A deeply embarrasing public apology

It is a risky business to apologize to your daughter via a newspaper column. First, of all, she is likely to find it embarrassing. To be honest, since she was about 11, my daughter has found any public acknowledgement of the fact that I was her father to be more or less unbearable. I was even required since about pre-K to turn off the radio when we drove into the carpool lane at school so that no one would be tempted to look into the car and see human evidence that she didn’t actually live alone, on her own in a Beanie Baby-filled duplex somewhere. (This may also have  had something to do with my taste in music … although come to think of it, I haven’t been allowed to choose the songs we played on the car radio since Joanna could talk.)

Joanna, of course, is her name. She is the one I am apologizing to.

But what I want to apologize for is something slightly more serious. Jo, I’m afraid I blew it. We blew it. I’m afraid we’ve let you down even more unhappily then when I tripped while carrying you on my shoulders a couple weeks before your fifth birthday. (And you know I’ve never gotten over that.) We got distracted while trying to make sure that you and your sister had enough dresses to wear to all those bar and bat mitzvahs and, because it wasn’t all selflessness, I’ve got to admit that some of the distractions were due to our own efforts to get ahead in life, you know, working to build up the number of hits our names would generate when entered on Google (which is the only true metric of the impact we make in our lives, right?)

And the cost of letting ourselves get distracted was somewhat more egregious than the cost of my parents not really paying much attention to me after my baby sister was born. I mean, I was emotionally scarred and ended up being a little needy. That’s not good. But the cost of our screw-up was destroying the entire planet Earth.

Which is serious, even if you are not a polar bear. (I don’t mean to make light. There is nothing funny about a drowning polar bear. Unless you’re a seal.)

Now, I know what you’re thinking, Jo. You’re thinking I’m trying to overstate this for dramatic effect.  But here are the facts (which I acknowledge you and most of your fellow students already know): virtually every credible scientist who has studied the problem has concluded that spiking CO2 content in the atmosphere is contributing climatic anomalies that are going to have very serious consequences. We can debate whether global warming is plateauing or even whether it is cyclical. But there is no denying that Arctic ice caps are shrinking vastly more rapidly than any projections made even as recently as a few years ago and similar problems are taking a toll in precious and fragile locations like the glaciers high up in the Himalayas.

Three rivers flow from those heights — the Ganges, the Mekong (along which you once cruised) and the Yangtze. Something like three billion people depend on those waters and should their flows be impeded, should their levels fall, it would be a social, economic, humanitarian and security catastrophe. There are credible estimates that temperature rise of three degrees in this century could result in the dislocation of over 700 million people. This makes it a potential historical turning point for humankind and a challenge on a scale exceeding all those that have ever come before.

Now, I know you are saying, “yes, I know.  I go to Middlebury. We’re greener than Kermit the Frog. We get it.” And I know that two-thirds of Americans under 30 agree this is a critical priority. But less than half of Americans over 50 get it (regrettably, I am part of this group, which is pretty much past our “sell by” date). And here in Washington, well, no one gets much. I follow this stuff for a living and I have to tell you right now it looks pretty bleak that the U.S. government is going to do what it must to seriously address this issue.

I once ran a political campaign’s policy operation and when I told the candidate that perhaps the single most important thing he could do was embrace the idea of a gasoline tax or a carbon tax, he literally blanched. Then he changed the subject. Now, he is among those likely to block cap and trade legislation in the current Congress, and he’s one of the alleged good guys, a Democrat. Heck, the President himself, who ran on promises of doing something about this, looks like he is going to backtrack from a demand that we set emissions limits or put a price on carbon and what’s the result going to be? Stalling progress on the rest of the world doing anything about it, that’s what.  When the world meets in Copenhagen, we’ll end up with a pale face-saving deal that essentially punts these decisions down the road.

Now you hear talk about trying to slow emissions without setting limits or putting a real price on carbon. And frankly, while that is certainly better than doing nothing (China just released a state-sponsored study suggesting they should reduce emissions four to five percent a year through 2050; they are more forward-leaning on some of these issues than we are) it’s not going to do the trick.

Without these measures, carbon levels will rise and then water levels will rise and the climate will shift and other than those who like the idea of summer sailing at the North Pole, it’s not going to be a happy time.

So, what do you get besides an apology? Well, advice, of course. I’m a parent, I can’t help it.  My generation has failed to meet its responsibilities.  But your generation gets it. To me, the only way this issue resonates in Washington is if people start figuring it in their political cost-benefit analysis. Someone needs to send the message that millions of voters between 18 and 35 consider action on this issue to be a litmus test. They need to make it hurt to do nothing. They need to make platitudes and pork unacceptable alternatives.  They need to say, “fix it or we will change the game right now” and right now, the message we are getting is just not loud enough. It’s too soft.  The crowds are too small. The political efforts are too much at the margins. No politician in America thinks they will lose their job if they get this wrong. They need to know different, to be proven different.

It is embarrassing for a parent to turn to a child to ask for help, especially if the reason is his own failure and that of his fellow parents. But trust me, you will someday have children (not too soon, please) and when you love them as much as your parents love you, you will not forgive yourself for having failed to rise to this challenge. I know you can do it. I mean you got us to let you have your own car up there in Middlebury, and Lord knows we hated that idea even as we were somehow made to do it. That’s power. Multiply that by 50 million or so and that’s the power of America aged 18-35.

Gandhi is alleged to have said that “when the people lead, the leaders will follow.” While this may be true, and who am I to quibble with Gandhi, over the course of my life, you have proven to me that it is even more clear that when the children lead, the parents will follow. We may pretend at the time like we are doing the leading.  But in this case, as in so many others (see the car comment above), we know the truth, right?