Climate change, wildfires, dark money

 The view from my window today is terrible. Smoke fills the air, the air quality index in Altadena is 280, and California seems to be aflame. In addition to California, Oregon is also burning, there are fires in Washington State, and other parts of the West are also in crisis due to wildfires. California alone has over 3,000,000 acres burned, an order of magnitude worse than 2019. 

A witty saying is that denial is not a river in Egypt. The denial of climate change, which is worsening the fire situation in the Western United States, comes from several sources. The primary funding for denial of climate change has come from the fossil fuel industry. Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money, published in 2016, remains a classic in revealing the immense sums of money spent by fossil fuel sources such as the Koch brothers. The big oil companies additionally spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying (translation: buying votes in Congress and state legislatures) to be certain that government policies were favorable to big profits. If this sounds familiar to you, it should. Big Tobacco used the same researchers and publicists to play down the health risks of smoking for decades. Check out Naomi Oreskes’ book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming for a great introduction to how the public was played by industry on many health issues.

Mark Maslin has laid out the five pillars of climate change denial here. The first one is science denial. I have heard this in its many guises over many years. How can a tiny change in carbon dioxide produce such an enormous effect? The science is unsettled. Or my favorite one, the climate scientists are fixing the data to make sure they continue to get grant money! All of these denials of science are false. 

The second form is economic denial. It is too expensive to fix climate change! This will destroy civilization if too much money is spent. Again, all false. Cutting carbon emissions now would require 1% annually of world GDP investment; waiting until 2050 (when my grandchildren will be dealing with the mess we leave behind) will cost 20% annually of GDP investment. The fossil fuel interests seem to want to burden civilization with the economic disaster when the current oil barons are dead and gone.

The third form seems totally immoral to me; humanitarian denial. Why, carbon dioxide will make plants bloom and warmth is better for people than cold! Pure crap, of course. Heat-related deaths have been increasing globally with severe heat waves in places that traditionally have been considered cold (Russia, Europe). Russian wheat harvests have been decimated in recent years. Weather-related effects such as the recent derecho in the American Midwest wipe out crops there as well. Disease outbreaks and pandemics are likely to increase. Desertification and the search for water will create climate refugees. Please look askance at anyone who tries this argument on you for size.

The fourth corrupt pillar of climate change denial is political denial. This takes the form that no nation should bother unless every nation also helps. This is, of course, a central pillar for Donald Trump and his belief that only America counts on Planet Earth. The lack of critical thinking is immense. Despite Elon Musk, we are not going to live on Mars. The need to protect the only spaceship we have, meaning keeping its environment livable, is paramount and apparent to anyone who takes a moment to think. Rabid nationalism will do nothing but stand in the way of humankind.

And finally, we have crisis denial. Spend some time on Facebook and you will find many climate change deniers in this bucket. It’s not so bad! We have seen worse! Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As Maslin points out, we have been deceived by this argument many times in the past; delay in ending slavery, allowing segregation and Jim Crow laws to deny African Americans rights, sexism with its profound effect on women and civilization itself, labor rights, environmental regulations, rights for gays, ad infinitum. It always seems that a group in control (you can parse them out from the last sentence) will do anything to be sure that others will be denied power. 

Which gets us back to today, 12 September 2020. The environment is thoroughly fouled up. Yes, the wildfires will end at some point and the skies will clear of smoke and particulate matter. For now. Until the next time. Climate change is real and now and dangerous and getting more dangerous every day. In 51 days there will be a general election. Change will only begin on that day. It will take time and hard work politically to make a real difference. I am choosing to vote and push my elected officials to address climate change, a crisis as existential as any faced by humanity in the past. Let’s go, Americans. We have wasted too much time already.