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Snappy climate-change slogans are self-defeating
(by David Linzee - June 18, 2008)
‘Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” Mark Twain famously remarked. That’s certainly true of the United States Congress, which last week saw a fierce debate about the Climate Security Act and no action.
The act, which proposed using market incentives to reduce carbon emissions, was the first really serious attempt to shake Washington out of its torpor of the last eight years, but it didn’t even get to a vote. When it comes to climate change, too many politicians and pundits seem to be more interested in annoying their ideological foes than in confronting the problem.
Whether you’re on the right or the left, you can strike an attitude that makes you feel good. Conservatives can feel tough-minded. “A Little Global Warming Realism, Please” was the finger-drumming title of a recent Charles Krauthammer column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Liberals, meanwhile, can feel tender-hearted as they buy hybrid SUVs to “save the planet.”
Fellow liberals, let’s throw that slogan in the recycling bin. “Save the planet” is sanctimonious nonsense. As the environmentalist Mark Hertsgaard pointed out years ago, the earth has already survived much worse than we could ever do to it. The planet is durable — individual species are fragile. The environment has changed many times over the millennia, and as a result species have declined or become extinct. Forget saving the planet; we’re trying to save ourselves.
Another subject liberals like to talk about is how others are going to have to pay for their environmental sins. I was at a party recently where my fellow-lefties were happily bashing the oil companies and the Chinese. When I pointed out that we had all driven to the party, and we might have to make sacrifices too, I got a lot of blank looks.
Conservatives, by contrast, recognize how painful for everyone the act of reducing our energy consumption will be. Fortunately we don’t have to do anything at all, because environmentalism is just a pinko conspiracy. Krauthammer, in the column mentioned above, wrote that environmentalism is simply another attack on the free-enterprise system by the same “intellectual left” that tried to foist socialism and communism on us. What the issue needs, he concludes, is more scientific study.
We have infinite leisure for study, apparently. Only action is dangerous; inaction is safe. It’s a strong contrast to the way Krauthammer writes about, say, Iran. The possibility that nature could do us much more harm than Iran — that Manhattan might be flooded, for instance — seems infinitely remote to him, if it’s real at all.
Conservatives keep hoping that more study will get us off the hook: the climate’s changing, but it’s not our fault, so we don’t have to worry about it. Nothing people do can affect the weather. That was a safe enough assumption in the 1880s, when Twain made his famous joke. Today we are begrudgingly realizating that we have been doing something about the weather for a long time now — pumping gases into the atmosphere and making it slowly but steadily warmer. Some of the consequences are already upon us, with catastrophic ones potentially to come.
As is common in science, unanimous consensus, in this case about the level of human contribution to climate change, does not exist. Just like predictions in any other field, a prediction about the precise severity of the problem and the timing of the consequences is tricky business. That gives conservative pundits plenty of wiggle room.
Unlike the pundits, people who bear some of the real-world responsibility for the problem recognize that the threat is real and immediate. Recently Sverdrup, the engineering firm, warned the transportation industry to prepare to cope with coastal flooding, forced evacuations, more frequent hurricanes and so on. And Ernst & Young, the accountants, named climate change as the biggest threat to the insurance industry.
Ernst & Young, Sverdrup — these are not Krauthammer’s pinko intellectuals.
I’m worried that the urgency of the climate crisis isn’t going to be enough to motivate action. This issue lacks the emotional gratification both sides crave. Conservatives like to fight evildoers. They want the climate crisis to be more like The Battle of Britain. Liberals like to rescue victims. They want it to be more like Free Willy.
Facing up to climate change, I fear, is not going to be rousing. It will not bring a tear to our eye or a lump to our throat. It will be a matter of recognizing that we have to make sacrifices without being absolutely sure what the future holds, because the risks are too heavy to bear. It will be like quitting smoking. You can’t be sure that smoking will cause you to develop cancer. But you do have shortness of breath and a nagging cough, and you think — I better quit now, because once I actually have cancer, it’ll be too late.
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