Year 3, Month 3, Day 31: Where There’s A Way, Unfortunately There’s A Will

Well, this is…unsurprising. The Very Serious People at the Washington Post are wondering why Americans don’t seem to care about climate change.

Rising sea levels threaten to inundate low-lying roads in Louisiana, costing billions in port activity, The Post’s Juliet Eilperin reports. Northrop Grumman sees potential damage to billions in shoreline defense infrastructure, such as the imperiled drydock in Hampton Roads built to construct the next generation of aircraft carriers. Other factors are also at work in these examples of rapid coastline loss. But Louisiana and Virginia offer a picture of how further sea-level rise and higher storm surges — just one set of climate-related risks — could seriously disrupt human activity.

America, meanwhile, is fixated on . . . paying an extra buck per gallon at the gas pump.

A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) underscores how myopic the country’s energy debate is — and, consequently, how delinquent the United States has been in leading the world. The organization calculated that the world is on course to increase its carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2050. That’s because global energy use will increase by 80 percent by mid-century, with 85 percent of the energy mix coming from fossil fuels. That would likely raise global temperatures well past the target of 2 degrees Celsius, beyond which scientists say climate change could be extremely dangerous. It would also produce lethal amounts of air pollution, manifested in more heart attacks, asthma and other maladies.

Coming from the paper that has given the odious George Will a platform for decades, that’s pretty rich. Sent March 25:

If Americans are fixated on gas prices and political trivia rather than on the dangers of global climate change, perhaps we should ask how this happened. What influences could let us ignore a threat of unprecedented magnitude for so long?

Politicians averse to having their actions and statements exposed will readily blame the media when reality intrudes on their prefabricated narratives. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, American news media tend to insert political narratives into reality rather than the other way around.

When conservative legislators block sane climate policies, it’s often framed as “a loss for environmentalists,” as if those advocating for our species’ long-term survival were just another special-interest group. If print and broadcast media discussed the real-world consequences of a failure to address climate change (droughts, famines, geopolitical upheavals, megadeaths) rather than treating it as mere political gamesmanship, perhaps more Americans would take the issue seriously.

Warren Senders