It was not hard to get both parties to support environmental issues when those issues were about. specific companies putting specific harmful substances into the air and water.
The issue now is specific companies which sell large quantities of a harmful substance to Joe and Jane Sixpack (and Joe and Jane EBT card) who themselves are putting that substance into the air in order to do the things they want and need to do.
The right has decided to play the Joe and Jane card for all it’s worth, and the left has been forced to lowball the true costs of carbon reduction for fear of making that card even more powerful.
Yeah, it’s like, the Earth will be fine whatever happens, and the only question is how miserable it will be for humans. So if your only response to climate change is to be miserable about it, why not just sit back and let events make you miserable.
A lot of the changes we’re talking about are over a scale of decades or more, and most people’s lives change anyway over that kind of time. With planning, it is not impossible for people to take this in their stride. I mean, “I used to live in Miami but I moved” is not necessarily a tragic story.
That’s not to minimise the scale of what will need to happen, especially in less-developed places. And the problems with food may be harder. But working on these problems is an active thing, with a collective purpose. If kids born today spend satisfying lives working on irrigation or building new towns instead of selling waterbeds, that doesn’t have to be a dystopia.
Or “I used to live in Bangladesh, but now I drowned.” The way we experience this in the US, Canada and the EU will be very different form how the global south experiences it. For us, it will largely be a series of increasingly uncomfortable events (excepting the occasional/regular raging wildfires taking lives and property, increasing flooding and droughts doing the same) for the foreseeable future. For others, it is quite literally life and death. We cannot be OK with that.
I mean, somehow, we lived through a couple of ice ages, with far less technology at our hands. If we can figure out how to ameliorate the problem and survive whatever the climate crisis throws at us, then that’s really going to be on us. I am most certainly not one of those people who believes that we can entirely depend on technology to fix our problems. But it can be one of the tools, along with working together and good policies, that helps us.
I do wonder about the whole “Anthropocene” debate now, though. Like… yes, we managed to fuck up our environment pretty good in the industrial age and now the environment is coming back to remind us that we’re not totally in control and need to learn to think more long term with regards to sustainability. But what comes after the Anthropocene? What does an age of balance look like? Fortunately for us, Ursula K. Le Guin is right that stories can help us imagine a way forward in the face of this self-made disaster.
We’re going to have increasingly serious issues with agriculture and other plants in the spring. We relied on the moisture from the melting snow in the spring and now we have so little snow that there’s nothing left in the spring. People think of droughts in hot weather but we can experience ground dry enough to make a difference when it’s still quite cool out.
Have you ever seen the pushback from the fundies at any suggestion that improved access to birth control and education would be generally beneficial to everyone?
Take say a hundred smart, well educated but otherwise average people. Put them in an isolated area with a computer with all science textbooks, engineering manuals, rubber bibles… the lot.
Now ask then to make you something like a functional simple computer like a ZX81 clone. Let alone a functional modern car or plane… Right?
Everything we use is a product of a product of a product of a process of a system etc… This goes dozens of layers deep. It would take them years just to get some decent iron production going, or usable glass. Even pottery is not that simple.
A buddy of mine is a flight instructor, and back when I first met him was also an adjunct chemistry professor. About twelve years ago we were driving back from some rural airport somewhere and I asked him his thoughts on climate change. Granted, teaching chemistry and pilotry doesn’t make one an actual climate scientist, but it meets my definition of a working knowledge of the atmosphere.
So I asked him what he thought the prognosis was. He said we were more than a decade past anybody being able to do anything meaningful to avert catastrophe, and then proceeded to spend the rest of the trip home explaining exactly why in ways that I felt like I understood in the moment. I still try to fight the good fight wherever I can, but I’ve long felt that he was likely correct.
Averting and mitigating are two different things. Yes, we will see upheaval on a global scale, and our way of life will change. How we respond to that is yet to be seen, but yes, we need to keep up the fight to make it possible for our children and theirs to continue to thrive on this “little speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” No room for giving up, my children are worth fighting for. If that is not motivation, I have nothing.
Exactly. We could have made the choice to make changes far earlier, but we did not. Climate change is forcing our hands, and yet we still people people who want to carry on with business as usually.
This, a thousand times this. As right-out denial is more or less out now, the vested interests of the fossil industry now focus on discourses of delay, one among which is doomism.
Hey, I’ve seen that guy in Figure 11 in this very topic!
I’ll also note that a lot of those fallacious and bad-faith ploys are straight out of the tobacco industry’s original playbook, borrowed and refined by such rotten outfits as the NRA and GOP.
Oh, I’m sure the him of twelve years ago would have agreed, and we likely spent much of the rest of the conversation discussing which fanciful and farcical mitigation methods might actually work. I was talking here only about the chemical/atmospheric side of things, essentially asking him to tell me if it was really as dire as ‘everybody’ was saying.
