Last Wednesday, 300 million miles into space, a lander from a satellite docked onto a comet. That same day here on Earth, Republicans in Congress blasted President Barack Obama for pledging to cut emissions that are choking our planet and said they'd do everything in their power to stop the initiative.
So as a planet, we can land a piece of equipment on a moving comet millions of miles away, but we can't find a way to resolve a problem that is happening right here in our own back yard?
I tend to agree with congressional Republicans that China, one of the world's worst polluters, got the best of the deal when Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced they had come to an agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. China actually only agreed to set a target date of 2030 for its growing contribution to world pollution to peak. Obama, meanwhile, said the U.S. will reduce 2025 emissions by 26 to 28 percent from what they were in 2005. In other words China will still be growing its pollution output as the U.S. strives to cut pollution by about a quarter by 2025.
That doesn't sound too fair.
Still, environmentalists were generally happy, even if somewhat reserved because they still think we aren't doing enough quick enough to cut pollution. But I put the story and controversy next to the one about the Rosetta mission and I had to wonder how we can be so innovative on the one hand, and so thoroughly hamstrung on the other.
It took 10 years for the Rosetta mission to make history last week. Launched in March, 2004, Rosetta circled the Earth three times and passed around Mars once before aligning with the comet's orbit and setting up last week's historic landing. During one period, Rosetta flew too far away from the sun to pick up any energy from its solar panels and it went into hibernation.
Ten years. The fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has been going on far longer, and we have seen far less in tangible results.
In terms of complexity, I put the Philae landing up there with the U.S. first putting a man on the moon. The intricacies of the Rosetta project have been well-documented since the landing, but I think they would have gotten more popularity and excitement from the general public if they had given the comet a different name, even just for the project, so that it would go along with Rosetta and Philae. As it stands, it is hard to get excited about landing on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Still, in terms of accomplishments this is a shining example of what can be achieved when some of the world's great minds put their heads together and set their sights on something. Imagine what would happen if the greatest minds from around the world came together to find a better way to live right here on Earth.
Push back from reducing greenhouse gases comes mainly from entrenched industries that would lose everything if the world moved to cleaner energy sources. Adding to that, however, is the costs that come with such a move. We want alternatives, but we don't want to pay more. The combination of factors means that any transition away from high polluting energy sources is only going to occur over a long period of time, and long periods of time translate into lots of fluctuations depending upon the leadership in countries around the world.
China's president may have felt confident throwing a bone to Obama saying yeah, his country would look to peak out on pollution 15 years from now. But the fact is that one of the worst polluting nations on the planet is going to continue to add more to its total for quite a while. Perhaps he's betting on cheaper alternatives coming online in the coming years that will make it easier for China to transition to less polluting methods.
Even if you factor in all the planning years that passed from the time the Rosetta project was first thought of to the actual landing on the comet last week, it is still illustrative of what can be accomplished with clear goals and a defined path for achieving them.
That's the type of long-range planning and execution that we need to resolve some of the issues facing us today. It's time to revive that old "We can send a man to the moon, but we can't …" phrase, and change the "can't" to "can." Imagine the possibilities if that were to happen.
Jim Lee is the Carroll County Times' Editor. Email him at jim.lee@carrollcountytimes.com.
