Year 3, Month 7, Day 23: I Wonder Why THAT Keeps Happening?

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette runs an editorial column ruing the lackadaisical attitude of the common people:

This should be the summer of our discontent, with heat waves, drought and other troublesome weather affecting large parts of the nation. Instead, Americans are hot but apparently not bothered about what it all might mean.

According to a new Washington Post-Stanford University poll, just 18 percent of Americans interviewed named climate change as the world’s top environmental problem. In 2007, when Al Gore’s warning documentary and a United Nations report were making headlines, 33 percent called climate change the top issue.

Like so much on this topic, the findings of the poll are contradictory. It’s not as if people don’t care about the environment; the top concern, as expressed by 27 percent of those surveyed, was polluted water and air — certainly real challenges.

And those polled don’t dismiss climate change or even mankind’s hand in it; in fact, nearly three-quarters believe that the Earth is warming and approximately the same number think temperatures will continue to rise if nothing is done. Many want government and businesses to do more.

The poll and follow-up interviews suggest that people are looking to Washington, D.C., for leadership and action, although, after seeing little or none, they are not consumed by a sense of urgency.

Somebody better do something. I wonder who? Sent July 12:

The disconnect between the facts of global climate change and American public concern about the issue can be laid at the feet of our country’s politicians, who are too focused on short-term electoral exigencies to address long-term problems — and at the feet of our irresponsible media establishment, which has spent decades fostering the notion that simply reporting two sides of every argument constitutes the whole of journalism.

In a common-sense world, the looming climate crisis would be story number one, day after day. But we live in twenty-first century America, where there is no crisis bigger than the latest celebrity scandal du jour. Now there is no time left for equivocation. If we are to preserve our agriculture, our infrastructure, and ultimately our civilization, our leaders must accept the responsibility of leadership — and our media must accept the responsibility to inform the public about the gravest threat our species has faced in recorded history.

Warren Senders