April 22 Marks the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day.

April 22 Marks the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day.

Climate change became an unquestionable environmental challenge in the last two decades in every continent and effects all life on Earth. We are seeing significant changes to the earth’s climate and there are no borders or walls that we can put up to stop its impact. We must all work together to reverse these changes. No one country, no one state, no one city and no one person can create the changes that are needed. We need to come together with the same aggressive approach that the world used to attack the corona virus.

The seeds that created Earth Day

On January 28, 1969, a well drilled by a Union Oil Platform off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, blew out. More than three million gallons of oil spewed, killing more than 10,000 seabirds, dolphins, seals, and sea lions. The other landmark environmental disruption took place on the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. The river was the dumping ground for the chemical industry that lined the river with no pollution controls in place. On June 22, 1969 a fire triggered by a spark from a passing rail car ignited an oil slick on the river. The fire brought reporters to the river to raise attention to the pollution of rivers. As a reaction to these disasters, activists and political leaders came together to mobilized and create environmental regulation and education— these were the seeds that grew into the first Earth Day.

There are many that think that they would be immune to global crises like climate change. The corona virus has changed that in a way that no one would have predicted. The impact of the corona virus has changed the minds of many in the government, in businesses large or small and every other organization in the world. When the virus hit in China it quickly spread globally with no ability to stop the spread. Global challenges require systemic changes — changes that can only be driven by government and the business communities. But they also require individual behavioral changes. We need both. We have seen over the past few months that governments can take radical action and we can change our behavior quite quickly. The corona virus may be the inflection point to show us the path to how we all can work together to improve the environment we all live in. The virus has demonstrated how we can work together to solve critical problems across borders. Amid the corona virus pandemic ,everyone is rightly focused on protecting their families’ lives as well as their own and their economic stability, but we need to simultaneously strive to avoid the next crisis. We need to now take the same model and apply it to climate change.

Today we are now seeing significant changes in our climate worldwide. These weather changes are going to require greater significant responses than our generation faced in the past.

The increase in population, and growth in world left unabated, will impact our planet’s ability to cleanse itself. This scenario contributes to a large percentage of carbon dioxide emissions in the world. According to James Hansen, a top scientist on climate issues, said that the current increase in global warming in 2018 is the “ equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per year. That’s how much extra energy Earth is gaining each day.” His new estimate in 2020 is 500,000. “That's 278 atomic bombs worth of energy every minute – more than four per second -- non-stop. That is just the extra energy being gained each day on top of the energy heating our planet by 0.8 degree C. It is the rate at which we are increasing global warming “( James Hansen). Scientists estimate that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius would reduce the odds of initiating the most dangerous and irreversible effects of climate change. Decarbonizing is achievable, but the math and effort will be daunting.

This week, the world marks the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day which helped shape the modern global environmental movement. Activist and scientists worldwide, due to the corona virus, will be prevented from demonstrating publicly to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. They will turn to online events on Thursday and their message should be one of warning and of the need to take systematic action to curb climate change. The World Meteorological Organization, which forecasted that the pandemic would drive down global greenhouse gas emissions by some 6% this year, the biggest yearly decline in planet-warming carbon dioxide since the Second World War. But the group said that that would be nowhere near the reductions needed to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change. More importantly this reduction will only be shot-term due largely to the recent reduction in transportation and the slowdown in industrial energy usage.

The Need for environmental outreach

The question for Waltham’s city leaders is what is the systematic plan with respect to climate change. Time is running out and we can no longer take a siloed approach. How do we reach out to the other communities, businesses which are rich in environmental / sustainability talent and pull together the minds and ideas to build a systematic approach that will benefit all of us: in the same as the corona virus pulled the world together to fight the virus Bob Ferrone