate change. We knew human beings were changing the chemical composition of our atmosphere and we are absolutely certain about that today, but all the hollering in the world wasn't going to reverse the man-made changes to the atmosphere. Human beings needed a source of energy to perpetuate their material development. Fossil fuels appeared to be the only option. Nuclear energy was on the horizon, but had not yet arrived. Even today, and recognizing the dangers and problems of waste disposal, I think nuclear energy has to be part of our reaction to climate change. I know this statement is not very popular today, but it emphasizes the point that we need to think of concrete scientific solutions to climate change.

Science can also contribute to establishing some ground-rules for political action. The American Chemical Society has stated that "However, comprehensive scientific assessments of our current and potential future climates clearly indicate that climate change is real, largely attributable to emissions from human activities, and potentially a very serious problem."1 This statement is also found in article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.2 In other words, we have determined that the scientific finding that human beings can influence our planet's climate is a not only a scientific finding, but also a legal parameter to which governments are bound by an international agreement.

Moving forward in forums like the Paris climate talks will require that the political actors take into account the science that must guide what they are doing. They must focus their attention on the limits science imposes on human action and the action that this science requires. At the same time we need to nurture a new generation of scientists, including chemists, who can work with expertise with the parameters of their discipline and those set by the political dialogue being waged around them to come up with scientifically sound solutions to the human problem we call climate change.

I am not sure we can accomplish this, but I sure hope so.