PAY NOW, PAY LATER: THE POLITICAL DILEMMA OF "SEQUENCING" ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE.

• Author: Young, Jesse

In the minds of many liberal reformers, the summer of 1965 was to be one of renewed hope for Black America. Lyndon Johnson, bolstered by landslide congressional majorities from the 1964 election, enacted the most sweeping program of civil rights legislation in the history of the country. The Supreme Court, led by Earl Warren and now with Johnson's former legal Svengali Abe Fortas on the bench, confidently affirmed Congress' broad expansion of civil rights protections in decisions like South Carolina v. Katzenbach. After more than a century of unkept promises, Black Americans finally had a federal government more committed to the promotion of their liberties.

And still, America's cities burned.

The rioting and fires that paralyzed the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in August 1965 were not the first such events of the 1960s, but they were some of the most shocking for many White Americans. Accelerating throughout the rest of the decade and peaking in 1968, rioting, fires, and civil unrest wracked African American neighborhoods all across the country. (1) While many reactionary commentators blamed ill-defined "black anger" as the source of the destruction, we now recognize that it was the fury of unmet expectations that helped set the torch to many cities. "Legislative successes at the federal level with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were not reflected in the daily lives of African-Americans facing police misconduct, economic inequality, segregated housing, and inferior educations," noted William S. Pretzer, a senior curator for history at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. (2) Despite major civil rights legislation being written "into the books of law," most Black Americans led lives that were largely unchanged. (3) By 1965, their horizons appeared no brighter than they had been in 1955, or in 1945. That vast gulf between the triumphal rhetoric of federal civil rights legislation and the unaltered indignities of daily life could be measured in burning buildings.

Big change often takes time. The history of the United States is replete with testaments to the fact that foundational reforms sometimes move at a glacial pace. To rephrase Dr. King: while the arc of history may eventually bend towards justice, it is still long. The civil rights movement claimed great legislative and judicial victories in the 1960s that took decades to bear real fruit--and many of their goals remain elusive even today.

Looking back at history, 1965 offers a possible lesson for 2023. As we tackle climate change, a global existential threat of our own making, we need to shed our illusions about what is needed to fix it. When it comes to structural change, there is a time lag between crafting solutions and actually feeling their impact. Nowhere is this more acute than with climate policy, where the full benefits that come with action may not be felt for decades.

Climate change presents the greatest social and economic challenge that the world has ever faced. The long-settled science behind global warming has demonstrated--with ever-increasing detail--the myriad ways in which man-made pollution threatens our lives and livelihoods. (4) We also know the policy measures needed to meet the challenge, and the vast measure of political will required to translate them into reality.

I've spent my career in government and civil society working in and around this complex problem, attempting to translate the moral urgency of climate change into real action. In that time, I have grown concerned that members of the climate community are failing to adequately grapple with an under-appreciated facet of the climate challenge: doing the right thing today will still take decades to bear its fullest and most tangible results. When it comes to climate policy, there is no instant gratification.

Massive and overwhelming measures need to be taken now to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to climate change impacts. However, even if the world managed to miraculously reduce global carbon emissions to zero starting today, our planet would still suffer decades' worth of irreversible consequences. This is because carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere, continuing to exist there long after it has left the smokestack or tailpipe, trapping and amplifying heat on a planetary scale. (5) While it's true that other greenhouse gasses remain in the atmosphere for shorter timespans, much of planetary warming is now simply baked into the system. Even under so-called "negative emissions" scenarios, whereby we actively remove...