For millions of people around the globe, especially young people, the pressing issue of our time is this: The world is on fire!
It’s on fire with climate change, creating a new and intensifying norm of deadly weather extremes that makes a dystopian future a distinct possibility—constant wildfires, rising seas, desertification, global crop failures, widespread hunger, water shortages, and so on.
Luckily, we are a sentient species with the scientific ability to know that the chief cause of this global destruction is not angry gods, but us—specifically, humankind’s massive extraction and burning of oil, gas, coal, and other fossil fuels. So, naturally, there’s a rising chorus of people shouting “FIRE!” And, sure enough, our national government is rushing to the scene to put an end to it.
Unfortunately, our President and his rightwing brethren in Congress are not directing the government’s hoses at the corporate extractors, but at the people, scientists, environmentalists, and other activists who’ve dared to point to the flames and call for global action to stop the conflagration. They seem to think the problem will go away if they can pretend it doesn’t exist. They also think us protesters will go away, Worse, the Trumpsters are fanning the flames by turning the Environmental Protection Agency into the Pollutors Protection Agency. Rather than fight climate change, they’re going all out to coddle the drillers, strip miners, frackers, pipeliners, refiners, exporters, and other fossil fuel profiteers by slashing the regulatory restraints that We the People have put in place.
For example, Trump & Company are working to throw out rules that protect neighbors who live near Big Oil facilities from being poisoned by toxic methane emissions, which also are potent causes of global warming. And, at a time when the United States should be taking the economic, environmental, and moral lead in phasing out fossil fuel production, they are opening up vast regions of our public lands and waters to environmental plunder while simultaneously fighting our nation’s rational shift to a green energy future.
The good news is that the people are revolting (in the very best sense of that term!) against our corrupt leaders’ rush toward climate catastrophe.
The people are revolting (in the very best sense of that term!) against our corrupt leaders’ rush toward climate catastrophe.
From the Boston Tea Party forward, creative and gutsy public protest has been democracy’s best friend. We must accept an awful truth about corporate and governmental power elites in our democratic society: They really don’t like democracy at all. They prefer to rule by buying lawmakers, hiring lobbyists, running Orwellian PR campaigns, and relying on authoritarian police power.
The Powers That Be pay lip service to our fundamental right to protest, by which they mean we should feel free to send emails, letters, phone calls, and petitions to our Congress critters—things that are about as effective as screaming “stop it” at a Category 5 hurricane. But Americans are innately rebellious, and so they push back.
Witness the uplifting example of thirty-one members of Greenpeace who dared to exercise their First Amendment right to get in the face of power and speak out forcefully against the fossil-fuel industry’s destruction of humanity’s living environment. They teamed up to dangle eleven of their members from a massive 440-foot-high bridge spanning the Houston Ship Channel, one of the nation’s largest petrochemical waterways.
The idea was to momentarily stop the 700,000 barrels of climate-altering oil that ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and others ship out under this one bridge every day, thus dramatizing the destructive scale of fossil fuel use. It worked. For some eighteen hours, the activists stayed suspended and no tankers moved through the channel.
But the larger political message (conveyed through worldwide media coverage of the stoppage) was that if just eleven inveterate democracy protesters can stall the Big Oil colossus, the great majority of people who want to stop climate destruction for good can do it by rising up in force.
As one of the bridge climbers put it: “I want to show people that we have power to pressure our politicians and change our system. We know there’s a better world out there, but we have to demand it.”