Fear of Climate

David Wallace-Wells' new book, The Uninhabitable Earth, has been getting more attention than most books on the climate crisis.  He presents the latest conclusions from the latest research, which is especially dire considering the sobering fact that things have gotten much worse in the past 25 years, when the climate crisis was a known phenomenon:

"It’s also the revelation that we’ve done more damage to the environment since the United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992 than we did in all the millennia that preceded it," one writer noted. "Or, as Wallace-Wells puts it, “We have now done more damage to the environment knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance.”

One of his conclusions about the near future is precisely what I've been saying here in recent years: “The 21st century will be dominated by climate change in the same way that … the 19th century in the West was dominated by modernity or industry...There won’t be an area of human life that is untouched by it.”

There are signs that the pace of this becoming true is picking up, apart from all the severe weather and accompanying disasters which are still mostly confronted with benumbed and willful ignorance. This January, as both newly elected and reelected or incumbent US governors gave their inaugural or state of the state speeches, at least five used the occasion to strongly endorse major action to address the causes of global heating.  They included the governors of New York, Pennsylvania, Maine, New Mexico and Colorado.  California is already on the books in this regard.

The change to a Democratic administration in Michigan immediately resulted in that state withdrawing from lawsuits against the EPA seeking to challenge its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. “Under my watch, Michigan will not be a party to lawsuits that challenge the reasonable regulations aimed at curbing climate change and protecting against exposure to mercury and other toxic substances,” said [new attorney general] Nessel in a statement.

But the big national event was the unveiling of the congressional Green New Deal proposal, which several Democratic candidates for President immediately endorsed.  This comprehensive proposal got some immediate good press.  Its premise in terms of the scope of action was endorsed as accurate by climate scientists. A Green New Deal can give us the freedoms to allow humanity to flourish was the headline to a Guardian opinion piece.

Wallace-Wells admitted it was flawed but praised it as a first and urged Democrats to get behind it: "But even in this larval stage, it’s clear that the Green New Deal is an enormous leap forward — fundamentally, even categorically, more serious than the previous approaches to address the unprecedented threat to human civilization as we now know it."

The Atlantic hailed the coming of "the Millennial era of climate politics," particularly in the person of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, already known on the Internet as AOC, as a chief proponent of the Green New Deal.  As she put it: "Climate change and our environmental challenges are one of the biggest existential threats to our way of life, not just as a nation, but as a world...“In order for us to combat that threat, we must be as ambitious and innovative as possible." 

But once AOC's popularity began to sink in, along with poll numbers showing overwhelming bipartisan support for Green New Deal proposals, and a public somewhat willing to pay taxes to support these proposals, plus the decline in popularity for climate crisis-denying lawmakers, the complex of unsavory forces that comprise the Republican opposition machine began to amp up.

 AOC was quickly demonized, and attacks on Democrats began, characterizing them and such proposals as the Green New Deal as "socialist" and radical. Pundits began to worry whether Democratic candidates were too far "left" rather than whether their proposed solutions adequately address problems. Under this barrage, press turned negative, and the impression that the Green New Deal "rollout" was "botched," and that this somehow tainted or discredited the proposals became conventional wisdom.

Considerable backlash from the current administration and especially the deliberately distracting elements of election year politics--especially the debate over emotional but meaningless abstractions that nobody can define (like "socialism")-- mean that the efforts to address the problems of climate crisis causes and consequences are still likely to be much less than they need to be.

There are also the perennial debates on messaging, on how to talk about the climate crisis in an effective way.  Some say doom and gloom only paralyzes people, while Wallace-Wells thinks that realistic fear is the needed motivator. (His media book tour interviews appear here and here  , reviewed here and here   and a book excerpt here and here.)

Politico highlighted a "change" in semantics emerging principally from weather people:"leading climate scientists and meteorologists are banking on a new strategy for talking about climate change: Take the politics out of it.

That means avoiding the phrase “climate change,” so loaded with partisan connotations as it is. Stop talking about who or what is most responsible. And focus instead on what is happening and how unusual it is—and what it is costing communities."

This tactic isn't new--it's been used at the community level before.  Its danger is a complete concentration on the effects over addressing the causes.  You can't address the causes of the climate crisis without acknowledging those causes: greenhouse gases.  Yet it is almost surprising that this approach hasn't taken over.

 As the effects become more dire and widespread, that is still likely to happen unless people wake up to that danger, with the result of  never-ending and always accelerating efforts to deal with the effects (and the consequences of those effects), while the causes remain unaddressed--and doom the planet to even worse heating in the future.

We most often know the story of something only when it is over, and can look back at events as if the causes and effects were always obvious.  So we don't know the complete story of our civilization's response to the climate crisis.  While "Too little, too late" now seems the likely story, we are in the middle of the events, with lots of information but some that's missing.  Being in the middle of events, we can only do our best, and enact hope by so doing.