Sun can dive deeper into climate change impact

Thank you for your recent editorial, “The clock is ticking on climate change” (March 6), providing persuasive reasons Marylanders need to be at the forefront of this issue. It was an excellent follow up to Dan Rodricks’ recent column that set forth the climate change arguments against a third Bay Bridge span (“A third Chesapeake Bay bridge is no road to the future,” Feb. 19).

America’s response to climate change will shape all aspects of human existence for centuries. Yet the scale of the problem and its insidious gradual onset make climate change hard to confront. According to Mr. Rodricks, 70 percent of Americans tell pollsters climate change is real and already affects them. But most voters place the issue only fourth or fifth on their list of priorities. For a problem whose solution demands massive effort, this is nowhere. Because effective action may lead to important changes in our way of life — some positive, some negative — and because climate change is a slow moving crisis, most voters express modest concern to pollsters and then return to business as usual.

Most media reporting invites our disengagement by separating climate change from coverage of economics, politics, urban and rural issues, culture, human rights and foreign policy. Climate change is so entangled with many topics that they cannot be intelligently discussed without asking, “What is the impact of climate change on this subject, and what can be done in this case to mitigate climate change?” For example, current analyses of economic issues typically cite GDP, unemployment, consumer confidence, the Federal Reserve, and international trade without addressing the interaction of our economy with climate change. This is about as useful as a 1942 economic report that made no reference to World War II.

That is why Mr. Rodricks’ piece on a new Bay Bridge was heartening; it brought to the foreground salient climate change questions not commonly considered relevant to discussions of economic, transportation and infrastructure issues. It is hard to imagine a better use of The Sun’s journalistic resources than to consistently present a penetrating look at what our world would look like both with — and without — an all-out effort to end climate change. This goes to the heart of journalism’s function in a democracy.

Marylanders deserve the information necessary for a robust debate over whether or not climate change merits meaningful action in our state. The Sun has a chance to facilitate that debate.

Peter C. Dwyer, Baltimore