Earth is Toast

To borrow from the Republican’s playbook whenever one of them is asked to address climate change, let me preface this by saying: I am not a scientist.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s admit it doesn’t take a PhD to understand that the earth is warming at an alarming rate. On Nov. 8 (ironically enough), the World Meteorological Organization reported that—among other disturbing trends—the past five years were the hottest on record. NASA, in a handy info-graphic on their climate site, reports that arctic ice is decreasing by more than 13 percent every decade.

Basically, we’re screwed.

What’s also painfully clear is we’re not going to do anything about it, at least not until irreversible, catastrophic damage is done (assuming that hasn’t already happened). To my mind, the main reason we’re not going to do anything (or certainly not enough) is almost as depressing as the actual problems that will arise from global warming, and it has little to do with ideology.

Put simply, there is no political capital to be gained, on either side of the aisle, from reversing climate change—at least not until its dangers are fully realized.

Yes, Trump’s administration is arguably worse for the planet than a Clinton administration would have been, and it’s unarguably in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry. As Noam Chomsky said in an interview with Truthout after Trump’s election, “The president-elect calls for rapid increase in use of fossil fuels…dismantling of regulations…and in general, racing to the cliff as fast as possible.”

And yes, there are some on the left who have doggedly pursued solutions to the issue of global warming. But democrats, especially during the Obama administration, didn’t do nearly enough.

So on the one side you have people who don’t believe in science, who either deny global warming is happening at all or claim there is no proof that humans are causing it. On the other you have democrats who refuse to make this issue a top priority. And they will continue to come up short, to employ half-measures.

Why? Because from healthcare to foreign policy, we are a reactionary nation, not an anticipatory one. Now, that’s not a serious admonishment of the country; it’s often difficult to predict and prevent things from happening. But this isn’t one of those instances. We know what’s happening and what needs to be done to stop it.

The paradox is, even if we put all our proverbial eggs in the global warming basket, fix the problem and reverse the damage that’s being done before it gets really bad, a large portion of the country wouldn’t grasp just how bad it could have been.

It’s like, for example, someone who eats healthy everyday. That person doesn’t necessarily realize that by doing so, she or he is actively preventing diabetes, heart disease, etc. The individual could only fully grasp the repercussions of living an unhealthy lifestyle if he or she were to actually get sick. The global warming predicament is no different. Yeah, we have an abstract idea of how bad it will get, but we cant “prove” it until it happens.

If we reversed the trend before catastrophe, the Right would still claim there was no concrete evidence that carbon emissions were causing climate change, that it was always an overblown problem, that God had it on lock—nothing to worry about. Because of that, a victory over climate change wouldn’t manifest into the political victory that it would be if, say, the planet were on the brink of destruction before we did something to stop it. Because of that, it actually better serves the democrats—politically, as a party—to sit on their hands, let things get really bad and then say, “I told you so!” And don’t for one second think that thought hasn’t crossed Nancy Pelosi’s mind.

Now, they shouldn’t do that, as it’s obviously immoral and using human lives as political capital, but that’s nothing new in American politics. You would think, in the age of populism, a cause that affects everyone, something that everyone can get behind (since, you know, we all live here), would be something worth pursuing. If the democrats want to galvanize and invigorate their base after a deflating election, maybe this isn’t a bad place to start. But instead we have partisan bickering, political war-games and, ultimately, inaction.

Meanwhile, temperatures continue to rise, with 2016 set to be the hottest year on record. As the WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a public statement, “Another year, another record.”