Why Are We Watching the Earth Burn?
Lately, I've had a hard time dealing with the realities of climate change. It's not a new story, it's just become a lot more obvious and apparent in our daily lives.
The word that underpins my general feeling: helpless.
Normally, I'm hopeful and on most days, I still am. But after months of reading, research, and writing, I've gravitated towards the dark side of the spectrum. Despite all the warnings, it feels like we'd rather let the Earth burn than change our values, lifestyles, and behaviors.
Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Rebecca Lindsey. August 14, 2020.
We've known about the scientific impact of greenhouse gas emissions dating back to 1896, with follow-up studies in the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s that corroborated decades of speculation that human activities are contributing to increased GHG emissions and global warming. And yet, as we witness the hockey stick curve of CO2 emissions and correlated global temperature averages, we're still not acting like this is the biggest problem we've ever faced as a civilization.
Since 1750, changes in the drivers of the climate system are dominated by the warming influence of 4 increases in atmospheric GHG concentrations and a cooling influence from aerosols, both resulting from 5 human activities.
(IPCC AR6 WGI. TS.2.2 Changes in the Drivers of the Climate System)
Code Red
Environmentalism and climate activism have seen similar growth trajectories, putting enough pressure on institutions to divest over 14 trillion dollars from the fossil fuel industry. But with every one step forward, we've taken two steps backward — we're on track to contribute more carbon emissions into the atmosphere than ever before.
This is Not Fine. KC Green. 2006.
Despite all the warnings, despite the science, despite the realities we face every day, we continue to go about everyday life as the trajectory of our society continues to drive us towards more consumption in the name of progress and wealth. Even if we somehow managed to bring a population consensus to mobilize in the name of climate action, we're only one nation on a globe with misaligned goals.
In light of the IPCC AR6 Climate Change Report released this week, mainstream media has plastered their front pages with a bleak picture for the planet, a "code red for humanity." Yet as you click the links to read on, the first image you see before the headline is an ad — "Presented by Chevron - the Human Energy Company," a green-washed sponsorship on top publications that rings true to the nature of our society and growth goals at the expense of everything else.
We know corporations contribute the most to our climate crisis and somehow still believe a collective can make a change, but how can we possibly activate climate action when we can't even reach a consensus on something as obvious and easy and masking or vaccinating during a global pandemic. How can we make humanity care enough to solve a problem that's even more invisible than a pandemic? Despite the uprooting of our economies and the millions of deaths counted worldwide, with the lion's share in the US, we can't convince people to get a shot.
The impacts of climate change will become far worse than Covid-19. It's more "invisible" than Covid-19 because it doesn't work on the timescales that we've grown accustomed to, and before the end of the century, we will witness the same levels of devastation with exponential frequency and no short-term miracle fix that a vaccine can offer to combat a virus.
As of last week, more than 600,000 people are known to have died from COVID-19 worldwide. On an annualized basis, that is a death rate of 14 per 100,000 people.
How does that compare to climate change? Within the next 40 years, increases in global temperatures are projected to raise global mortality rates by the same amount—14 deaths per 100,000. By the end of the century, if emissions growth stays high, climate change could be responsible for 73 extra deaths per 100,000 people. In a lower emissions scenario, the death rate drops to 10 per 100,000.
In other words, by 2060, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.
COVID-19 is awful. Climate change could be worse. Bill Gates. 2021.
Instead of focusing solely on the technological solutions (a climate change vaccine), it feels like we need to focus on the code red of humanity and society. We need to challenge what we've built, what behaviors we've incentivized, and what collective understandings we've fostered over time of what it means to live in a global community.
If we stand a chance to prevent a climate catastrophe, shouldn't we focus on community?
Look Around
It's no surprise we fetishize Mr. Roger's famous advice to "look for the helpers" when we're constantly faced with acts of sudden tragedy. As adults dealing with something so large and difficult to grasp, we need to be spoken to like children that need guidance, simplification, and calming. What are we supposed to do in prolonged acts of cumulative tragedy and environmental destruction that get incrementally worse every year — hotter summers, colder winters, rising sea levels, more wildfires, more droughts, more floods, more tropical storms.
The helpers have been there and they’re growing — frontline communities, non-profits, CBOs have been shouting, writing, pleading for years, but as a whole, we’ve refuse to accept the gravity of it. You think Covid sucks? Just wait 20 years.
But despite all of this negativity that constantly streams from mainstream media and social media, there has been a concerted effort in recent years in both policy and science to find solutions that not only prevent the worsening of climate change, but also help people adapt and mitigate the damages caused by climate change.
Yes, we can all look to the helpers to make us feel better, but more importantly, we can join the helpers and become helpers ourselves. If we begin to understand that our incremental decisions to drive less, eat less meat, use less plastic, and waste less are small little votes that amplify our effect on the people around us, we can collectively work to change the behaviors and habits that directly contribute to corporation behaviors.
So many people have written about what we can do. The lists often sound the same:
we can work for climate oriented corporations
and we can vote for the people that demonstrate their commitment to these causes
The best we can do is apply what we're already good at to the problem. Not only will it be lucrative for new and growing careers in climate, but it will increasingly become the most important thing any person, corporation, and government deals with in the next 100 years.