People have to connect the dots and decide climate change is a vital issue and they have not
by Mike Shatzkin
It seems that all year, but especially for the past month, the lead stories in the news have been about climate change. Fires are raging, and frightening, throughout the western United States. But not just there. Also in Sweden above the Arctic Circle. And, while the start of them might have been arson, Greece has seen fires this month that have driven people into the sea to their deaths.
Great Britain and Europe are not equipped with air conditioning like the United States is because they hadn’t needed it. This summer they sure have.
Meanwhile, the eastern United States is seeing record amounts of rain. And Japan is suffering both extreme heat and catastrophic flooding.
That’s a set of current conditions that enormous numbers of people are suffering through and that anybody who reads a paper who watches the news is well aware of.
Here’s another fact. The hot weather is not an aberration. It’s a trend with a human cause. We burn fossil fuels. We put more CO2 in the atmosphere. The earth warms. That’s inexorable. And that is a fact that has been known at some level for over a century. James Hanson famously put the matter squarely in front of Congress in 1988. That’s 30 years ago!
This warming trend will not stop. And the warmer air means it holds more moisture AND that the water on the planet expands, as water does as it gets warmer. More rain. More flooding. Sea level rise. Unbearable heat is not the only consequence we’re facing. And it is all going to continue to get worse.
In fact, the only way to reverse the warming trend would be to stop adding CO2 to the ecosystem AND to do things to take CO2 out. (That’s called “drawdown”, a really important concept, and one that has gotten some attention, but which is several steps beyond the first thing we should be doing, which is cutting fossil fuel use to a minimum and as fast as we can.) Meanwhile, catastrophes like the current heat and floods and the hurricanes that savaged Texas and Puerto Rico in the past year will become increasingly common events.
But apparently the connection between the burning of fossil fuels with a planet becoming less hospitable to humans has not been made by very many people, let alone the reality that this is getting inexorably worse. Gallup has been tracking what issues voters think are important for decades. This chart of the dozens of issues they are tracking shows no evidence that the heat or flooding we see on the news every night is affecting public consciousness in 2018 at all. “Environment/pollution” is mentioned by TWO PERCENT of voters and “energy/lack of energy sources” gets listed (better than “climate change” or “global warming”, not listed at all) but is cited by less than ONE percent of the voters.
So while it seems as obvious as it could possibly be that burning fossil fuels is causing enormous pain and dislocation right now and is leading us to ultimate catastrophe, it doesn’t make the list of concerns for the overwhelming majority of people. We who see curtailing the use of fossil fuels as not only the most important issue, but, indeed, the only existential issue facing mankind, are a tiny, tiny minority.
No wonder so few people can engage in the discussion of the “best” way to “put a price on carbon”, or do anything to curtail its use. The conversations I think we should be having about the best policies to curtail carbon use are apparently of very little interest to most people.
So perhaps also no wonder that the US House of Representatives last week voted to ban taxing carbon. This resolution of the House has no actual legislative effect but it certainly makes clear that this discussion is going nowhere without a far more engaged public and a lot more elected Democrats.
But it isn’t just climate-denying Republicans who need to get their priorities straight. Sea-level rise expert John Englander explains on his blog that cleaning up our act on single-use plastic will not change the equation on warming. While there are clearly totally legitimate concerns about nuclear power, the anti-nuke movement hasn’t taken on board that shutting nuclear plants inevitably means burning more fossil fuels.
Fukashima and Chernobyl didn’t make the planet uninhabitable by humans. Nor will plastic. Fossil fuels will.
We ALL need to get our priorities straight. Once we get a widespread acceptance of the reality that burning fossil fuels is, literally, Public Enemy Number One, sensible policies can follow. Without that acceptance, essential steps aren’t even being entertained. We are already suffering tragic consequences, but the disasters of the future will both be worse and more frequent until we address the realities and fundamentally change our energy system.
