Denial: Costs

Denying the reality and the causes of the Climate Crisis can cost us the future.  In the long run, it could cost us human civilization as well as much of the natural world we know--including the loss of animal and plant species that would leave us bereft and struggling to survive. 

But even in the near future, even now, denial and its political exploitation have their costs, in money and lives.  This is coming into focus more and more, as the U.S. as well as much of the rest of the world is feeling the reality and the impact of huge weather and climate events that cause disasters, deaths and injuries, and tear communities to shreds.

The denial of the Climate Crisis is fueling the denial of the effects of what may be caused by the Climate Crisis.  This is another subtext in Bill McKibben's Washington Post piece.  For to truly ignore the connections among the many events, it helps to downgrade the importance of the events themselves.

Here's the kind of measured expertise that people would be heeding if denial were not so strong: meteorologist Jeff Masters' conclusion to his discussion of this record-breaking two months of tornadoes:  "In summary, this year's incredibly violent tornado season is not part of a trend. It is either a fluke, the start of a new trend, or an early warning symptom that the climate is growing unstable and is transitioning to a new, higher energy state with the potential to create unprecedented weather and climate events."

This statement allows for the possibility of this being a fluke, but the other two possibilities suggest the need for attention to preparing better for more likely disasters in the future.  Even if they are flukes, preparation is a good idea anyway--but patterns likely to lead to future danger adds urgency.  It is precisely this kind of situation--seeing patterns that can lead to future danger or future opportunity--for which the human brain has its most decided survival advantage.  But denial cancels that out.

"In policy debates about environmental issues, evidence of extreme weather is often dismissed as fleeting anecdotes," notes a Boston Globe editorial advocating more attention to preparation.  "But it is hard to ignore the cumulative impact of science, technology, and experience."

The Globe editorial then mentions "an expert panel assigned by Congress in 2008 to recommend ways to deal with climate change provided a sobering analysis of what is at stake: Every ton of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere not only drives up the earth’s temperature, causing potentially disruptive weather events, but raises the cost of taking action later on."

That's the cost of far future disasters caused by present and near future greenhouse gases emissions: the familiar if strange fruits of Climate Crisis denial.   But we need to admit the pattern and eventually the cause if we are to prepare for near future problems and disasters: everything from better structures to withstand extreme weather and protection for coastal cities to better public health and systems of response to areas of immediate emergencies.  For the society as a whole, preparation and prevention cost less, in money, in suffering and in lives.

Some of this preparation goes by the stunningly inept title of adaptation.  Doing something directly about greenhouse gases is called mitigation.  (Why does anyone wonder why scientists, social scientists and bureaucrats can't communicate when they insist on such dead vocabulary?)   I used to call this the activities of Stop it (addressing the Causes of global heating) and Fix it (addressing the Effects.)  We really need to do both, but there was a time I worried that smart Republicans would manipulate public alarm to devote all attention to addressing the effects while saying we can't afford to address the causes, too.

 That may still happen, but so far GOPers have stuck with strict denial.  Denial, together with the politically related insistence on fatally wounding the federal government while siphoning money to corporate interests, has led to such barbarity as suggested Tuesday by the House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor.  He insisted that any emergency funds voted by Congress to help tornado victims in Joplin and elsewhere be offset by cuts in government spending elsewhere, or GOPers wouldn't support it.

Cantor represents a district in Virginia, where disaster resulting from severe weather is not unknown and these days certainly not impossible.  Looking at the weather map, it could even threaten it this week.  His tune may change in that event.  But the power of denial is so great that you really can't count on even the most extreme reality to overcome it.  No one knows if Cantor or any politician is truly in denial about the Climate Crisis.  You almost hope that they are, because sacrificing lives and communities now and in the future for momentary political advantage or even the riches and seeming power conferred by wealthy corporate masters is even worse.  But the effect on the rest of us, the world and the future is the same.