The Climate Emergency

I've lived for 65 years.  I've seen that:

Conservatives said that civil rights laws would be a disaster for America. They turned out to be wrong.

Conservatives said that pollution laws would be a disaster for America. They turned out to be wrong.

Conservatives said that fuel efficiency laws would be a disaster for America. They turned out to be wrong.

Conservatives said that auto safety laws would be a disaster for America. They turned out to be wrong.

Now, conservatives say that climate laws will be a disaster for America--"cutting off our arms and legs" is how Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Vice Chair of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, put it on Meet the Press this morning.

They are are wrong again.

Climate change is a global emergency.  It brings to mind two prior global emergencies: World War II and the Y2K computer bug.

During World War II, America, belatedly, recognized the emergency and entered the war against fascism. In many ways the Allies' conduct of the war was riddled with waste and blunders. There was broad consensus, though, (there was a lot of propaganda, of course) that it was an emergency. The democracies (together with Russia) prevailed. No one today doubts that it was an emergency, but before Pearl Harbor, the country was very divided about the necessity of entering the war.

What will be our climate change Pearl Harbor, that will galvanize our attention and our resolve to deal with the emergency? Are we capable of acting before a sufficiently large catastrophe turns our daydream of limitless consumption into a nightmare for some large population of unlucky victims?

Yes we are. The history of the Y2K bug shows the way.

In case you've forgotten, the Y2K bug was an emergency created by the fact that almost none of the computer hardware and software created in the 20th Century would work correctly for dates in the 21st Century. Most of the problems would be small, but engineers who studied the problem recognized that the impact of a vast number of small problems occurring all at once all over the world might well overwhelm our ability to deal with them and create economic and financial chaos. We would be "pecked to death by ducks" as the saying goes.

A massive international effort was undertaken.  Virtually all governments and major businesses mobilized to confront the emergency.  An estimated $300 billion was spent fixing the problem.  Was a lot of that wasted? Yes, of course. It's really difficult, maybe impossible, to confront an emergency without a really shocking amount of waste.

We did a good job though. The 21st Century arrived and there was virtually no disruption from the Y2K bug. In fact, we did such a good job that a lot of people started to doubt whether the problem was ever "real" in the first place or just some fantastic conspiracy dreamed up by computer programmers to make work for themselves. I was involved in it, and I can tell you, it was real. The thing is, we saw a crisis, we mobilized, we solved it. Veni, vidi, vici. It may be the first time in human history that the whole human race mobilized to successfully avert what would probably have amounted to a global disaster.

The first step is to recognize and accept that it's an emergency, as we did in the case of Y2K. What if there had been Y2K deniers? There weren't, or they were marginalized at least. What if they had stopped or impeded the global effort to confront the crisis? You don't know, is the thing. You're on a car trip, and you decide to take a longer route to avoid a dangerous, winding mountain road. You'll never know if you saved yourself from driving off a cliff. That doesn't mean you were wrong. "Uneventful" is the goal in that case.

Thoughtful persons have a solemn responsibility to confront the deniers and take every opportunity to get the word out that the climate emergency is real, and that we need to take the longer, safer route to the future rather than risk finding out if the shortcut is going to work out for us or not.

You wear seatbelts. You use child safety seats. You buy cars with airbags. You don't drive on bald tires. You don't drink the Kool-Aid if the safety seal is broken. So let it be known in every way you can that you don't want to play demolition derby with the future of our planet. Most of our children and grandchildren will not get a chance to inhabit another.