Climate Action Network: "Climate Hero Award"
Baltimore, Maryland
November 4, 2009
(As Prepared)
It is an honor to join all of you tonight. Congratulations to everyone with the Maryland Student Climate Coalition and the Baltimore Climate Action Network. And to this evening’s Climate Leadership Award recipients, Donald Boesch and Verna Harrison.
To Mike Tidwell and everyone at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, thank you for this tremendous honor, and thank you for the important work you are doing on behalf of the more sustainable future we all prefer.
We could not have passed the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Act nor the Clean Cars Act without your efforts. In times of great adversity for our planet, both these pieces of legislation really continue Maryland’s proud Revolutionary tradition of leading the way – setting an example for other States to rally around.
Stabilizing and reversing Global Climate Change – before it is too late – may very well prove the defining issue of our times. All of us would likely agree that the keys to the survival of our species, and the keys to our security and economic potential will likely rest in our ability to unlock, harness, and advance green technologies; to discover new renewable forms of energy and bring them quickly to scale for ourselves and the world.
It is an issue which is connected to virtually all the great challenges we face as a country – and a planet – in this 21st century world, including the four interlocking challenges of leadership in sustainability, leadership in security, leadership in skills, and leadership of the human spirit.
Climate Change & Maryland
The Climate Change issue is also connected to the big goals we’ve set for our State. With its inherent connection to our quality of life and our security, it’s connected to our ability to strengthen and grow the ranks of an increasingly diverse, upwardly mobile middle class, and to improve public safety.
And because progress toward stabilizing and reversing climate change requires a new era of innovation, it is connected as well to our goals for improving public education in every part of our State.
What’s more, in a 21st world in which the emerging green economy is the next great frontier, climate change is connected as well to our goals for expanding opportunity. Our Climate Change bill alone is projected by the International Center for Sustainable Development to bring as many as 326,000 green collar jobs to Maryland in the next two decades, and generate as much as $2 billion in economic activity.
And climate change is connected as well to our goals for protecting the health of our people and, of course our environment. The health of our planet is by it’s very definition a public health emergency, isn’t it?
We all know the stakes for our planet and our State. In Maryland we’re losing 580 acres per year to shoreline erosion. Our Chesapeake region is considered the third most vulnerable to sea level rise in America. Thirteen charted Chesapeake Bay islands have already disappeared, and the National Wildlife Foundation estimates that by the end of the Century our region could lose 69% of our estuarine beaches and 58% of our ocean beaches.
As the social entrepreneur Paul Hawken puts it, “This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don't poison the water, soil, or air, and don't let the earth get overcrowded, and don't touch the thermostat have been broken.”
And yet, for all the legitimate reasons for pessimism, there are also great reasons for optimism. We live in remarkable times; times when our own creativity and imagination have expanded the outer bounds of human achievement and potential as never before, and by exponents never imagined,..
… Times when the public has started to embrace the urgency of this issue and the solutions it will take to heal our planet.
The public “gets it,” and together with the people of our State, we’ve been able to achieve some important progress here in Maryland these past three years,…
- Passing the clean cars legislation I mentioned earlier and creating incentives for homeowners and businesses to utilize green energy;
- Setting some of the most ambitious goals in America for reducing greenhouse emissions and energy consumption;
- Increasing our renewable portfolio standard and setting goals for creating 100,000 green jobs;
- Leading the nation in the ways we strategically target our Recovery & Reinvestment dollars, particularly those geared toward growing our green economy;
- And leading the charge for the nation’s first cap-and-trade auctions of greenhouse gases. Auctions which have netted our State $85 million for green initiatives.
Conclusion
I leave you tonight with some words written more than a century ago by the Russian playwright Anton Checkoff, from his play Uncle Vanya:
“Man is endowed with reason and the power to create,… but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day… But when I pass peasant-forests that I have preserved from the axe, or hear the rustling of the young plantations set out with my own hands, I feel as if I had some small share in improving the climate, and that if mankind is happy a thousand years from now, I will have been a little responsible for their happiness.”
While the specific threats to our planet are new, the challenges we face are, in many ways, timeless. And so too are the solutions.
The vast majority of all human thought, progress, and science has for 300 years been reductionist in nature. It has been driven by a fundamentally Western belief that nature is to be harnessed, dominated, brought to heal and serve our material appetites – however large or gluttonous. But the drive for "Sustainability" in all its forms – land, air, water, renewable energy, green design – is not reductionist, it is holistic. It seeks to integrate the many small parts into a larger picture, a greater, more balanced and complete whole.
Like most human progress, our ability to stabilize and reverse global climate change rests in our ability to embrace our connections,… in the higher notion that we are all in this together. And, as Hawken puts it, “if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth,… and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”
Thank you.
