WORLDFIRE - Chapter 14, Part II
Last Hours?
The window of opportunity for gradualism and baby steps closed a long time ago. Mother Nature doesn’t compromise. She’s telling us time is up. Any hope of turning around the Titanic requires honestly addressing something that is currently holding us back: the unwillingness of many to fully internalize the true scope and scale of the existential crisis we face, a crisis that unless addressed in heroic fashion soon promises violent social upheaval, immense suffering, mass death, and very possibly the end of our species. Here I am talking about the complex phenomenon of people suppressing climate reality for reasons of their own. I am talking about psychological barriers we all erect from time to time to help us cope with painfully complex challenges.
In 2009, the American Psychological Association commissioned a task force on the “Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change” to try to get a handle on why more people don't feel more urgency, despite dire warnings from experts. Drawing on decades of research and practice, the task force identified six barriers to change: uncertainty, mistrust, denial, undervaluing risks, lack of control, and habit. I would add a seventh: raw human fear. The truth is just too scary for many people. Acknowledging a threat that could wipe out humanity raises the uncomfortable specter of our own mortality. Most people don’t want to ponder their own aging, let alone their own death, at least not in the U.S. where we worship at the fountain of youth and where talk of death–the great equalizer–is largely taboo. Because people don’t talk about these things, there is a lot of fear in our culture around aging and death. I sometimes wrestle with the aging process myself. But aging and death are a natural part of life. Why fear that which will find us all in the end anyway? We age from the day we are born and every single one of us will someday die.
My viewpoint is supported by a fascinating study conducted by researchers at Cornell University. Reporting on the study in Greater Good Magazine, writer Lisa Bennett writes: “One might think that presenting climate change as a threat to humans would be more likely to move people to action than framing it as a threat to birds. But… the study suggests that people appear more willing to take action if the perceived threat involves some kind of beloved creature other than them. And the reason is that, at least when it comes to climate change, people seem more motivated by empathy for non-human others than their own self-interest… The authors suggest that focusing climate discussions on the risk to humans can cause people to unconsciously think about death, which activates defense mechanisms, such as denial, repression, and projection of the eventuality far into the future.” This got me to thinking about the “fight or flight” response and how humans are wired to respond to immediate threats via fight or flight. Evolution did not prepare us to instinctively respond similarly to long-term threats like climate breakdown. But if you are someone who cares more about birds, you will be alarmed to learn about this finding from a 2019 National Audubon Society report: “Two-thirds of America’s birds are threatened with extinction from climate change.” Former Audubon CEO, David Yarnold, calls the climate-driven extinction threat “a bird emergency.”
In a 2017 New York magazine piece called, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” author David Wallace-Wells offers up his own laundry list of reasons for our failure to respond: “the timid language of scientific probabilities… the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past… the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear.”
Even many climate scientists, the people with the firmest grasp on what is happening, suppress overt recognition of the terrifying truth as a kind of protective shield. As explained by glaciologist Jason Box: "I think most scientists must be burying overt recognition of the awful truths of climate change in a protective layer of denial (not the same kind of denial coming from conservatives, of course). I'm still amazed how few climatologists have taken an advocacy message to the streets, demonstrating for some policy action.” In a 2017 op-ed written by climate scientist Peter Kalmus, “To My Fellow Climate Scientists: Be Human, Be Brave, Speak Truth,” Kalmus explains that “scientists have a careful, understated culture; we don’t like calling attention to ourselves. We prefer letting our results speak for themselves. As a group, we prefer evidence to politics; we communicate mainly within our ranks and behind paywalls in scientific journals. And when we have something scary to say, we employ the dry and precise language of science.” He then challenges his colleagues by writing: “We need to let our emotions shine through; we need to become storytellers,” warning that “when climate scientists don’t speak out, we’re inadvertently sending a message that climate change isn’t urgent. If the experts—the scientists on the front lines, the people who know—are so calm, dispassionate, and quiet, how bad can it really be?” Being the change he wants to see in the world, Kalmus has been anything but quiet.
A hopeful display of more scientists finding their voices unfolded at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco soon after Trump’s election, where 500 people rallied in defense of science. 500 people gathering at a rally is hardly major news. What’s news is that many of them were scientists, in their white lab coats, there to speak out against President Trump’s assault on science. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, more than 1 million people across the globe–including an estimated 100,000 marchers in Washington, DC–attended a series of Earth Day marches and rallies under the banner, “March for Science,” calling for “political leaders and policymakers to enact evidence-based policies in the public interest.”
I am not a scientist myself, but I track pretty closely what scientists are discovering and based on some of the more frightening findings I have shared with you, I can empathize with their impulse to suppress. While I try not to suppress these terrible truths myself, I also don’t let them dominate my thinking 24/7. If I did, I would never sleep. I would never smile. Instead, I compartmentalize what I know. But I do go there most days, at least for a while. I make it a point to sit with the truth. While researching and writing this chapter, I sat there for weeks, finding myself alternatively demoralized, angry, and depressed. Writing the “Houston, We Have a Problem” chapter was similarly agonizing for me. But pain is what breaks our hearts open. If we do not allow ourselves to feel the righteous anger that comes from knowing that corrupt corporations are putting the lives of everyone we love in danger, how will we find the courage to fight to hold those soulless entities accountable for their monstrous actions? If we do not allow ourselves to feel the soul-wracking grief that comes from owning up to the destruction we have unleashed upon the world, how will we find the strength to rise up and protect those we love from its awful wrath?
Scientists used to be celebrated in our society for helping us better understand the world. Think of all the scientific discoveries that have so dramatically improved our lives: electricity, X-rays, antibiotics, the Internet, spaceflight… the list is endless. A war on science is nothing less than a war on human progress. They may not think of their work as heroic, but consider how critical climate scientists are to the future of humanity. By sounding the alarm to ward off climate calamity–often in the face of ferocious personal and professional attacks by fossil fuel industry mercenaries–these professionals are performing a monumental service to the public. Society owes these brave men and women our deep gratitude. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment. How would you feel if you were smeared and threatened by industry hacks and their political lackeys for simply doing your job? Then think about the personal impacts their terrifying real-world findings must be having on the climate scientists who are discovering them. It is the stuff of nightmares.
It is no wonder so many climate scientists are suffering from depression. In 2014, Grist interviewed climate scientists suffering from “climate depression,” described as a condition brought on by the deflation they feel from having their alarming discoveries ignored. One of them, senior scientist for climate change research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Jeffrey Kiehl, turned the question back on the interviewer by saying: “How would that make you feel? You take this information to someone and they say they don’t believe you, as if it’s a question of beliefs. I’m not talking about religion here, I’m talking about facts. It’s equivalent to a doctor doing extremely detailed observations on someone and concluding that someone needed to have an operation, and the person looks at the doctor and says, ‘I don’t believe you.’”
Climate denial is one thing. Climate apathy is another. There will always be some who selfishly suppress climate reality–whether consciously or not–so that they don’t have to inconvenience themselves. If you can fool yourself into thinking the scientific consensus isn’t real, you can rationalize staying politically disengaged and not having to change your lifestyle in any way. We all know how resistant ingrained behaviors are to change. On the surface at least, life is more comfortable that way, even if deep down such rationalizations are harming oneself and others. Other people willfully avoid news of the topic altogether by trying to convince themselves it is not their “issue.” Yet others try to console themselves by saying humans may go extinct sometime in the future anyway, so why worry about it. The fatal flaw in this thinking is that extinction may happen in the lifetimes of our children or grandchildren. Earth’s systems are breaking down now, not in some far-off distant future. Still others selfishly say they’re so old it probably won’t affect them. Again, I say, what about the children? We are bequeathing them a future filled with immense suffering. Absent a heroic all-hands-on-deck mobilization, lethal social upheaval is all but guaranteed in the lifetime of our children.
In a piece called “The Psychology of Denial,” author Steve Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, takes a deeper dive into denial as a coping mechanism: “In most areas of life, we trust the expertise of others... If we get on an airplane, we rely on the scientific principles and the engineering expertise which enables us to glide six miles above the ground at 500 miles an hour. But with climate change it seems to be different.” Addressing the abstract nature of the challenge, he writes: “Human awareness tends to be quite narrow, and focused on everyday immediate concerns… Climate change isn’t visible and immediate, not part of [our] everyday world, and so we don’t pay attention to it.” Then he gets to the heart of the matter: “But perhaps more importantly, human beings are frequently reluctant to accept uncomfortable facts. The theory of cognitive dissonance describes the unease which comes when reality conflicts with our beliefs, and how we often go to extreme lengths [to] try to ignore or distort evidence, so that we can maintain our beliefs. So we try to deal with cognitive dissonance created by global warming by ignoring it completely, or attributing it to a conspiracy.” Ignoring and distorting scientific facts. Calling global heating a hoax. Sound familiar? Taylor concludes: “To avoid confronting uncomfortable realities, we engage in self-deception, convincing ourselves that everything isn’t as bad as it seems… what could be more uncomfortable than contemplating the devastation and hardship which scientists tell us that global warming will inevitably cause, the idea that our activities may be destroying the ability of our planet to sustain life? This is such a grave threat that it’s not surprising that many people refuse to accept it.”
One who has fully dedicated himself to increasing the public’s acceptance of climate breakdown is the UK’s University of Cumbria sustainability leadership Professor Jem Bendell. Bendell believes “it is probable that our civilisation will collapse within the lifetimes of people alive today, and it is possible that humanity will be extinct by the end of the century.” In 2018, Bendell made major waves with his provocative concept paper, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” In it, he offers readers “an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near term social collapse due to climate change.” Moving beyond the theoretical, he writes that “when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.” Arguing that academics “no longer have time for the career games of aiming to publish in top-ranked journals to impress our line managers or improve our CV for if we enter the job market,” he asserts that to “evolve in response to the climate tragedy one may have to quit a job – and even a career.” Walking his talk, Bendell has himself “moved into a new phase of work in light of the latest climate science.”
Is it just me or do you also find it odd that the biggest crisis facing humanity today is hardly ever talked about? A 2016 survey conducted by Yale and George Mason universities “suggests that there is a climate change ‘spiral of silence,’ in which even people who care about the issue, shy away from discussing it because they so infrequently hear other people talking about it – reinforcing the spiral.” According to the survey, “about seven in ten Americans report that they ‘rarely’ (36%) or ‘never’ (32%) discuss global warming with family and friends.” Their 2018 survey found similar numbers. Unlike sports and the weather, the climate crisis is just not something most Americans talk about standing around the water cooler at work. It’s a scary topic, so they avoid it. Most people don’t want to talk about, let alone emotionally connect with, the fact that our life support systems are crashing down around us. Sometimes I don’t want to talk about it. I get it. It’s depressing. But if an asteroid were on a collision course with Earth, everyone would be talking about it. In the end, I think the biggest reasons people don’t talk about it more are: 1) the science is complicated; and 2) the challenge feels overwhelming.
The nuances of atmospheric science are complex and because it’s a science, the findings are constantly evolving as new discoveries are made. I sometimes struggle to understand it all myself. The detailed findings of climate scientists often do not lend themselves to simple sound bites, yet we live in a social media age with shrinking attention spans. Who has time to study the latest scientific findings when most of us are struggling just to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads? And we are getting almost no help from the corporate media. Instead of responsibly educating the public on the true scope of the crisis, most of the major television outlets avoid the topic like the plague. We need not just more climate reporting, but more outlets dedicated specifically to covering climate news.
Instead, we are simmering in a mythical cultural stew of fear and lack, infected by the toxic, demoralizing corporate news we are spoon-fed daily. But what if instead of having our minds polluted with the gruel of death and destruction we are served up daily on the 24/7 negative news networks, we were fed a daily diet of life-affirming news? What if instead of adopting fear-based “if it bleeds, it leads” programming, cable news networks started covering the far more frequent extraordinary acts of kindness people all over the world commit every day? Imagine a news outlet devoted specifically to covering the everyday heroes who are working to solve the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. You might think this an impossible dream, but it is not. It is actually a choice. People with resources created the negative news networks. People with resources can create the opposite. I have long dreamt of doing what Ted Turner did with CNN, only my cable news network would be called ENN (Earth News Network), devoted 24/7 to reporting on those who are doing the heroic work of making peace with the planet. The global climate emergency is the biggest story of our time. It demands media coverage to match.
Then there is the overwhelming part. Many people feel paralyzed by the enormity of it all and just don’t know what to do. As you may recall, I felt some of this myself before my mind was sparked to embark upon the trek about which you are now reading. Many feel powerless in the face of powerful special interests that are perpetrating the suicidal status quo. Others feel like it is an exercise in futility to make changes in their own lives when they see people around them unwilling to do the same. Still others consciously change their lifestyle to shrink their carbon footprint in the spirit of leading by example, despite knowing it will not make a decisive dent in overall emissions. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus argues that “the main impact of reducing our [individual] emissions isn’t the emissions reduction itself: by modeling change, we tell a new story of what’s possible, shifting the culture and opening space for large-scale change.” Peter is right, of course, and he is living his life as a model for the Gandhian philosophy of being the change he wants to see in the world. I, too, try to be conscientious about my carbon contribution in my own way. Living new stories is hugely important, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that individual actions will somehow save us. They won’t. It is way too late for that. Personal actions matter, but they are no substitute for the deep systems change required to avert societal collapse.
This is not to say that those of us, especially in industrialized nations, do not have a responsibility to rein in our overconsumption and shrink our personal carbon footprints. We do. The smaller our carbon footprints, the better, and there are a great many things each of us can do without waiting for the government to act. What is not helpful, however, is guilting people for having a carbon footprint when society is designed to ensure exactly that. Carbon purity is not physically possible in the fossil fuel-based economy in which most of us work and live. This is why we need to change the system. In the words of climate justice essayist Mary Annaïse Heglar: “If we want to function in society, we have no choice but to participate in that system. To blame us for that is to shame us for our very existence.” Do not allow yourself to be shamed for existing.
There is a reason why oil giant BP hired a public relations firm to popularize the “carbon footprint” concept: the titans of industry want you to feel guilty about your carbon contribution so you will refrain from denouncing their stranglehold on our economic and political systems. Do not play their game. It is demoralizing and divisive when we need millions of Americans energized and united in our demands for systems change. For humanity to survive, we must wrest control away from these inhuman corporations and the pliant politicians who enable their deception. We need government officials to enact policies that make it possible for humanity to live sustainably. And it’s not as if we don’t know who these inhuman corporations are. Since 1988, more than one-half of the world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to just 25 corporate and state producers (with 100 producers accounting for 71% of emissions). We know who needs to be reined in.
In a 2019 op-ed he co-authored, Michael Mann went so far as to assert that fixating on “personal actions” as the main solution to the climate crisis “could prove suicidal” to society, warning that “a focus on personal action can divide us, with those living virtuously distancing themselves from those living ‘in sin.’” He explained how “obsession with personal action, though promoted by many with the best of intentions, plays into the hands of polluting interests by distracting us from the systemic changes that are needed. There is no way to avert the climate crisis without keeping most of our coal, oil and gas in the ground, plain and simple.”
Expressed another way by author David Wallace-Wells: “People should try to live by their own values, about climate as with everything else, but the effects of individual lifestyle choices are ultimately trivial compared with what politics can achieve. Buying an electric car is a drop in the bucket compared with raising fuel-efficiency standards sharply. Conscientiously flying less is a lot easier if there’s more high-speed rail around. And if I eat fewer hamburgers a year, so what? But if cattle farmers were required to feed their cattle [a small percent of] seaweed, which might reduce methane emissions by nearly 60 percent according to one study, that would make an enormous difference. That is what is meant when politics is called a ‘moral multiplier.’ It is also an exit from the personal, emotional burden of climate change and from what can feel like hypocrisy about living in the world as it is and simultaneously worrying about its future… That is the purpose of politics: that we can be and do better together than we might manage as individuals.”
Author Samuel Miller McDonald makes a similarly strong argument when he writes: “A vegan, non-flying CEO of ExxonMobil who lives in a carbon neutral yurt is not mitigating climate change even if he reduces his personal carbon emissions to (theoretical) zero. He’s still perpetuating an industry that’s massively responsible for climate change. By the same token, another person could have a positive impact on reducing the effects of climate change, like by working to develop a new means of storing electricity or sequestering carbon or drafting a Green New Deal, while still flying all over the place and eating lots of meat. When we’re talking about what people can do to mitigate climate change, it’s more important to dedicate actions to influence the systems that maintain a fossil fuel economy than making Excel spreadsheets tracking one’s own personal carbon emissions.”
In another piece, Miller McDonald goes further by ascribing culpability for what he calls the crime of the century. His 2017 essay includes an illustration with concentric circles representing those he views as most morally responsible for climate breakdown to those least responsible. At the bullseye (no surprise) is: “Oil/gas/utility.” Radiating out from there in larger and larger circles are: “Political obstructors,” “Corporate obstructors,” “Citizens against solving,” “Citizens apathetic,” “Citizens working to solve,” and “People kept out of the economy.” He declares: “Fossil energy economies are doing this. They transform the world into a deathly, suffocating hothouse sabotaging the climate and atmosphere. That’s what they do. Carbon energy kills 3.5 to 6 million people per year through air pollution alone. Beyond that, this crime is also killing people via extreme hurricanes, wildfires, floods, droughts, and heat waves, expanding the range of deadly diseases like malaria and Lyme, famines, and conflicts like the Syrian civil war… Every one of these types of disasters will continue to intensify – that is inevitable at this point. What is not inevitable is degree of intensity. Quantity of death can still be curtailed; we can prevent billions of deaths, even forestall human extinction. But the tragic fact is that some immense minimum of murder is certain. The body count will exceed those of any crimes that have come before. Monarchs and dictators designed the twentieth century’s vast death; this new crime is perpetrated by a global oligarchy… a network of governments ruled by a super-wealthy elite. The most culpable among this elite are members of the oil, gas, and coal industries. Whereas the events of mass destruction wrought in the last century ceased, this new crime will endure for generations, maybe centuries... We are living in the midst of a long, slow Holocaust. This atrocity is immediately less dramatic but far more destructive than Nazi Germany’s. Now is the time to decide whether we will fight to stop this crime or allow it to continue, and to bear the infinite stain of it. Will history see us as one meager people shrinking back, tainted by complicity in this mass destruction of life, or as the heroic generation that fought to stop humanity’s greatest crime?”
If the information I have shared in this chapter frightens you, I am glad, for that is the appropriate human response. If it doesn’t, I hope you will ponder it some more. For what we really have here is an emergency disconnect. When a wildfire threatens a local community, the normal functions of that community are suspended, with all available resources devoted to fighting that fire. People don’t deny that the flames are real. Resources are not withheld due to cost. I experienced this firsthand when the Marshall Fire climate disaster struck the community where I lived in Colorado. The courageous response of emergency responders was overwhelming. Yet when crash programs are proposed to contain the raging worldfire, with the stakes being the very survival of the global community, the standard whiny response is that drastic action is not politically possible–it will cost too much, inconvenience too many, be too disruptive. Any hope of humanity surviving the coming climate crash requires a radical reorientation of our thinking.
Here's the good news that bears repeating: once we zero out emissions, we could see global temperatures stop rising within about a decade, and possibly as quickly as three to five years after emissions drop to zero. I will say again: this is huge cause for hope, but only if we get to zero emissions quickly.
In his book, Spontaneous Evolution, scientist Bruce Lipton writes: “We all want to fix the world, whether we realize it or not. On a conscious level, many of us feel inspired to save the planet for altruistic or ethical reasons. On an unconscious level, our efforts to serve as Earth stewards are driven by a deeper, more fundamental behavioral programming known as the biological imperative, the drive to survive. We inherently sense that if the planet goes down, so do we. So, armed with good intentions, we survey the world and wonder, ‘Where do we begin?’”
For now, let’s begin where we left off, perched high above the banks of the Ohio River.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.