David Roberts

David Roberts of Grist has published a cogently argued piece, reprinted in the Guardian, on why the US environmental movement is not and never will be capable of dealing with climate change. Roberts does a very good job of summarizing the problem and reasoning to the ultimate solution.

The whole piece is here.

Here's the conclusion:

"What needs to happen is for concern over earth's biophysical limitations to transcend the environmental movement -- and movement politics, as handed down from the '60s, generally. It needs to take its place alongside the economy and national security as a priority concern of American elites across ideological and organizational lines. It needs to become a shared concern of every American citizen regardless of ideological orientation or level of political engagement. That is the only way we can ever hope to bring about the urgent necessary changes."

He's right. And he's encapsulated the whole thing in a nutshell. Nicely done.

The problem is, and I've mentioned this before several times and only quite recently here, this kind of 180 degree change in the overall pattern of widely held mental models in the US happens very rarely and only in response to very serious events. And I keep being brought back to World War Two, although I must sound like a stuck record.

Pearl Harbor was enough to get the US into World War Two, but Hurricane Katrina wasn't enough to reorganize American ideas about climate change.

And if the more or less total destruction of a US city wasn't enough, you have to ask yourself what is? Certainly not the Pakistani floods, nor the Russian fires, nor even this record-breaking long hot summer in the US and Canada.

Never mind that all this was predicted with quite good accuracy in the 2001 and 2007 IPPC Reports. (A reproduction of the table that summarized the prediction is here.)

When the Japanese navy attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, despite the fact that the war had been going on for over two years, and despite the fact that reports of massacres of Jews and other non-Aryans had been leaking out of Europe since mid-1940, millions of Americans were still walking around with a mental model of the world situation in their heads that somehow told them that the Japanese would never attack America, and that the European war would not affect them and could safely be left alone.

This mental model wasn't reorganized until the obvious destruction of the Pacific Fleet on December 7th.

Today, the situation is similar. We should be smart enough to admit that millions of Americans are walking around with a mental model in their head that somehow says that climate change is most likely not happening, or if it is, it's not going to be too terribly bad. A smaller number, those most ideological, are walking around with a slightly more elaborate mental model that tells them that climate awareness and advocacy is a political choice, one that left-of-center people pick, when they could reasonably make other choices.

In other words, millions of rather ordinary and only moderately conservative Americans believe that left-of-center people decide to be aware of climate change and support climate policy in the same way that we might decide that we're in favor of gay marriage or publicly-run health care.

It's a choice, not a necessity, and one only chosen by leftists. That's what they think.

And to some extent they are right. There's been a lot of bandwagon-jumping, and the left has embraced climate change and used it as a Trojan Horse for other ideas and policies, including many that are just plain stupid or frivolous. Read some people's material on what to do about climate change and you'd think we will all be living in 1970s type communes, eating nothing but radishes and walking everywhere, within a few short years.

But that doesn't mean to say that it isn't still the biggest issue facing humanity, nor does it mean to say that ordinary Americans, and even these ordinary, moderate American conservatives, can safely ignore it.

Contrast the way that Americans felt about World War 2 in, say, 1941, with the way that Europeans felt about it at the same time, and you might begin to get an idea how most climate scientists and serious energy thinkers feel about this. If you were my grandfather, say, a very ordinary Englishman, you'd already been in the Army for two years, although you were 41 years old and had a wife and kid at home in Sheffield. You'd already lived through the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. Your home neighborhood had been bombed. You actually thought you were lucky (at your rather advanced age) not to be sent to France (again) in October 1940 and have to suffer through Dunkirk.

Instead you'd been assigned to heavy rescue in London.

Lucky.

How much more real was World War Two for you, compared to one of isolationist Senator Burton Wheeler's Montana constituents? Obviously, by 1940, it was no longer possible for my grandfather to hold the mental model he had previously held, around the time of the Munich fiasco, which was that war was a terrible thing (he'd been in the trenches in the first war) and Britain should do everything it could do to stay out of another one. That mental model, held by millions of ordinary Britons, had all but evaporated by June 1940.

But it was still possible for Burton K. Wheeler's Montanan to hold his particular view, right up to December 6th, 1941. And so Americans, and their Congress, did very little to think about or prepare for the war.

The problem is, by the time you get to December 7th, if all you do is wait for people to change their minds, you're in a lot of trouble. Luckily, we didn't wait. A smaller number of people took action. We had FDR, who had begun to rearm even before September 3rd, 1939. We had the designs for the machines that would win the war, the Liberty ship, the Sherman tank, the jeep and the B17, completed, and some of the latter were already in service and even destroyed at Pearl Harbor. Factories had already shifted to war production to meet first British and then, after July 22nd 1941, Soviet demand.

Congress did pass Lend-Lease and we did have the destroyers-for-bases deal, as well as the convoy system. We did enough to stave off disaster.

The most important thing that happened was that Britain did not lose the war or surrender before December 7th. That meant that the war would continue to be in the news, that Edward R. Murrow would report from London during the Blitz, that Joe Kennedy would come to be seen as a fool and poltroon for his defeatist reports, and that Hitler would always have that giant aircraft carrier in the North Sea called the British Isles in his rear when he turned his sights east to all that Soviet Lebensraum.

When ordinary kinds of conservative Americans finally reorganize their mental models about climate change, we had better have done quite a lot of this kind of preparatory stuff. And there's lots that can be done without having to wait for a climate bill. Energy efficiency and renewable energy projects that can pay their own way and compete even at today's oil prices can be begun tomorrow, if we choose. We can certainly make sure that we have cadres of well-trained people to do the work, to be the trainers that train the trainers that eventually train the people that will really reorganize American industry and agriculture. We can think about how to scale up, just how we might organize to completely insulate and weatherize our existing housing stock, or just how we might organize to make enough thin-film solar for every rooftop.

But the most important thing we can do is not surrender, to not go away quietly. Because there will come a time when the evidence is so compelling, when the scientific explanation of what is happening is the only one that fits, and millions of ordinary people are forced to admit what is already obvious to us, that we have to reduce carbon emissions very, very quickly, and all these ideas and processes and techniques get put into action on a massive scale.

And we would be smart, too, if in preparation for that day, we would lay off our bandwagon-jumping, and come up with a mental model of climate response that ordinary kinds of conservative Americans can accept. One that doesn't seem to want to abolish capitalism, for instance. One that is rational, and scientific, and that doesn't use climate change as a Trojan Horse for hemp or transcendental meditation or eating radishes in a commune or some other happy horsepoop.

And then we wait. Unfortunately.