Opinion: Once again, the U.S. embarrasses itself on climate change
Ice breaks up along the Kuskokwim River in Alaska on April 12. By Joel Clement May 6 at 3:13 PM Joel Clement, the former director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the Interior Department from 2011 to 2017, is a senior fellow at the Harvard Belfer Center Arctic Initiative and a senior fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists Center for Science and Democracy.
This isn’t the first time this episode has played out. I bore witness to the administration’s self-inflicted embarrassment two years ago while working at the Interior Department. Then, as now, the leader of the free world stood thoroughly diminished while other nations and the people most affected by the climate crisis were forced to face the consequences.
It didn’t end there. Once negotiators finalized the declaration, another wave of climate-change insecurity beset the martinets at the White House, and they told then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to demand additional changes just days before the signing ceremony in Fairbanks, Alaska. Those changes? Eliminating or changing language about — you guessed it — climate change and the Paris agreement.
The indigenous peoples of the Arctic, like the Pacific island states who face inundation from the rise of sea levels, live squarely in the path of dramatic climate impacts. Vulnerable coastal villages in Alaska face the twin threats of vicious storms and coastal erosion as protective sea ice shrinks and permafrost thaws beneath their feet. In a place where store-bought food is expensive and sometimes scarce, subsistence hunters in some areas can no longer safely travel and hunt on thick sea ice.
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