I never thought the end of the world could be so pretty.
You would have thought, given the way some people speak and write about climate change, that this is a moderately important issue, perhaps even a very important issue. Say, on par with the Iraq or Afghanistan War, women’s rights, health care, child poverty. (All very important issues.) Instead of, you know, the end of the world.
OK, look. I know we’re used to the apocalypse, in movies and text going way back to prehistory, screaming down at us from a blackened sky while monsters gibber out of newly-formed flaming holes in the earth. I get it. We’re not used to the end of the world looking like sea level rise so slow you need to measure it over a century, gradually rising temperatures that shift the zones of tropical diseases, a permanent dustbowl in the American southwest, the drip-drip-drip of 100 extinctions per day over hundreds of years, the oceans choking on CO2 and acidifying so that massive dead zones form–a gradual, barely perceptible, frog-in-a-boiling-pot apocalypse that most of us fail to see, absorbed as we are with our Very Important Issues.*
Where are the massive spaceships filled with evil aliens who will enslave and torture us? Where is the corrupt empire bent on conquering the world, bringing us to world war III? Where are the volcanoes spewing ash and lava into the sky, choking out the sun? Where is Ragnorak? Where’s the freaking asteroid? Where is the easily-identified enemy, preferably wearing a uniform but we’ll take a natural disaster or two if that’s all that’s on offer, who we can hurl ourselves at in possibly futile acts of desperate heroism?
There isn’t one. OK? Get used to it. This is a drip-drip-drip. The most heroic thing that most of us will be able to do, and just as futile as the small band of heroes in a Hollywood action epic throwing themselves courageously against an overwhelming foe, is write a couple of letters or emails, change our buying habits, choose better housing, make informed political decisions, beg, and pray. Your moment in the sun is not coming. Unless you mean your moment to roast in a sun-baked desert, newly formed as a result of climate change.
But here’s the thing:
Some people are working very hard on this climate change thing. I am not even a foot soldier in that army. Maybe a soldier’s symbiotic parasite. The all-I-can-do, which I am doing, means researching and writing articles and interviewing and blogging and volunteering in larger efforts wherever I can, and it’s not much. The actual foot soldiers work on this forty hours a week or more, holding rallies and lobbying governments and drafting legislation and fundraising and developing green technologies. They are burning out, incidentally. It’s probably a lot more than you do, Dear Readers, and I don’t blame you. You have your own issues, Very Important and otherwise, which claim your attention and divert your energy. All well and good. Not everyone needs to be a foot soldier, or even a foot soldier’s symbiotic parasite.
But do you think, as they march past trying to save your planet for you and your kids, that you could at least get out of their way?
Could you stop voting for politicians who shamelessly pander to coal and oil companies? Don’t you know those people think that their bank accounts are more important than your children’s and grandchildren’s lives? What better definition of evil are you looking for?
Could you stop placing your short-term comfort above the goal of cultural survival? Maybe? Look, I know it’s a pain in the ass and will involve some disruption and material loss, but the unassailable fact of the matter is that energy should cost us several more times what it currently does. If you factor in simply the human death toll per coal-fired electricity plant per year, it is estimated that the cost of electricity in your home should be fifty cents per kilowatt hour, which is approximately 10x more than you presently pay. Gasoline, too, and the entire driving culture, has been so heavily subsidized that any sane, rational future in which people have actual food to eat will mean that you pay much more at the pump than you do right now. Several times more. I’m sorry, I know you like your big house in the suburbs, but that world is dead and gone. Let it go. At the very least, be prepared to pay a fair price for it. Your electricity bill will triple. As a start.
And maybe could you also stop picking at insignificant details in climate science and reporting? The scientists working to define and solve climate change are getting death threats. For the love of god. Death threats. Somehow people have gotten into their brains that the big house in the suburbs with the big car and the walk-in closets full of cheap clothes made in China were inalienable human rights bestowed on them by Providence, and any effort to undo that is satanic and evil. Thus the very people working hardest to save the world now live in fear of being assassinated for it.
Anyone who reports honestly on the issue, too, is slandered, typically for bias. Look. Newspapers, news shows, news magazines, articles, etc., are not a child’s playground. No arbitrator is obliged to make sure each of us gets equal time in the sandbox. Nor is this a play-parliament operating by Robert’s Rules of Order. The obligation, the only obligation, of any writer or journalist in any medium is to understand the facts and communicate them as clearly as possible. They do not need to be nice to any politician or political party. They do not need to be equal in their apportioning of blame. They need to tell the truth. And the harsh, cold truth of the matter is that the right-wing in nearly every country I can think of has fairly earned more of the blame than the left.
The left ain’t all that great. I don’t consider myself a leftist, for all that I am so accused every time I open my mouth or pick up a pen on environmental issues. I am willing to do anything at all that looks like it might work, regardless of who thought it up and what their political affiliation is. It’s the end of the world! I’m going to quibble? You want to implement a market-based solution? God speed. A conservative has an idea to sequester carbon** that might mean some people profit from halting climate change? Great! Can you start last week?
Forty-four Democratic politicians in America from coal- and oil-producing states voted against cap-and-trade last year. For sure, they are as evil as any Republican politician doing the same. Jean Chretien dithered and procrastinated on climate change as only he could, and I hold him responsible for the failure of Kyoto in Canada. But get this straight: no journalist, no scientist, no academic, no writer, no author owes equal air-time or pissing-time to all wings of political thought. They are required to research and report the truth. If the truth is unflattering to one political wing or party, then that is what they will and should write. If you don’t like the way your politician or party of choice is reflected in the media on this issue, then first determine whether or not the presentation is fair and accurate. If all you can do is whinge and moan about how unfair the media is, how biased it is, how liberal it is, without having a clue’s shadow in the (newly-expanded) Sahara of whether or not it is true, then please keep it to yourself. The people researching, reporting, and working on this issue have more important things to do with their time than to defend themselves against groundless accusations of bias from people who don’t even bother to consider the facts.***
I so wish that all of the politicians so implicated, left and right, and their various funders and lobbyists, working so hard to smother the world in a blanket of heat and smog and who the hell cares so long as the share prices continue to rise?–I so wish, that each of them, every one, could be quarantined on their own separate section of the earth, to live out the results of their actions, the species collapse, the ocean collapse, the coral collapse, the heat, the desertification, the storms, the floods, all on their own, while everyone else got the rest of the planet the way it was and should still be. The completely fucked-up and unfortunate truth is that the people slaving away 24/7 to end the planet will continue to profit from their current actions while still enjoying the benefits of the sacrifices being made by others, even as they work to undermine, attack and slander the foot soldiers.
You don’t want, or need, to spend your days marinating yourselves in the realities or predictions on climate change. Neither do I. I know enough to lose sleep at night, I know enough to know the scale of the problem and the required solutions, and to be motivated to do everything I am capable of, and that’s enough. I enjoy spending my life in fear and anger as little as anyone else, and choose to devote my resources and energy towards every positive step I can think of and afford. So that’s fine. You want to spend your days thinking about your issues, Very Important and otherwise, while knowing that someone somewhere is taking care of this for you.
If that’s the way you want it, then the very least you can do is get out of their way.
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*Nothing wrong with Very Important Issues! They are Very Important, and deserve our attention and action. They’re just not the END OF THE WORLD.
**The problem with carbon sequestration is that it is, at this point, a purely hypothetical and untested idea, commonly promoted by the coal- and oil-industries as a way of maintaining business-as-usual practices. There are, at this moment, no feasible or proven techniques for seqeustering carbon. If there ever are, I guarantee you, climate change activists and scientists will be rushing out into their backyards to build them out of popsicle sticks and duct tape, if necessary.
***And the truth of that is that we can now afford party- or affiliation-based worldviews and responses as little as we can afford suburbs filled with McMansions, drive-thrus and 3-car garages. Of course, because I stated here that the right-wing has earned more blame than the left, I will be accused of having party- or affiliation-based responses, as if the very concept of an unbiased assessment reaching such a conclusion is impossible. This is as sensible as the claim that “unbiased” classrooms should include “Intelligent Design” in the science curriculum because clearly any open-minded assessment must inevitably lead anyone to give ID equal time with evolution, as if UNBIASED by definition means a 50/50 split. It doesn’t, any more than UNBIASED courtrooms automatically lead to the acquittal of fifty per cent of cases.
She’s not learning about math outside, when she’s with me, though we often count things we see. She’s not learning about art or aesthetics, though we often comment on the beauty of what we find. She’s not learning about biology in any practical way when I teach her about tadpoles and frogs, and she’s too young to be terrified of the natural world so I don’t tell her about the endocrine disruptors we’ve dumped so much of into the environment that many frogs are going extinct because they can no longer reproduce. Maybe she’ll pick up enough to be useful to her in her future academic or professional careers, and maybe not.
I’m not one of those 29-forever types. I’m pleased as punch to have 35 years under my belt, considering that’s 18 more than I would have had with a type 1 diabetes diagnosis a hundred years ago. I get to be thirty-five–to have fallen in love, gotten married, had the world’s most adorable daughter ever (apologies to other parents-of-daughters in the audience … but it’s true), gotten divorced, and all of the other ups and downs and detours and loop-de-loops of life as an adult. Hurray!
See…
