Who cares, when it ain't us? — Americans and climate warming

© 2018 Peter Free

 

13 November 2018

 

 

Americans (and presumably humanity) are innately incapable of dealing of climate change

 

I've mentioned this before, using a fun video to illustrate the point.

 

This week, during California's devastating Camp and Woolsey fires, reporter Jeff Goodell concluded the same thing.

 

In taking President Trump to task for his climate-missing critique of California's forest management, Goodell agreed with bad-guy-seekers that the Trump Administration is beholden to the fossil fuel industry. The Administration has, indeed, gone out of its way to sink cooperative efforts to ameliorate global warming.

 

Nevertheless, Goodell pointed the Primary Finger of Blame at representative samples of the American public:

 

 

Trump is not responsible for the burning of the Golden State.

 

We — and when I say “we,” I’m talking about rich westerners who dump the majority of CO2 pollution into the atmosphere — have known about the risks of climate change for 30 years or more, and we have collectively decided to do virtually nothing about it.

 

Consider the 2018 election results.

 

In Washington state, hardly a stronghold of Big Coal and Big Oil, a carbon tax initiative failed.

 

In Arizona, a proposal to require 50 percent of solar power by 2050 was defeated.

 

Neither of these were radical ideas, and neither were close to the scale of change necessary to deal with the climate problem.

 

The fossil fuel industry spent millions of dollars fighting these measures, but, if voters really believed climate change was an urgent problem, they would have voted “yes”.

 

They didn’t.

 

© 2018 Jeff Goodell, When These California Wildfires Go Out, New Ones Will Come, Rolling Stone (12 November 2018) (paragraphs split)

 

 

The moral? — Humanity's enthusiasm for creating and escalating avoidable problems continues

 

Do not be surprised if Extinction eventually kills us off. For having been temperamentally unsuited to this planet.

 

We are smart enough to wreck things. But not intelligent (or self-disciplined) enough to see and act in accord with larger pictures.

 

Who knows, this premise may be one of the test hypotheses being run in the computer simulation that some folks think we're part of.

 

If so, I'm glad that somebody is having fun with the Human Situation.