Disappearing glaciers show need for policy change

It wasn’t long ago that my dad took me hiking in Glacier National Park, an end of a summer trip before I headed east for college. Camping out in the open, we spent two nights traversing the backcountry of the spectacular national park in Northwest Montana. While it was my dad’s way of saying good-bye to me before I moved across the country for school, it was also time for me to say good-bye to the park as I knew it that summer. 

The stunning views of the jagged icy peaks and high alpine lakes that I saw while standing on top of the world that summer are being greatly transformed as we speak. As global warming continues, the glaciers in Glacier Park are melting at unprecedented levels, and scientists have predicted that park will lose all its glaciers by 2030.

With more than 700 miles of trails and the breathtaking mountainous backbone of the Continental Divide, Glacier Park is a world heritage site in danger. Containing more than 150 glaciers when the park opened as the 10th national park in 1910, the park is now home to only 27 glaciers, rapidly diminished from even five years ago, when the park counted 37.

The parks most famous glacier, Grinnell, has lost 9 percent of its surface area in just 24 months and 40 percent of its area in the last 30 years.

These glaciers act as important summertime reservoirs of water that are slowly disappearing and also affecting the park’s ecosystems and species survival. While we can’t reverse the damage done to the disappearing glaciers of Glacier National Park, its destruction gives us a physical representation of the growing problem of climate change.

As climate change gets worse, we have an unprecedented opportunity for environmental issues to come to the forefront of government policy. Despite past attempts to curb environmental pollution, a broad-reaching new policy is needed to adequately confront climate regulations that have been neglected in the last eight years.

Our brightest hope for new climate policy lies in the government creation of a comprehensive cap-and-trade program that curbs emissions while seeking new technology in energy solutions. While the specific details of the policy can get tricky, the concept is not. The federal government sets a limit on the amount of a specific pollutant that can be emitted, and companies receive credits that indicate exactly how much they can emit. Backed by added investment in clean energy and more efficient emission technology, a new vision of climate change policy can and should be established.

The local policy issues surrounding Glacier Park and glacial retreat illustrate the far-reaching effects of our climate problems. In the atmosphere of environmental optimism of the Obama administration, we have the opportunity to look beyond local policy solutions to broader national policy answers.

While Glacier Park loses its glaciers, we can’t lose any time in establishing a national emission trading program that will lead climate change policy in the future.

Amanda Pade, of Whitefish, is a junior at Duke University, in North Carolina.