Is Global Warming a Distraction?

For the past few days, my supervisor has been very preoccupied and I have been left without any real assignment to work on. Instead, I have taken it upon myself to spend the time wisely by editing papers for my mom, reading up on news, and also writing down my ideas. I have been thinking about Global Warming for a while, and finally put it into words this afternoon. Thank you lazy internship (but seriously, give me something to do!)!
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If the environmental movement could be characterized by fashions and fads, Global Warming would be today’s defining trend. It seems no matter where you look, every environmental action is eventually reduced to a carbon count, a tag line about sea level rise, or some general relevancy to one of the many freakish symptoms of Global Warming.

As someone who friends point to as the ‘environmentalist’, my having a qualm with Global Warming should come as no surprise. However, my qualm is not regarding the usual laundry list of disastrous consequences that Global Warming might bring about. On the contrary, I think Global Warming is taking up too much attention.

As the super star of the environmental show, Global Warming shadows other problems and undermines the extent to which world leaders, policy makers, NGOs, and even environmentalists pay attention to other pressing environmental concerns. After all, with a problem as gargantuan as Global Warming lingering on our horizon, how can we have any energy to expend for those minor local issues?

My experience interning at the Regional Environmental Center in Istanbul, Turkey has reaffirmed my belief that Global Warming is being challenged at the expense of local environmental problems.

My first impression of Istanbul was the dreadful water quality. To avoid water-borne diseases, everyone drinks bottled water, and two of the Yale interns brush their teeth with bottled water. Interestingly, REC, despite being probably the only environmental organization around, does nothing with Istanbul’s glaring water degradation. However, it does have a plethora of resources devoted to combating Global Warming, including a webinar series for educating businesses, employees and managers who fly internationally to be trained in Sustainability and Global Warming, and projects for evaluating how Global warming affects fish and wildlife in the Black Sea.

Similar narratives are repeated everywhere. Recently in the US, the 2008 Kids Safe Chemical Act, a bill intended to set chemical safety standards to levels that give consideration to the most vulnerable—children--failed to make it out of the committee primarily because it could not successfully compete against giants like health care reform and climate change for the scarce attention of Congress. With the American Energy Act in the Senate promising to set a price for carbon, other environmental regulations will have to wait on the backburner.

While we have ample reasons to be wary of climate change and the dreadful natural phenomena and irreversible effects it portends, we must realize that the same irreversible and ruinous consequences can also be said of other environmental degradations. For example America’s largest aquifer, the Ogallala, is being depleted at 10 times the natural rate of recharge, threatening the economic livelihood of farmers producing 1/3 of the nation’s food supply. Around the world, freshwater is being consumed at a rate that will make battles over scarce water sources the petroleum wars of the future; however, world leaders have never held anything remotely close to COP 15 in regards to water pollution and depletion.

Historically, humans have proven themselves adaptable to climate change, but again and again, civilizations have collapsed when people are without safe drinking water. It is my hope that our focus on Global Warming will not distract us from other pressing concerns that are equally deserving of our attention.