Climate isolationist senators

In the midst of what seems very likely to be one of the hottest summers on record, the failure of the Senate to pass or even seriously consider climate legislation seems increasingly ridiculous to those who have taken the threat of climate change seriously. A new article by Eric Pooley in Yale Environment 360 and the Guardian takes a long slow, look at this shambles.

This article is interesting to me because it's the first one I've seen by someone within the "goldfish bowl" of mainstream climate science and politics in the US that directly references the current emissions reductions successes, and the very large number of energy efficiency and renewable energy projects that are now in the pipeline as a result of ARRA and other economic (as opposed to political) approaches.

I've been saying this for several years now: all this talk about climate policies, so very little effort in reducing fossil energy consumption. When the latter is so easy to do, while the former runs directly up against all of the inertia in the American political system.

Inertia.

We should remember that this is a country that waited until December 7th 1941 to realize that it had to get directly involved in WWII. In the period prior to Pearl Harbor, up to 80% of Americans held one or another form of isolationist views. Only when America was attacked directly, did FDR have a mandate to act. Climate change is a very similar kind of threat, distant, involving other people, not ourselves, away someplace else, and above all, requiring us to change our plans for our lives. This last is understandably the hardest to bear. But the alternative, which appears to many to be nothing more than a call to abandon the American lifestyle and even capitalist polity, is too difficult for most Americans to contemplate.

I'll never forget what one otherwise impressively intelligent and probably graduate school-bound young woman said to me, after taking my Environmental Sustainability class:

"I suppose this means I'll never get that Jeep Liberty I've been dreaming of."

That's what it meant to her, that she thought she would have to change her plans. And while she could see the logic through to the inescapable conclusion, she couldn't accept it. And she didn't. That was one student who went away still thinking that climate change wouldn't affect her, despite the all too obvious facts.

Even though what it probably means is that ordinary kinds of capitalist companies have to ensure that the Jeep Liberty or whatever has to get 60 mph or better yet run on batteries. We'll need to harness capitalism to get out of this hole we've dug for ourselves.

Of course, this scenario can't last. Americans will figure it out sooner or later. The effects of increasing carbon dioxide and methane can't be staved off by mere wishful thinking. Climate change will manifest itself more and more directly in the years to come. But until climate change is that obvious to ordinary Americans, the political inertia will continue to be massive, a giant, suffocating wet blanket of humid political air.

This parallel of wartime isolationism is perhaps too obvious for sophisticated folk in the climate movement. But that's just the point. Folkways and traditional memes or mental models are impressively persistent, even when the nomenclature believes they are not. Just as it was too difficult for most Americans to contemplate entry into WWII and all that would entail for their lifestyles, so it is for climate change.

In the America of October 1941, Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana uttered these not-so-famous words

" I can't conceive of Japan being crazy enough to want to go to war with us."

Just before Pearl Harbor it was,

"If we go to war with Japan, the only reason will be to help England."

Wheeler was a popular politician who, like most today, tried hard to reflect what he thought his Montana constituents wanted. But once the attack on Pearl Harbor was over, the attitude swiftly changed. It was time to "lick hell out of" the Japanese. And I expect too, once it becomes that obvious, most Americans will fall in behind the climate movement much as in December 1941 they fell in with the Allies.

In the meantime, we are pushing a rope if we think we can convince Americans of climate change without what they consider convincing evidence. Instead, we need to get emissions down directly, by actually acting on the technological changes that are required to do this. As the DOE's recent figures show on emissions reductions, it doesn't take a climate bill to put in insulation or put up a wind turbine. If we can get this jump start, ten to fifteen percent a decade, by the time the next Katrina occurs, we'll be at least already heading in the right direction.

It doesn't take a Pearl Harbor to get something done. The Atlantic convoys had been heading east, dodging U-boats all the way, for many months before December 7th, 1941.

It just takes a Pearl Harbor to get something done by Congress.