As a consequence of one of the few "real" jobs I ever had (the kind with a salary, an office, daily series of mind-destroying meetings, etc.), I went on my only "real" vacation (paid, winter, flew, sunny place, hotel, restaurants, shops, sunburn) in Cancun. This was so many years ago that if the babe in the bottom photo was there, she'd be in her forties or fifties now. But the hotel in the top photo (a smaller version of it anyway) was where I stayed. It was the winter after a hurricane mashed the place, and they were anxious for tourists to come back, so it was unbelievably cheap. And though the beaches had been damaged some, they still existed. Apparently these days, as the international Climate Crisis Convention (or whatever they call it) is happening there...not so much.
The beaches are disappearing in Cancun, thanks in large part to direct and indirect effects of global heating. But the Climate Crisis is well beyond such ironies. That the reality doesn't matter seems to be a given. So the norm is clashing headlines like Study: Climate change to cause extreme world drought (USA TODAY)meets Climate Change Doubt Is Tea Party Article of Faith (with its nice play on "faith," in the New York Times).
As everyone knows, political opposition has kept the U.S. from leading or doing anything much through congressional legislation, and that's only going to get worse when John "Voldemort" Banal becomes Speaker, and the Death Eater Party is the majority. But we're not alone--our shining country to the north disconcertingly mirrored our intransigence last month: Canada senate kills climate bill ahead of UN summit noted BBC News.
And so expectations for what the summit in Cancun can accomplish is very low--it's pretty much that Cancun can't. What is specifically at issue, what increments may show some progress, are summarized here. Some scientists even remain hopeful, either because they see incremental progress (even if others have noted that incremental progress is unlikely to be sufficient) or they take a longer view (even if that presupposes a future that may not be there.) For example, the ICCC's Rajendra Pachauri who claims:
"I am not terribly dismayed about the current state of affairs," Pachauri said. "I believe the trend is clearly toward much greater understanding and awareness on climate change than was the case three or four years ago. I personally feel very optimistic about the youth all over the world, including the US, who feel very sensitive about some of these issues. ..There's a lot of disinformation, which is driving current attitudes, and these things don't last," he added.
Meanwhile, Oxfam reports that "climate-related disasters killed 21,000 people in the first nine months of this year, more than double the number in 2009..." and "The summit takes place against the backdrop of forecasts that carbon emissions are set to start rising again after a brief interlude from the recession, and analyses showing that countries' current pledges are not big enough to keep the global average temperature rise within bounds that most nations say they want."
Since controlling carbon and encouraging clean energy are linked economically as well as ecologically, the United States is confronted with another problem that the Party of Ignorance and Hypocrisy is intent on ignoring: the U.S. is losing any chance of leadership in global clean energy technologies to other nations, particularly China. (This piece also provides some play-by-play on the Can'tcun not-goingson.)
This fact has distressed U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, as well as others who have been paying attention (just sample the comments to that story.) He says it should be our "Sputnik moment," i.e. the fact that galvanizes us into action, basically by scaring us to death. I'll at least give him credit for not calling it a "wake-up call," as every story about rising temperatures and sea levels, melting glaciers etc. is supposed to be, but hasn't been. There are good reasons why this isn't a Sputnik moment (we're not threatened with imminent nuclear holocaust from the sky by a sworn and highly propagandized enemy, for starters) but it does somewhat indicate why we're in this fix. Scientists typically don't have a grasp of political and social realities, and a field rightly following the lead of scientists has no vocabulary that has succeeded in communicating urgency or moral responsibility.
As much as the continuing inability to communicate effectively really distresses me (the current mind-numbing mumbling over "mitigation" vs. "adaptation" being the latest case in point--do they really think anybody knows what they're talking about?), that's unlikely to be most of what's gone wrong. We sure could use some plain talk and some real moral leadership. But the gap between demonstrable realities and public "belief" is so extreme, that this must be mostly in the realm of the psyche, involving politics built around psychological responses, and perhaps even rising to the status of large groups captured by a psychological complex on a massive scale, as were many in Germany and western Europe as the Nazis rose to power. Whatever it is, I don't think it has reached its fullness yet, and I kind of doubt that anything--any disastrous event even--will change that until it has played itself out, or has reached a point where a disaster or the right words at the right time by the right person throws enough cold water in humanity's face to wake us all up to these realities, and our fate.
Of course I have no idea when this will be, or what difference it will make if and when it happens. But I doubt it will be in Can'tcun.
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