Getting Real
by Ron Dembo, Zerofootprint on 04.12.07
Imagine discovering a Roman newspaper from, say, 23 August 410 AD.
On that day, the Goths had the city under siege. They had already demanded, and had been given, five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand silken tunics, three thousand scarlet-dyed hides, and three thousand pounds of pepper. Statues were melted down to pay off the barbarians, but the Goths wanted more.
In short, it was a difficult spot for the Romans. The very existence of the city, and certainly their way of life, was at stake. So you’d expect their newspapers to betray a bit of uneasiness. That is, you might be surprised to find sections of the paper devoted to winners of the chariot races, or recipes for larks’ tongues, speculation on the next season’s most promising colors. The Goths sacked the city the next day, bringing to an end a seemingly invincible civilization.
I began to wonder about these non-existent newspapers when I read some of the comments in response to a recent posting. One person sneered at my claim that the scientific debate over climate change is over. I’m not sure whether he was assuming that I am naïve to believe that the thousands of climate scientists who produce the IPCC reports constitute an overwhelming consensus, or that I’m naïve to believe that overwhelming consensus will be enough to shift public debate. Perhaps he doesn’t even believe in climate change.
But he reminded me of an important point. We’re just not getting an accurate account of what is going on in the world. We are, of course, being misinformed, manipulated, and censored. But that’s not what I mean.
What I mean is this: if we really believe that we face planetary disaster, if we really believe that our children and grandchildren will inherit a world incapable of supporting our civilization, to say nothing of countless doomed species, then why are we talking or reading about anything else?
Not all that long ago, people took to the streets to stage violent protests against globalization, presumably on the grounds that economic integration exerted a downward pressure on wages and hurt local economies. I don’t mean to diminish the concerns of the people who battled police in Seattle, Washington, and Quebec City. But the consequences they were working to avert were hardly of the same scale as those the IPCC is warning us about, and they were a good deal more abstract. Where are the protesters today?
I think it’s a fair question. When an issue is deemed important enough, people take to the streets. Powerful public sentiment has a correlative in action: people had to take to the streets to give momentum to the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the movement to get out of Vietnam, the protest to save Clayoquot Sound. Greenpeace members have taken all kinds of personal risks to make their point at sea. And while the age of activism seems to have waned, the fact is that the largest protest ever staged took place around the world only four years ago. Moreover, even if climate change does not mobilize vast armies of protesters, it’s a little surprising that it does not inspire more “direct action.” No one is chaining himself to a coal-fired plant. No one is vandalizing SUVs. No one is occupying Exxon’s headquarters. Why not?
Is it that we don’t really believe that life as we know it is in peril?
I ask because it is far from clear that we are acting as though absolutely everything depends on immediate, decisive action. Which do you think galvanizes popular anxiety more powerfully, the question of who will win “American Idol,” or the question of whether untold millions of humans will die as a result of global warming?
I do not mean to seem elitist, or to draw a distinction between frivolous pop culture and the real business of climate change. On the contrary. Take Tony Blair as an example. Here is a politician claiming to lead the world in environmental policy and looking for a legacy. Let’s leave aside for a moment the question of whether his proposed cuts (60 percent by 2050) are deep enough to make a difference. In fairness, they are the most ambitious put forward by any national government in the world. The trouble is, Blair has also signed off on a program to develop Britain’s airport system in the expectation that air travel will more than double in the coming decades. In other words, Blair is building the infrastructure to make his own climate policy useless. Is this the behavior of someone who really thinks there is a grave threat?
And let’s not single Blair out for criticism. The nations of the world contribute their money and their scientists to the IPCC in order to determine how best to face the threat of climate change. Then, when the scientists sit down to draw up their conclusions, these same countries send representatives to the meetings to water down the findings. This has the benefit of making the IPCC reports unassailable (since they’ve already been assailed), but it also makes them less urgent, just when urgency is called for.
Let me put it another way. When people are convinced that there is a real threat, they don’t wait for evidence. And they certainly don’t delay while they determine whether they can afford to respond to the challenge. Countless billions have been spent squashing an imaginary threat in Iraq, for which there was never any evidence, and shoring up an isolated ad hoc government in Afghanistan. There are always vast fortunes at hand to finance military campaigns against harmless tyrants, yet the coffers are empty when it comes time to roll up our sleeves to do something about a much, much more urgent threat.
So the difference between the crisis posed by a tin-pot dictator on one hand, and that posed by the specter of planetary ecological emergency is neither the necessity for due diligence in evidence gathering nor the imperative of budgetary caution. The difference is political will, or the intangible sense of urgency. Somehow, it seemed plausible to some people that if Canadians did not occupy part of Afghanistan, the Taliban would be setting up shop in Toronto, and to others that if Americans did not flatten Iraq, Saddam Hussein would invade Michigan. People have yet to be convinced that unless we get our civilization in order, we’ll face a future far more troubling and much more plausible.
There are no doubt many reasons for this. It’s easier to blame other people, and to assign to others the task of solving the problem. It’s not as fun to cut CO2 emissions as it is to get ready for war. We’re never going to “win” the fight against climate change in any familiar sense, and no one is going to riot for austerity measures, as George Monbiot says.
That’s all true. But we’re going to need to get past it. Eventually, we are going to have to act as though we believe that the threat of climate change is as real as the IPCC says it is. And I would love to see the media make the case for action the same way they beat the drum for war. To have a story about climate change between a story about Angelina Jolie’s latest adoption and an account of the prospects of this or that hockey team in the first round of the NHL playoffs is a kind of lie. It suggests that these stories are of the same kind, and they’re not.
I know perfectly well that the media are not going to change, just as I know perfectly well that the Romans did not have broadsheets. That’s not the point. The point is that what we do illustrates what we believe better than what we say, and that if we don’t believe we are in trouble despite the evidence building up around us, we are fools.
People have been talking about the impending end of civilization since Thomas Malthus and before.
And they'll still be talking about it after we're gone, and our children's children are gone.
You can look back to periodicals from any period in the past to see that people are woefully inable to accurately predict what the future will be like.
Whatever happens next, it's probably not what we think.
People don't protest because it isn't clear against whom (or what) we should be protesting. Every one of us - individuals, corporations, governments - is guilty of contributing to global warming. So whose door do we bang on? And once we get there, can we present concrete demands or just vague requests like "lower your CO2 emissions by some non-specific degree somehow"?
For example, it is easy to say to India "don't burn so much coal, it's a major contributor to CO2 emissions which is bad for the us as a species". The underlying problem there is an economic one (it's a poor country, they burn coal because it's cheap). So until the people of India can afford a cleaner burning fuel, that problem will not go away. How do you address the economic situation of an entire country (or magically create a clean burning fuel that is less expensive than coal)? There is no simple answer, no specific laundry list of demands any protester can offer.
Do you really think taking to the streets will magically change everything right away?
In this day and age, it doesn't change as much as it used to. We take to the streets quite often here in Mexico, and sure, we hear promises made, decisions suposedly 'overturned,' but how much does it actually change things? Not much. Take the last presidential election, there were thousands, hundreds of thousands of protesters on the streets for months upon months, but Felipe Calderon still won. A few months ago, they raised the price of public transportation in my city, and protesters blocked the downtown streets for days, effectively shutting down the city, but you know what? The price still went up.
If we really want to change something, we need to get over the 'environmentalist wacko hippie' stereotype that so many conservatives have given us, show the world that we're grown-up and educated. We're not just college students following the latest cause, we know what we're talking about and you'd damn well better listen to us. I don't think taking to the streets is the way to accomplish that.
Real change occurs when minds change one at a time. I thought one of the most significant parts of 'An Inconvenient Truth' was when Al Gore was talking about how he felt he could make the greatest impact doing his presentation around the world, informing one room of people at a time. That should be our goal. Get your family on board. Get your neighbors on board. Once you do, encourage them to get their families and neighbors on board. That is how we will accomplish this.
The Malthus comment is not relevant. Malthus wasn't operating with any comparable quantity of emiprical evidence (nor was that evidence of comparable quality.) And frankly, he didn't have the concurrence of a world scientific community. The people behind the current global warming science have taken great pains to mold a consensus view.
But that doesn't seem to matter to deniers. They'll pull any inapposite example they can to gum up the works. (By the way, you will find the greatest enthusiasts for Malthus among the far right in America.)
I believe part of it lies in the fact that people protested, people got arrested, people got shot with rubber bullets, hell, people DIED, and not a damn thing changed except the media learned to marginalize the protesters.
It seems like many people have simply given up feeling they can contribute more to this world than their meaningless paper-shuffling job or influence more than the outcome on American Idol.
He's not urging people to protest. He's saying that the scarcity of protest is evidence that people don't really believe what they're saying when they talk about the threat of climate chage. In other words, if we really believed that absolutely everything is at stake, we'd act with at least as much urgency as we show when we stick up for harp seal or macquilladora workers. Protest is just one way of showing we're serious. Lack of protest is just a symptom of a general lack of action.
Such a thing as this can be directed squarely at one spot, just the same as it can be directed to one spot for cause for war. The difference lies in that we target our own government and essentially ourselves. War is easy, us vs them etc... For climate change, we cant point any fingers until we deal with our own faults, the only thing with the power to enforce change is our government. So what do we do? We ram the barricades at the parliament buildings until the government starts laying down some law.
the beast will be seduced only for so long, a day will come when misdirection and misinformation will not work anymore. When the beast finally wakes up, nothing will stop it.
I think there's no reason for DESPAIR. After all, a lot of success has been acheived recently. Just concentrate on the next election, and getting people in (of either party) who want to get stuff done.
No one likes concentrating on the mundane details of politics and compromise, but one you get in the daily habit, it isn't so bad. If every reader posted one opinion to a mainstream website every day (and all the big networks have comment fields) that's hundreds of comments. That's huge potential.
i go on CBS News or New Republic and too many commenters are right-wing nut jobs. We need some Treehuggers in there!
I am joining with more than 1300 other protest groups nationwide, taking to the streets this Saturday for a Step It Up Action to tell congress to pass legislation that will switch our economy to running on clean energy.
http://stepitup2007.org
I can't belive treehuggers are so negative!
We changed the way we powered our vehicles from the horse to the horsedrawn carriage. We can do similar things today. We don't have to drive gasoline cars if we say we won't any more. We consumers can let Detroit know that.
They think we won't buy an electric car, that could be powered by your solar roof (subsidised by legislation in congress now, if you tell them you want it!)
here, go and vote for the electric Volt:
http://www.gm.com/company/gm_exp_live/events/naias_2007/index_flash.html?navID=3.0.1.1&seo=goo_volt
If global climate change causes us to die out as a species, our own human nature must share an equal amount of the blame. I don't think the problem is that we are blind to the problem, or that we aren't doing anything about it. (Quite the contrary, I would argue that our global "green" awareness and actions are at an all-time high.)
The question we are struggling with is this: of the many things that we (and I mean "we" in the collective sense, i.e., governments) can pursue, which will reap the greatest reward for our efforts? And even once we have the answer to that question, how do we mobilize to get it done?
IMO, we as a species are not terribly good at organizing ourselves on such a large scale and reacting to problems we'll have generations ahead of our own. (And why should we be good at it? In the evolutionary big picture, we've spent all our time living in small clans and reacting only to our most immediate needs.)
We feel disconnected from our government. We hate large corporations. It's just human nature. It's ironic and unfortunate that our fate perhaps lies in these very institutions.
And I can't resist...I am reminded of something Vonnegut said in an interview once (found it's still online at rollingstone.com):
....Not satisfied with his answer, I pressed him to expand, wondering if he had any advice for young people who want to join the increasingly vocal environmental movement. 'There is nothing they can do,' he bleakly answered. 'It's over, my friend. The game is lost.'
it is easy to rally against an enemy -- to demand someone else make a change...
but when we are part of the problem,
when we are the ones who need to change,
then it is much harder...
that's why this is an inconvenient truth...
Stop complaining and do something like I did.
I have created a company by the name of Natures Solutions. We manufacture biodegradable and compostable tableware.
Instead of trying to decrease landfill usage and petroleum usage by selling to individual consumers who won't make a dent in our garbage landfills, I am selling to maor corporations, schools, and industries. Do you know how many and how large of cafeterias these people have? Do you know what type of usage they go through?
Quit quoting Vonnegut, and get off your butt and do something.
"Quit quoting Vonnegut, and get off your butt and do something."
Actually, the author of the post is doing something, and writing about the problem is doing something too.
But congrats on your company. Action is where it's at.
Here in Tokyo, Japan, people are protesting but also creating Earth Day Markets (next one is April 21-22) and starting Organic Cafes and using bikes or public transport instead of cars.
Lets keep Trehugger a blog for all the good things going on. Vandalizing SUVs? Not on Trehugger.