Ever Get The Sense They Are Counting On Our Lack Of Focus?

“Climate change is the defining issue of our time.” South Korea’s Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General

Madame:

While baseball season crescendos, and football season swings into high gear, the modern day Romans are willfully ignoring the seminal issues of our time.  One of them is the Climate Summit and the demonstrations surrounding it.  Their seemingly willing acquiescence to minimalist or dismissive coverage would seem to indicate they are okay with not being informed on it, let alone caring enough about the subject to be emotionally invested in it.

Or they are in denial:

Someone told me he was incensed that “all the funding is going to prove climate change exists but none is going to the skeptics of it.”

This person is a working class college student  who also has an effectively full-time restaurant job.  Where would his expressed viewpoint come from, and more importantly, why would he believe it important to him to have it?

Readers can do their own critical thinking on those questions, but one thing his response illustrates is that we are creatures of great illogic and manipulatable emotion at times.  What would be the reason for funding climate change research but not funding research that was skeptical of it?  Some selfish advancement or personal aggrandizement of the 97% climatologists who agree climate change exists? ALL of them?  We haven’t exactly seen them bumping around the Waldorf plunking down several hundreds on lunch, nor tooling down the freeway in the latest sports car, nor taking exotic vacations, nor living in lavish mansions (a few do, but that the vast majority do not …).

Or it’s a conspiracy of the renewable energy industry?  Quite a conspiracy to get 97% buy in of a lot of people.  Conspiracies usually fall apart  with far fewer people (climatologists number in the tens of thousands).  And if it WAS a conspiracy, the result would be, what?  That we get a world of non-polluting, sustainable, local jobs creating, renewable energy that our descendants can be proud of instead of bequeathing to them some nightmarish world?

In any case, the question’s premise is manifestly incorrect, because skeptics and deniers, some with marginal or vaporous credentials, have had a wealth of funding, albeit from fossil fuel industry-related organizations and plutocrats connected to them.  Their “findings” have been lackluster at very best.  It doesn’t take very much thought to realize that if the findings had been at all credibly awesome or paradigm-shattering, the plutocratic influence on the mass media would have gotten them plenty of coverage.

Further detracting from the premise is that many formerly skeptical climatologists, some after having done their skeptical research, have changed their minds.

Climate change denial is a mere subset of the general denial prevalent in the West, and in America in particular.   Denying or ignoring reality, and especially the harmful results of what we are doing and not doing, has become too much of a norm.  When anxiety and fear over the pace of change is thrown in, the result has been a people far too selfishly susceptible to abdicating on acknowledgement of the problem, let alone action.  When personal and family economic anxiety has been made forefront in people’s lives, as the plutocratic transformation has made it for so many, the abdication becomes an even more fearful one.   Many ill-informed, misinformed Americans, of course, take it one step further and actually do the unwitting bidding of the status quo perpetrators, becoming fierce opposers of beneficial change.

We are more than willing to insure our possessions, our lives, and our national defense against far less likely phenomena, and far less disastrous consequences.  Planetary/ecosystemic insurance against the effects of climate change, in our uprooted disconnection from nature, is somehow a foreign concept to both minds and emotions of too many.  And this is even as the costs of climate change mount for all to see every year.  But with our primitive social accounting systems, apparently we miss the connections, let alone the second, third, fourth, etc. order effects.

It gives me no pleasure to recall it, but over 20 years ago I wrote that the looming effects of climate change would become more inescapable to see the world over, and that its effects would move beyond the so-called “Third World” and into the lives of the West. 

Going on as we have is doing the equivalent of deliberately injuring our children and grandchildren.  Perpetuating the unsustainable status quo is increasingly a malevolent choice.  And as Hedges continually says, systems management for the plutocrats will do little but make it worse.

What feelings and thoughts will our descendants have about us if we continue this pattern?  Bewilderment?  Contempt? Or will they seek to have no thoughts or feelings about us at all?

And another important question.  Do we care what they’ll think and feel about us?

Pan-culturally, it would appear the answer is not affirmative, perhaps even… “meh.”