We, the people, of the United States of America have a problem. As a nation, we don’t care enough.
“What the hell are you talking about, Steven?” I can hear some of you say. “I care about a lot of things. I care about winning elections. I care about electing more and better Democrats. I care about raising the minimum wage. I care about food stamps, unemployment, racism, prejudice against LGBT people, voting rights, the war on women,crazy gun laws, like Stand Your Ground, that have turned many states into “kill and get out of jail free-fire zones. I car about preventing sexual assault in the military. I care I care about education, civil rights, income inequality. I’m active in my local party. I sign petitions. I donate money. I donate time to help others. I care about our veteran soldiers. I care about privacy. I care about …”
Wait a second. Let’s back up. Yes, most of us care passionately about so many issues, and the policies needed to deal with those issues that are so essential to preserving our democracy and advancing the “general welfare” of our country’s people. But, in my humble opinion, on one issue I don’t think enough of us care enough to lead our country and the world from falling over the precipice into an abyss so vast we cannot not even begin to see how bad the fall into it will become. What is more, I don’t think enough of us are willing to we fight hard enough to change the Democratic party, and then ultimately our country, to come to grips with this crisis.
Most of you have probably already identified the issue about which I don’t think we care enough. Maybe some of you have already tuned me out and stopped reading this post. And I understand that response, I do. This subject is not a pleasant one to discuss. It doesn’t have an easy solution. It’s complicated. Any effort to educate and motivate people to change their views on this crisis and assert the power of their voices and their votes is opposed by a well oiled machine working diligently 24 hours each day to keep that from happening. That machine, created by and for the benefit of .01% of the population, is buying politicians and media outlets on the cheap to insure that nothing gets done, and that, at a bare minimum, the status quo is maintained, i.e., our civilization’s addiction to their products continues, ad infinitum, or until we kill all ourselves off.
Then again, maybe some of you you believe that there are other more pressing concerns that need to be addressed first by our nation and our party. Issues on which perhaps we can make progress sooner, or issues that will help Democrats win elections.
Or maybe you just don’t like hearing about this issue because it is so damn depressing. I sure don’t blame you for that. I get depressed, too, when I read stories such as this one:
Surveys show that many Americans think climate change is still a topic of significant scientific disagreement.[i] Thus, it is important and increasingly urgent for the public to know there is now a high degree of agreement among climate scientists that human-caused climate change is real. Moreover, while the public is becoming aware that climate change is increasing the likelihood of certain local disasters, many people do not yet understand that there is a small, but real chance of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts on people in the United States and around the world. […]
The range of uncertainty for the warming along the current emissions path is wide enough to encompass massively disruptive consequences to societies and ecosystems: as global temperatures rise, there is a real risk, however small, that one or more critical parts of the Earth’s climate system will experience abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes. Disturbingly, scientists do not know how much warming is required to trigger such changes to the climate system. […]
The CO2 we produce accumulates in Earth’s atmosphere for decades, centuries, and longer. It is not like pollution from smog or wastes in our lakes and rivers, where levels respond quickly to the effects of targeted policies. The effects of CO2 emissions cannot be reversed from one generation to the next until there is a large- scale, cost-effective way to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Moreover, as emissions continue and warming increases, the risk increases.
(cont.)
You’ve seen the stories about heat waves, droughts, extreme weather events, flooding, famine, and mass extinctions. About the acidification of the oceans. About the ice sheets melting in the arctic, especially the one in Greenland and the danger of rising sea levels. About the consequences that are already happening as a result of climate change. Mass migrations of peoples, such as those in Sub Saharan Africa. Wars fought over water. Killer tropical storms such as the Category 5 cyclone that destroyed so much of The Philippines, or the ones that hit Tuscaloosa AL and Joplin, MO. The bizarre unprecedented flooding this last Fall in Colorado (a 1000 year flood), flooding caused by rainfalls that were the heaviest in that state’s recorded history.
As for wildfires, well, no one even seems to mention them much anymore, they have become such a constant presence in the lives of so many people across so much of the United States. Weird chaotic weather is beginning to seem, especially for the young, the way things have always been.
But it isn’t just the fact that these extreme weather events are occurring that is so depressing, that CO@ levels are rising, that the oceans are heating, and on and on and on. No, the most depressing thing, to me, is the absence of political will among politicians and the electorate alike to deal with the problem of climate change by taking the steps so necessary to limit the damage we are doing to our planet and our civilization.
Yes, a few highly dedicated people have worked tirelessly to advance public awareness of the threat we face. A few courageous activists have taken on the task of opposing projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline, or to push for a ban on hydro-fracking and other drilling methods for oil and gas that not only are adding to atmospheric carbon emissions, but are poisoning our water supplies and threatening the integrity of our food supply. Others have pushed hard for renewable energy research and development, while others have risked their money and careers to develop and bring to the market affordable, sustainable energy, despite the lack of government funding and tax credits for research and development of renewable energy, and the unnecessary and obscene government subsidies to the Resource Extraction Complex that make fossil fuels cheaper and more attractive options.
Yet, despite these ongoing and heroic efforts, despite all the warnings by eminent scientific organizations, despite the individuals who have done so much to break our society out from the grip of fossil fuel addiction, we keep losing ground. Nick Cohen of The Observer made the case in this article that the climate deniers have won, and I am hard pressed to argue with his conclusions:
If global warming is not new, it is urgent: a subject that should never be far from our thoughts. Yet within 24 hours of the [AAAS’s] warning the British government’s budget confirmed that it no longer wanted to fight it.
David Cameron, who once promised that if you voted blue you would go green, now appoints Owen Paterson, a man who is not just ignorant of environmental science but proud of his ignorance, as his environment secretary. George Osborne, who once promised that his Treasury would be “at the heart of this historic fight against climate change“, now gives billions in tax concessions to the oil and gas industry, cuts the funds for onshore wind farms and strips the Green Investment Bank of the ability to borrow and lend. […]
Tempting though it is to blame cowardly politicians, the abuse comes too easily. The question remains: what turned them into cowards? Rightwing billionaires in the United States and the oil companies have spent fortunes on blocking action on climate change. A part of the answer may therefore be that conservative politicians in London, Washington and Canberra are doing their richest supporters’ bidding. There’s truth in the bribery hypothesis. […]
Clive Hamilton, the Australian author of Requiem for a Species, made the essential point a few years ago that climate change denial was no longer just a corporate lobbying campaign. The opponents of science would say what they said unbribed. The movement was in the grip of “cognitive dissonance”, a condition first defined by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1950s …
The politicians know too well that beyond the corporations and the cultish fanatics in their grass roots lies the great mass of people, whose influence matters most. They accept at some level that manmade climate change is happening but don’t want to think about it.
Cohen admitted himself that he could be doing more, writing more articles about the threat of climate change, about the need to dramatically curb our present use of carbon based energy sources. But too many people in our country and in many other countries have bought the lies the climate deniers are selling, or have remained deliberately ignorant, or, while acknowledging the problem, have refused to do anything about it.
Too many of people who understand the danger are just waiting for someone else to do something – anything at all – to wake the people up and get them to vote for politicians who take climate change seriously and are willing to use their political capital to do what needs to be done – 1) Cut greenhouse gas emissions now and keep cutting them; 2) Fund a Manhattan Project style effort to fast track renewable energy; and 3) Shift the real economic costs of fossil fuel use to the producers and manufacturer’s of their literally toxic products.
Climate change is not the most prominent issue we discuss on a daily basis on progressive blogs. Oh, you’ll find climate change posts there, some doom and gloom, some offering a smidgen of hope, and a rare few that propose actions we could be taking now to limit emissions and provide our progeny with a self sufficient, sustainable, renewable energy based society in the future.
Yet in the midst of the most dire warnings by our most eminent scientists, despite the calls for action from well entrenched establishment institutions such as The World Bank, major insurance companies and even the Pentagon, our country, along with Russia, China, India, and so many more are plunging full speed ahead with expanding humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels to generate power for industry and the home. Thus, the rate of growth in levels of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is not declining, nor even even staying stable. It is, in fact accelerating.
I suppose there are those of us who, as a matter of faith, believe everything will work out for the best somehow. Someone will ride to the rescue. Some new technological advance will change the world overnight and flood the planet with cheap affordable renewable energy. And no doubt some people think that this isn’t the time to fight this battle within the Democratic Party because not enough people who vote care enough about the problem to make it a political winner.
And that’s the problem in a nutshell. The deniers seem to have won. Many of us who know the problem is real, and know the dangers and risks it poses, are in denial ourselves. We drift along with the rest of our know nothing populace, hoping that someday the time will be right to make the political case for lowering or halting carbon emissions. That someday the issue of ameliorating the effects of climate change (because we have passed the point of reversing our situation) will be a political winner with which we we can drum Republicans out of office and any hope of regaining political power.
So we (and I am speaking in a general sense when I say “we,”) have allowed our party to walk away from doing anything significant about climate change. Some of us bitch and moan about it. Some of us demand we do something to hold Democrats accountable for their environmental record. Yet, in the final analysis, not enough of us care enough to force our party, our society, to make the issue of climate change a priority.
And so I am back to my original question. Why don’t enough of us care, and care enough, to make a difference?
One can make the case that our species is simply hard-wired to deal only with immediate crises, and that we lack the facility as a species to address longer term threats such as the present climate crisis human activity has created. One can bandy about psychological explanations, such as cognitive dissonance, or our recently discovered “Optimism Bias”, and maybe there is some truth to those explanations. Maybe those theories provide some basis for helping us comprehend why we continue to ignore this danger, much less refuse to treat the threat it poses with the urgency required. To combat it with all the financial, diplomatic, intellectual and other societal resources we have at our disposal.
Still, understanding why our civilization has failed to do what we should have been doing since the end of the last century is not particularly satisfying. At least, not to me. I write out of frustration and anger, and not a small portion of guilt, over the calamities we endure today, and the worse disasters to come. The store of misery and death that we are banking because of our inaction is almost too horrible to contemplate.
But we contemplate it we must. Finding a way forward to galvanize humanity stop our denial, and face this crisis head on, is now critical. Since shortly after the dawn of the Industrial revolution, scientists had learned of the potential danger of pumping up the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere. By the middle of the last century, the media began to broadcast the warning signs of the crisis, and scientist began the hard work needed prove that human beings were changing the nature of our biosphere, and that those changes would have dire consequences. By the beginning of this century, our political leaders, knew or should have known that drastic changes in the use of energy resources were necessary if we were not to risk the possibility of a new Dark Ages, at best, and the extermination of our species at worst.
We cannot continue to blame the extensive and well funded disinformation operation created by those who stood to benefit the most (in the extreme short term) from sowing the seeds of doubt about the reality of climate change among the general population. Yes, the people who funded, organized and participated in those propaganda efforts are evil, but outrage over their nefarious and, to my mind, criminal, activities can only take us so far. One needs only consider our brethren on the right to see just how destructive a politics bases on hate can be.
For myself, I’ve done a lot of blog posts here and elsewhere, trying to raise awareness. But the internet is not a powerful enough medium in which to overcome the “see no evil, hear no evil, do nothing about the evil” mindset of most Americans, and worse, almost all politicians of either major party. And in any case, it has been just as effectively used by the climate deniers, if not more effectively. I don’t have the answer to my question, obviously.
But someone needs to discover the key to turn our apathetic populace and political officials into people who do care, and care more about this issue than any other, or we, as a species, may very well go the way of the Dodo Bird and all the other species that no longer inhabit this planet. At least they had an excuse – they lacked the means to prevent their extermination. We do. But for whatever reason, we aren’t taking the steps needed to prevent our own man-made apocalypse.
If we don’t soon, as the popular saying goes, “There’ll be hell to pay” and last I heard hell costs you everything you value for all eternity.
