Climate Change is an existential danger.
I feel like I'm making an understatement putting that in so few words but simultaneously I can't ever escape the immense doubt I feel when I see what can generously be described as a tepid response to Public Enemy Number One.
And I think I speak for many people on Daily Kos and the American Left when I say that I don't know what to really do about it.
And by it, I am referring to the American Public, the by and large, apathetic, American Public.
The danger just doesn't seem real to a lot of people and I wonder what it would take for it to feel real.
I was kind of hoping that New Orleans would have shown the world and the American Public that the Anthropocene was firmly here but no, no, that seemed to have gotten blamed on some levees and a storm.
I have found myself in inescapable orbit around the conclusion that the American Public will need to witness a disaster that places climate change unambiguously at direct fault.
Then, no price will be too high.
That's what we saw with the event that began the so-called War on Terror, remember that?
No price was too high.
There's a shortlist now of cities that are going to face unprecedented storm flooding during the next 20 years. Unfortunately, it seems like those events will be what precipitates the sea change in public perceptions necessary to finally do the hard work of adaptation.
Unfortunately, and I hope I'm wrong, but it often doesn't seem like adaptation on a wide scale ever happens until something is lost.
I'm writing this and I worry that my pessimism might come off as unappreciative of the good and necessary work that so many people both here and elsewhere have done.
It's a good thing for instance that the Keystone XL will likely fail but at the same time why is so much of the American Public in favor of the Keystone XL.
Why is this, getting people to appreciate and get on board with tackling an existential threat, so difficult?
Just speaking for myself, the answers to this question are difficult to cope with.
I wonder if maybe we should make a support group to just emotionally deal with this state of affairs...