The debate about anthropogenic climate change can no longer focus on whether or not it is happening; this has been settled for some time now.
As journalist and environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote in his July 19 Rolling Stone article, the U.S. “broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records” in June.
Droughts unlike anything experienced since the Dust Bowl, raging wildfires, severe flooding and hurricanes: this is the future we now look forward to. As NASA climate scientist James Hansen puts it, we are essentially loading the dice with regard to the climate, drastically increasing the probability of severe weather.
Yet, with the upcoming presidential election looming, no politician seems to want to stir up environmental issues. Mitt Romney has made it clear he has no plans to disrupt the status quo; and President Obama advanced an all-of-the-above energy plan well before his recent convention speech, but has been relatively silent on environmental issues since the start of his campaign.
Are we supposed to accept his change of heart as the voice of reason, the experienced Washington pragmatist? The answer is “yes” only if we want climate disaster.
America needs to get on board with the kind of big, sometimes difficult changes that countries like Germany have begun to make.
And so the question now is how can individuals contribute to a solution? I’m not talking about specific technologies or policies, but merely asking how we can get to the point where we care enough to take action?
Part of the problem evokes a classic predicament of the human in a globalized world: we feel insignificant in the grand scheme of things. How can one person’s actions, we wonder, make a difference?
The solutions to climate change won’t come as easily as casting a ballot. We can vote for the lesser of two evils, but until we demand that more attention be devoted to the issue in Washington, we are consenting to inaction.
If Obama doesn’t feel pressure from voters to address environmental issues like fracking, tar sands or Artic drilling now, I can assure you he won’t as election day draws closer—especially when fossil fuel interest groups donate millions to his campaign.
The first step, and a fundamental one at that, is changing the way we frame the issue. To do this, more and more sociologists have focused on understanding how we conceive of climate change; much has been said, for example, about our inability to imagine problems that are distant in time and space.
We don’t like to imagine a world radically different from our current one, let alone one different and worse. People often cite the lack of specifics as another barrier.
But there are many reasons why, as Anthony Leisorowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, put it in a New York Times article: “You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology.”
A recent, yet unfortunately low-profile paper in Nature titled “Climate Change and Moral Judgement” attempted to analyze six major moral impediments to acting on climate change and offered potential solutions. These ideas were based in studies and experiments.
Let’s analyze these suggestions for overcoming the “abstractness and cognitive complexity” of climate change. The facts alone have not done enough to produce change on the scale that the problem demands. They propose a more comprehensive effort to tap existing moral values.
Appealing to the sanctity of the earth has been a particularly strong argument among religious people who might otherwise be predisposed to downplay anthropogenic climate change.
Or, as the aforementioned article suggests, we can erase the abstraction of “future generations” in favor of our own sons and daughters.
Much more can be said about how to frame climate change, but if we can discern one theme, it is the need for unification.
Oil magnates like the Koch brothers, as McKibben suggests, provide easy enemies, but they are not necessarily the best ones. We should acknowledge that the burning of fossil fuels brought great progress, but we must also accept responsibility for the damage.
With this, we can start the real crusade—a crusade against our former ways. And while it may sound cliché, we must concentrate the effort around the family and the community, our children and our neighbors.