(This essay also appears in the summer 2020 issue of Sisyphus Magazine)
In June 1988, I listened to the radio as Dr. James Hansen testified before Congress. ''Global warming,” he said, “has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.'' He told the committee that scientists were 99% sure it was caused by carbon dioxide and other gasses like methane accumulating in the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuel extraction and combustion. ''It is already happening now,” he warned (Shabecoff). I assumed such clear evidence would lead to decisive action.
For the next two decades, leaders from both parties championed the environment. Even as late as 2008 we saw Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich together in a TV commercial, united in the fight against climate change. Over the years we’ve been sold the fallacy that preventing warming would come down to our individual habits of consumption (Park). We were reminded that the Montreal Protocol was working to let the ozone layer repair itself (NASA); so by extension, we would legislate and engineer the global carbon cycle back into balance. All of this happened while both Democrats and Republicans presided over an additional 32 years of shattering mountains to unearth coal and fracturing stone to liberate the methane trapped within. We were being gaslit, literally.
Scientists aren’t 99% sure about competing theories of gravitation, but we agree that the sky is above us and the ground is beneath our feet. Consensus around climate change, on the other hand, is unequivocal (Allain). It’s disheartening that facts about the crisis no longer seem to matter. Only three years after Pelosi and Gingrich urged us to come together to solve the problem, Gingrich disavowed the commercial, claiming it misrepresented his intention to “debate the issue (O’Brien).” Debate what? The laws of atmospheric chemistry and thermodynamics? Likewise, we see many Americans turning away from reason during the pandemic. Conspiracy theorists, including the President (Goldberg), achieve new heights of cognitive dissonance when they claim 5G networks make us sick, the “deep state” is using the pandemic to undermine Trump, COVID-19 death tolls are inflated, and the coronavirus is not real (Lynas).
Inasmuch as the crises of climate change and COVID are related, both are the result of a global economic system that treats the living planet as a stockpile of resources to be unearthed, transformed, and consumed. We are required to do cost-benefit-analyses to determine which forests will be clearcut, which habitats deserve protection, and how many daily deaths from COVID-19 our business models will tolerate. We are compelled to further develop and fragment remaining ecosystems to provide housing and food for our growing populations, putting us increasingly at risk for spillovers of novel viruses (Power and Mitchell).
At the end of April, almost all Americans supported continued social distancing, with only a small minority of people responding that it was time to set-aside shelter-in-place orders to restart the economy (Epstein). At the start of June — now that many states and municipalities have been open for a few weeks — many of us are wearing masks in public, but a growing plurality seem proud in their refusal. One of my cousins recently posted on Facebook, “Tell the mask-wearer in your life that masks block .03 microns and COVID-19 measures .0125 microns. MAKE THEM GOOGLE IT.” While my left-leaning friends quip, “WE are the virus” and then post memes about smogless skies in Los Angeles and coyotes “returning” to Central Park. My cousin’s post suggests that normalizing widespread mask use is ineffective at slowing contagion -- which will come as a surprise to infectious disease experts (Mayo Clinic) -- but his implicit message is that wearing a mask is an affront to self-determination. My friends on the left engage in an equally dangerous false equivalency by presuming we exist outside of “nature,” which is healing in our locked-down absence. Neither side asks how we might embrace philosophies that consider the biosphere as a complex, self-regulating system, of which we are a part. In her March 27 article for the New York Times, Meehan Crist says,
“…the real question is not whether the virus is “good” or “bad” for climate… but whether we can create a functioning economy that supports people without threatening life on Earth, including our own.”
A warming world means higher sea levels, more severe storms, widespread droughts and floods, unusually intense heat waves and cold snaps, and more frequent crop failures. The changing climate is also threatening our health. Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Zika, Ebola, HIV, SARS, and COVID-19 are just some of the diseases to emerge in my lifetime. Malaria and Dengue, illnesses that were mostly confined to the tropics, are now becoming endemic in lower temperate latitudes. Previously undiscovered viruses of unknown pathogenesis locked in polar ice are melting out (Leman), and emerging research shows that common industrial air pollutants increase the risk of respiratory infections like COVID-19 (Mooney). According to the U.S. Department of Defense, climate change will bring waves of refugees as people flee famine, drought, disease, toxic smog, destroyed homes, collapsing economies, and armed conflict. Climate change is already adversely affecting our economy, health, and national security. The question is, how bad are we going to let it get before we do something?
The acute economic downturn caused by stay-at-home orders has brought immense uncertainty and widespread financial hardship, but it could have been otherwise. We had the necessary time and tools to prevent this situation, yet our leaders did not act (The Lancet). In the absence of effective, widespread testing and contact tracing, states were forced to shut themselves down. While many states and municipalities have now reopened, adequate testing and tracing are still not universally available. Unless we remedy the situation immediately, we should expect future waves of job losses and business failures as rates of infection spike here and there until the situation forces new lockdowns. Climate change is happening more slowly and, unless we act now to eliminate carbon emissions, the economic impact will be much worse than anything coronavirus throws our way. The April 12 Editorial page of The Guardian declared,
“If further savage waves of destruction to people’s livelihoods are to be avoided, rather than simply stored up or ignored until they become unignorable, just as coronavirus was, every possible effort must now be made to ensure that the recovery, when it comes, is as green as possible.”
Getting off fossil fuels will require huge upfront investments, but the dividends will be invaluable. Are we willing to spend money today so that our grandchildren will have a fighting chance of living tomorrow? How much is their existence worth to us? A best-case scenario, unfortunately, will not be the prevention of climate change. We are already 1-degree Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial global mean, and current levels of CO2 have locked us into an increase of an additional 0.5 degrees (NASA). If we stop emitting greenhouse gasses now it will be difficult, but survivable. When we debate the climate issue, the questions we need to ask are: “What is the role of government in the face of unsustainable industrial practices in a world with finite resources?” and, “How do we address inequality so that climate risk is not disproportionately borne by the most vulnerable among us?” These questions lead to the heart of moral philosophy, a field of inquiry made popular by the TV show, The Good Place. The bigger question is, “What do we owe each other?” Respect would be a good place to start. We need to create a robust social contract, not just because poverty and overpopulation exacerbate habitat destruction and make effective responses to climate change impossible (Whitfield), but because enabling all human beings to live in dignity is the right thing to do.
“ ‘We are now going to go into deep recession, possible depression, and we have to find a way for the digging out from that to be greener and more equitable,’ says Rachel Kyte, Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, previously the UN’s top clean energy official. ‘We desperately need jobs, economic activity, and by the way we need clean energy, so let’s go for it’ (Hook and Wisniewska).”
Congress recently committed to spending $3 trillion for COVID economic recovery, and more has been proposed. It’s hard to know just how much the US has spent to address climate change, but the costs of increasingly intense wildfires and hurricanes are all too clear. Paradise, California is a charred moonscape. Parts of the gulf coast and Puerto Rico remain in ruins, and by mid-century some coastal cities will be inundated (Lu and Flavelle). Investments in green infrastructure will speed economic recovery and promote the long-term resiliency we are going to need. Assuming politicians now understand the reality of an exponential curve, they should apply that awareness to the climate. As with the bungled national response to coronavirus (Borger, et al.), our elected representatives must face their culpability in the climate crisis. By looking away as carbon was mined from the ground and pumped into the atmosphere, our politicians allowed corporations to externalize the cost of the damage, profiting at the public’s expense and leaving us to foot the bill. We must hold individuals and industries accountable and demand action while we still have a world worth living in, and which the earth’s remaining species, including us, can still inhabit.
WAYS TO TAKE ACTION
VOTE this coming November! Please make sure you’re registered.
Contact your elected officials to demand action on a system-wide level. This could include carbon taxes, requirements for industry to build externalized costs into their product pricing, removing existing subsidies for extractive industries and mega-farms, creating better incentives and subsidies for renewables and sustainable farms, and reducing military spending.
Join Sunrise School, an inspiring army of young people working to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process.
Reduce your use of fossil fuels by eating less meat, turning down the heat and AC, driving less, and taking fewer flights. These are all good things to do, but changing individual consumption habits will not be an effective wedge against climate change until thrift becomes a global norm and energy delivery systems are decoupled from fossil fuels. Individual frugality is only part of the equation.
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