Ban offshore oil drilling, ramp up renewable energy to save our oceans — and ourselves | Opinion

Catastrophic climate events are ramping up every year, in large part because of all that carbon dioxide we’re releasing and how it interacts with the atmosphere and our ocean. Today, there’s more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than has ever been recorded in human history. Much of that carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean, making it more acidic and killing corals and other marine life in the process.

Carbon dioxide, along with other greenhouse gases, also traps heat from the sun. This heat warms not just the air but also the water in the ocean. This extra heat fuels tropical storms and hurricanes. Warmer air holds more water — think about those super-hot, humid summer days. Heated air, literally, is lifting the water, and storms carry it across the ocean before dumping it onto our coastal communities.

The continued burning of fossil fuels not only is a huge danger to our oceans; it is also bringing the ocean to our doorstep — and that’s not a good thing.

Hurricanes and other storms are forming earlier and getting stronger. For example, a named storm formed in the Atlantic before the season officially started this year; the same thing happened six years earlier. If nothing changes, this will happen more frequently.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration already has predicted a stronger-than-average hurricane season for 2021 — this just a year after 2020’s record-breaking season. Thirty named storms formed in the Atlantic, which set a new record. Five named storms made landfall in Louisiana, the most on record for any state in one year. And six hurricanes made landfall in the United States, a tie for the most hurricanes in a single season. The prediction for this year is bad news for many coastal communities still recovering from 2020 storms.

And it’s not just hurricanes.

Last year, the United States experienced 22 weather and climate disasters, each with losses exceeding $1 billion. Of those, 13 were multibillion-dollar disasters. No previous year has come close. Also, 2020 was the most active wildfire year on record. Nearly 10.3 million acres were consumed, exceeding the previous decade’s average by more than 50 percent. In addition, 2020 brought us the fourth-hottest summer on record. Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah each had their hottest August ever recorded.

It’s time we recognize that the climate disaster is here, in our back yards. It’s not just a faraway problem for low-lying island nations. It’s causing death, loss and suffering in our communities and among families and friends. It’s bringing the ocean to our front doors, into basements and living rooms. It’s destroying homes and lives in too many parts of the United States.

This June, as we celebrate World Ocean Month, we cannot forget that our fate and the oceans’ fate are linked. So much needs to be done — and done fast — to make the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. There are three obvious and important first steps our government can take:

▪ Immediately and permanently ban new offshore oil and gas drilling in U.S. waters. This would prevent more than 19 billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions, the equivalent to taking every car in the nation off the road for 15 years. This would also prevent more than $720 billion in damages to people, property and the environment. Clean energy can step in to take its place.

▪ Stop paying oil companies to fuel this devastation. According to a 2020 report from Oil Change International, the U.S. government spent an average of $7.6 billion per year from 2017 to 2019 supporting the fossil-fuel industry through tax breaks, direct payments and public finance.

▪ Use that money instead to drastically ramp up renewables, like offshore wind, which will help us shift to a carbon-free future and is expected to create and support tens of thousands of jobs within the next decade.

Climate change is disrupting our lives, sometimes in devastating ways. We don’t need to keep adding fuel to the fire. President Biden recognizes climate change as an existential threat, and he’s taken some promising steps to address it. He should continue to treat this crisis with the urgency it deserves.

Jacqueline Savitz is chief policy officer for Oceana, the largest international advocacy organization dedicated solely to ocean conservation.