We live in the age of the phoney crisis. Hordes of immigrants are coming to kill your family. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to get rid of planes and cows. Without easy access to bump stocks, the Second Amendment has been effectively repealed. We’re doomed!
Amid this cacophony, it’s almost possible to forget that we are facing actual existential threats. The fate of the planet will hinge on what we do, or don’t do, in the next decade or so. The damage that Donald Trump is inflicting on our democratic institutions will take decades, perhaps generations, to repair. And the omnipresent danger of unparalleled catastrophe looms ever larger, as the hothead-in-chief abandons the Iran nuclear deal, exports nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, and torpedoes arms-control treaties with Russia.
There is so much genuine crisis all at once that we are forced to perform triage. This is what war medics are trained to do, and it’s a ghastly business. It may involve letting one severely injured but saveable soldier die so that several others with critical but lesser injuries can live. Do we rely on nuclear power to help remove the immediate pressure to burn fossil fuels, even though it carries its own awful risks? Do we focus on plastics clogging the ocean as the meltwater from the polar ice caps washes entire cities away?
And what a dirty trick it would be if we were to make serious strides toward lowering carbon emissions only to have madmen obliterate the planet in less time than it takes to watch Dr. Strangelove.
These existential threats must be addressed with equal urgency. Nuclear weapons could deliver absolute horror more immediately, but global warming requires the most immediate response. In fact, it is already too late.
The planet’s climate is changing for the worse and will continue to do so no matter what we do now. That’s not an argument for resignation. What we do now can still make a huge difference. But we have blown our chance to avoid catastrophic impacts. Indeed, they are already occurring. The world is becoming hotter, weather events are more destructive, and species are dying off at alarming rates.
Nuclear weapons could deliver absolute horror more immediately, but global warming requires the most immediate response. In fact, it is already too late.
Some members of The Progressive’s staff attended a conference held on Earth Day, April 22, in Madison, Wisconsin. Among the speakers was Dan Vimont, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research. (The center is named for Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day.) He mentioned the parts per million average of atmospheric CO2 the year he was born. Then what it was the years each of his children was born. The number climbed higher with each mention, shooting past the guaranteed catastrophic threshold of 400 parts per million. Then Vimont began to cry.
“No one living will ever see 400 parts per million again,” he said, voice shaking. He was not the only person in tears.
In his shattering and important new book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells writes about the inevitable planetary crisis that we have literally brought upon ourselves.
“[H]owever sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us.”
Crow all you want at the increased use of compact fluorescent light bulbs and the growing number of charging stations available for electric cars—the fact is, we are failing. “Three-quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem,” Wallace-Wells writes, “we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves.”
How reckless this is. How irresponsible. And finally, how dumb.
“The costs [of climate change] are astronomical already, with single hurricanes now delivering damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” he notes. “Should the planet warm 3.7 degrees, one assessment suggests, climate change damages could total $551 trillion.” That’s at least as much wealth as currently exists in the world today.
And the Republicans’ main excuse for refusing to take meaningful action to curb carbon emissions? It costs too much!
There are also the costs in terms of increased disruption and displacement, as heat spikes conflict and sends people fleeing for their lives. In a 2018 study, the World Bank predicted that more than 140 million people in just three regions of the world—Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America—could be made climate migrants by 2050. Yikes.
Wallace-Wells sizes up the tragic predicament of climate scientists who “spent decades presenting the unambiguous data, demonstrating to anyone who would listen just what kind of crisis will come for the planet if nothing is done, and then watched, year after year, as nothing was done.” They exercised caution and tried to appear reasonable—that is, to not “freak out.”
News flash: There is no longer any reason to not freak out.
As with the threat of nuclear war, the danger of climate catastrophe is addressable. No, we cannot stop some effects from occurring, but we can make them less awful. And we can build a future that is sustainable, assuming we don’t blow ourselves up.
The need for urgent action is now. Here in the United States and all over the world.
It will require courage. It will take creativity. It will involve disruption. It will mean civil disobedience.
This March, some 1.4 million young people around the world took part in school strikes for climate action. Caroline Lucas, the only Green Party member ever elected to the British Parliament, praised them in an op-ed published in The Guardian, especially for putting their bodies on the line.
“When we look back at this moment in a generation’s time,” Lucas wrote, “the real criminals won’t be seen as those blockading bridges—it will be those who understood the science of climate change, yet consistently blocked action to prevent its worst effects.”
Business as usual cannot be an option. We should immediately shut down insane subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry. We can pursue ideas like the Green New Deal, which lays out a vision for both vastly reducing emissions and at the same time creating a stronger and more equitable economy. We can plant more carbon-loving native trees, create safety nets for climate refugees, and invest in energy from the sun and wind. We can block traffic in the street and go to jail for it.
The Green New Deal, reviled by the same people whose stupidity and inaction have brought us to the present brink, is an especially promising avenue. As Naomi Klein argued in her seminal 2014 book, This Changes Everything, the results of climate change will force a dramatic restructuring of society. So why not set out to make it better? (If you haven’t seen it already, take a few minutes to watch the short video “A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”)
If necessity is the mother of invention, catastrophe is the pathway for fundamental change. We will never have the same planet, but we may be able to build better and fairer ways for humans to occupy it. Let’s get to work.
Mulling the Mueller Report
The long-awaited report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller is out—at least the unredacted portions. It “established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” It also found that the President repeatedly did his level best to obstruct justice, in some cases failing only because those around him refused to carry out his commands. Hundreds of former federal prosecutors signed a letter stating that if it were anyone other than the President, charges would have been filed.
So we now have further proof of Crooked Donald’s venality. But, as John Nichols argued so well in our last issue, there was already ample evidence of his unfitness for office and the wisdom driving him out. (No, Mike Pence would not be just as bad—are you really not paying attention?)
The “Comment” for this last issue listed some of the many reasons that Trump deserves to be driven from office, as outlined by Nichols and others. “Plus,” it stated, “there are the things that have likely transpired since this issue of The Progressive went to press” and before it was published.
In fact, for this three-week period in late March and early April, we were able to identify, in a web article, more than two dozen fresh outrages. Among them: Trump’s malicious attacks on the late Senator John McCain; his administration’s call to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act, including the protections for pre-existing conditions; his threat to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border at the peril of five million U.S. jobs; and his delusional claim that his child-separation policy was actually begun by Barack Obama.
There have of course been more outrages since, including Trump’s efforts to impede Congressional inquiries, his slamming the door on U.S. participation in a treaty designed to curb international weapons sales, and his administration’s blatant war-mongering against Iran.
We don’t need a Mueller report or Congressional investigations to identify reasons to dump Trump. He keeps giving us new ones each and every day.