Climate, Politics and Evidence

In covering Hillary Clinton's last day as Secretary of State, Rachel Maddow on Friday quoted her AP exit interview in which Clinton reflected on the Bengazi controversy by noting that there are too many people in politics and the media who simply refuse to  " live in an evidence-based world."  This segment ends with Chris Hayes talking about the particular danger of the political power wielded by those who are rigidly not evidence-based to addressing the problem that the new Secretary of State John Kerry calls a major global issue: global heating and the climate crisis.  When nations of the world gather to negotiate climate treaties, Hayes said, they know that the United States Senate which must ratify such a treaty (with a two-thirds vote no less) is clotted with climate crisis deniers for whom no evidence will ever be relevant, let alone convincing.

The climate crisis is the most comprehensive crisis humankind has faced since humans first spread across the globe.  It is first of all a challenge to the sophistication of our knowledge and our understanding, because it is about effects that will happen or are happening long after their causes.  And those effects will eventually challenge the interrelationships of our natural planet and our increasingly interdependent civilization, so that dealing with these effects will require timely, complex, careful and simultaneous efforts, for a long time.

It would be a daunting challenge even if we were at our best--that is, the best we've been so far.  Unfortunately our politics and much of our society is as reactionary and primitive as any I've seen in my lifetime.  That's not because people with these views didn't exist before.  They simply weren't as powerful and as accepted as normal and legitimate in our public life.

At a time when we need to be better, we've fallen back.  But that's not the whole story.  There is an even greater divide in our country than between rich and not rich.  It is the divide between the rabidly reactionary and the common sense progressives.  And an even greater divide between the intentional ideology of ignorance and those with knowledge and skills beyond any before.

Progress on addressing the climate crisis is happening apart from the political circus.  It's happening in universities and industries, in cities and states and regional groups.  It's happening in departments of the federal government.  And as Chris Hayes noted, it is happening in other countries.

Here in America it may well take the political power of the citizenry, expressed in some old ways (like the march on Washington scheduled for February) and in new.  There is no clear way forward past the barrier of the Senate and the intentionally delusional--not as long as they keep making money and financing their campaigns by publicizing their delusions (which, hypocrites as many are, they probably don't even believe.)  But as the previous post indicates, there are only a few years left to find that way.