This blog post is adapted from an OpEd that ran in the December 7th Virginia Pilot, a daily paper serving Hampton Roads. Glen Besa, Virginia Chapter director of the Sierra Club, lives and works in Richmond. He is attending the U.N. Climate Conference in Lima, Peru, as a volunteer and conference observer with the Sierra Club. Like all Club volunteers attending the UN Climate Conference, he has traveled to Lima at his own expense.
I live in Virginia where I work for the Sierra Club Virginia Chapter. Â Much of our chapter's efforts in Virginia are devoted to fighting climate disruption and advocating for clean energy solutions. Â
Addressing climate disruption is especially urgent in Virginia because the metropolitan region of Virginia, known as Hampton Roads - an area along the southeastern coast of the state - is second only to New Orleans in its vulnerability to sea level rise. Of course, that is only thinking in terms of our United States. Other regions of the world are far more vulnerable than even New Orleans.
Imagine yourself on a tropical island paradise out in the ocean. Your imagination may be the only place where you will be able visit that paradise in a few decades, maybe less.
Sadly, sea level rise from climate disruption is quickly making many of these tropical atolls and islands uninhabitable. Even if portions of the islands remain above water, saltwater intrusion is contaminating their drinking water and making their agricultural fields unproductive.
Tuvalo, the Maldives, the Marshall Islands, the Seychelles, and others are disappearing quickly and will not likely be on maps of the future.
As waters continue to rise in Hampton Roads, Virginia, some folks will have to move inland; others will have to go to great expense to adapt. But when you live on one of these islands, there is no inland.
Leaders of these small island nations are already negotiating with continent-based countries to allow their island people to migrate. These island inhabitants will be among the first climate refugees with no place to call home, dependent on the good will of other nations to let their people resettle.
These are the kinds of issues being discussed here in Lima, at the 20th annual meeting of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP).
Small tropical islands are not the source of the vast volumes of carbon pollution destroying their nations and their distinct cultures. Small and politically weak, they rely on only the weight of moral authority to persuade the big polluting nations - like the United States - to reduce carbon pollution and to provide assistance to their people as they are forced to relocate.
Yes, sea level rise is a serious problem in Hampton Roads, New Orleans, in New York City- as we found out when Superstorm Sandy struck - and along much of the U.S. coastlines, but this is just the tip of the melting iceberg that will inundate small islands and other low lying nations, most of whom don’t have the resources to adapt.
Unfortunately, it may be too late to save these islands. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere has cast their fate. But these people's stories should be a lesson to us all that the time to act is now, lest more of us find ourselves climate refugees in a not-too-distant future.
What actions must we take? We can start by pushing our public officials to support the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. But that is only where we start.
Too many of our public officials fancy our ship of state as the Titanic -- unsinkable, immune from the iceberg that is climate change. That has to change.
Sea level rise and other effects of climate disruption will only get worse and more expensive to address if we sail on, oblivious to the fate that awaits our Titanic.
But, there’s still hope. Clean energy technology -- like wind and solar -- is available today to meet our energy needs, and we must aggressively pursue and share these technologies if we are to end our emissions of carbon pollution in the next 20 to 30 years.
-- Glen Besa, Sierra Club Virginia Chapter Director