There are a staggering number of people who insist that we commit the world economy to the fight against anthropogenic climate change. But that crisis pales in comparison to our debt crisis.

There are a staggering number of people who insist that we commit the world economy to the fight against anthropogenic climate change. They claim that we’re at the threshold of a greenhouse gas crisis, which will cause runaway planetary heating unless emergency actions are taken now. But that crisis pales in comparison to our debt crisis. Despite claims to the contrary, climate science is far from “settled.” But even if the folks flying to Davos every year to complain about our SUVs are 100 percent correct, I’m not worried about the climate, because Congress is going to destroy civilization as we know it, long before bovine flatulence causes the oceans to rise. The famed Michael Mann “hockey stick” is the evidence that the climate change lobby invariably cites as proof that greenhouse gases are killing our planet. His chart shows a slightly downward temperature trend for over a thousand years, followed by a sudden upward bend at around the dawn of the industrial revolution (hence the term “hockey stick” describing the shape of the curve). The theory is that greenhouse gases generated by industrialization are trapping the Earth’s heat, and causing the planet’s surface temperature to rise. It has already gone up a staggering half a degree in the last 100 years! According to this prediction by the Center for Scientific Education, the Earth’s average temperature could rise another 4 degrees by the end of this century. However, I’d like to suggest that there’s another “hockey stick” that’s going to beat us to death, long before our coastal cities sink beneath the rising seas. For the first 200 years of our nation’s existence, our national debt remained relatively modest. But Congress began accelerating their borrowing in the 1980s. Once they got addicted to spending other people’s money, the national debt took a sharp upward bend at the beginning of the 21st century, and has continued the trend ever since, creating the classic “hockey stick” curve shown below. At its current rate of growth, our national debt will reach a staggering 80 trillion dollars by the midpoint of this century. And that’s assuming the curve doesn’t take another upward turn to pay for a war, stimulus package, pandemic, or bailout (and there are several states already preparing their bailout requests). Considering how hard it was for Congress to rescind a paltry $9.4B this year, there’s no reason to expect our paid public servants to recover from their tax/spend/borrow addiction anytime soon. If anything, that projection is optimistic, and it has real world consequences. So, how does our exploding debt compare to our planet’s rising temperature? Let’s compare the climate and debt “hockey sticks”? This illustration is a plot of our projected temperature rise as a percentage of our current average temperature, with a graph of our projected debt increase as a percentage of our current GDP superimposed.  Which of those two “hockey sticks” is scarier? If the worst-case climate projections are correct, our average global temperature may increase by 25 percent by 2080, giving us the environmental disaster of Greenland becoming green again. But if our debt continues to grow at its current rate, our civilization will collapse long before that. Congress is running out of other people’s money much faster than internal combustion engines are filling the atmosphere with carbon emissions.  My granddaughter was born in 2010. If our debt continues to grow at its current rate, she will reach retirement age in an America where: * Loans are in default, * The dollar is worthless, * All savings has been wiped out, * Trade is done by barter, * The infrastructure has failed, * Employment opportunities are scarce, * There is no such thing as retirement, * Tax revenue is nonexistent, and * Social order is nonexistent. We need to rethink how we do crisis management, because we’re currently treating the patient’s cholesterol (1/2-degree temperature rise over the past century) while we ignore an arterial bleed ($2T per year financial hemorrhage).  America will not be able to respond to any crisis late in this century if we don’t survive the next 4 decades. It’s time we exercised some common-sense triage. Our federal government does not have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. Without changing how we think about government, we won’t be able to address any emergency in the future – climate or otherwise.   Addicts will never choose to make their drug of choice unavailable, and our spendaholics in Congress will never choose to give up their power to spend our money. This crisis will only be fixed when the states reassert control over the federal government, via an Article V convention to propose an amendment for fiscal restraint.