Today, a UPS dude walked into the office. I made a comment about how people do not shop at the store as much anymore and wondered off-handedly about all the cardboard that packages require. He said to blame Al Gore who “invented the internet” and suddenly launched into a rant about how Al Gore “made millions off global warming” because of his energy company investments. “No one knows this,” he said, conspiratorially.
I am reminded of a time when I was 13 and just becoming acquainted with the climate change “debate.” I remember a parent’s friend telling me, “They say the oceans will rise but what happens in a glass of ice water? When the ice melts, the water level lowers.”
I also remember a male friend who once asked me quite seriously one time that did I ever consider that the vast majority of scientists who say climate change is real and it IS our fault are bought out by the massive trillion dollar energy industry?
These individuals I considered reasonably intelligent (perhaps dubiously the UPS guy) but expressed ideas that would have put an absolute gleam in Rex Tillerson’s eyes. Conspiracy theories with no merit. I wish that I could disregard them, but Trump’s action today to remove us from the Paris Agreement tells me that we truly live in a reality where facts don’t matter.
In his documentary “Before the Flood,” Leonardo Dicaprio asks then President Obama, “You have access to information. What makes you terrified?”
Obama responded, “A huge proportion of the world’s population lives near oceans. If they start moving, then you start seeing scarce resources are subject to competition between populations. This is the reason the Pentagon has said this is a national security issue. And this in addition to the sadness I would feel if my kids could never see a glacier the way that I did when I went up to Alaska. I want them to see the same things that I saw when I was growing up.”
The family friend who incorrectly analogized ice water to what’s happening in Antarctica has since passed away. I respected him and thought he was a good person. But he will not have to live in a world ravaged by increasingly chaotic climate patterns, oceans that consume our coastlines, and a scarcity of resources.
Oil is finite. It is becoming increasingly dangerous (from both a public health and an environmental standpoint) to extract it from harder-to-reach places. There is a worldwide scientific consensus that our CO2 addiction is leading us to a more chaotic future, not to mention threatening the existence of millions of other species, not just ours.
These three reasons would be enough on their own, but together should make our efforts to reverse climate change a no-brainer. But today the U.S. has indicated to the world (along with a whopping two other countries, Nicaragua and Syria, woo) that we will do nothing to stop a literal tidal wave at our door. I feel like exclaiming in a quasi-British Carrie Fisher accent, “Help us Elon Musk, you’re our only hope!”
(Either that or we live in someone’s joke of a simulated reality and none of this is real and actually sometime in 1955 we created an alternate 1985 where Biff becomes a casino mogul leading us to an alternate 2015 where Biff becomes President and we need to send Marty back to original 1955 to stop old Biff from giving young Biff the Sports Almanac thus giving Trump (cough, I mean Biff) his wealth and power.)
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial
Betsy Hayes says: