As severe climatic and weather changes have started to assault parts of the U.S. where the residents’ prior experience was limited to gaping at televised images beamed from where they thankfully didn’t reside, several well-intended expressions of dismay and urgency have been surfacing. That alarm has been reflected both here on Daily Kos and in the U.S. media as a whole. One relatively consistent theme of these pieces has been to decry those who seem to have retreated into despair and even nihilism about what can or will be done to reverse what by all appearances is an existential crisis—one facing not only this country, but the entirety of the human race.
That’s because the capitulation to “doomerism,” although understandable as a human response to the magnitude of the crisis, does nothing to change the status quo, let alone advance the ball toward positive action. But “doomerism”—a mostly passive acknowledgement of feelings of relative or complete paralysis in the face of a seemingly insurmountable, daunting challenge—is actually something worse than ineffective, because it provides sustenance to the greatest problem we face in addressing climate change.
That problem isn’t climate denialism. It isn’t the Republican Party. It isn’t even the fossil fuel industry that created, aggravated, and then denied the reality of this crisis. Those are all root causes and contributors to the catastrophe, obviously, but the biggest challenge we face at this point is the resignation, acceptance, and worst of all, complacency by a shell-shocked, helpless, and overwhelmed public. Because now the real portent of multiple and severe climatic crises has become practically impossible for us meager and limited humans to assimilate. A substantial majority of Americans accept the reality of man-made climate change and consider it a “major threat.” They just don’t know what to do about it.
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As documented by David Gelles, writing for The New York Times, the frequency of severe climatic events caused in whole or in part by the effects of greenhouse gas-induced climate change has suddenly, radically, become commonplace: “Catastrophic floods in the Hudson Valley. An unrelenting heat dome over Phoenix. Ocean temperatures hitting 90 degrees Fahrenheit off the coast of Miami. A surprising deluge in Vermont, a rare tornado in Delaware.”
Greece, 2023.
It’s helpful that the mainstream media is finally highlighting the fact of human-induced climate change as something happening now, and all around us. For the past two decades, media complacency about climate change has been the problem, and it’s clear they are still grappling with how to explain it to the world. Columbia Journalism Review reports:
Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news, the brutal demands of ratings and money work against adequate coverage of the biggest story of our time. Many newspapers, too, are failing the climate test. Last October, the scientists of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark report, warning that humanity had a mere 12 years to radically slash greenhouse-gas emissions or face a calamitous future in which hundreds of millions of people worldwide would go hungry or homeless or worse. Only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the United States covered that report.
Case in point: Gelles article for the Times is titled, “Climate Disasters Daily? Welcome to the ‘New Normal.”’ Three days later The Washington Post ran a front-page article titled, “Floods, fires and deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on the brink.” One of the climate scientists quoted in that article persuasively took issue with calling what we see today the “new normal:”
“This is not the new normal,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Imperial College London. “We don’t know what the new normal is. The new normal will be what it is once we do stop burning fossil fuels … and we’re nowhere near doing that.”
His point is that there is no “new normal,” simply an ever-evolving cascade of numbing climate disasters, each of which will become “normal” for a short while until it is supplanted by an even more severe and devastating condition or circumstance. Simply calling it the “new normal” (or as one climate scientist recently interviewed for the Miami Herald put it, the “new reality”) diminishes its significance and heightens feelings of resignation and complacency, as evidenced by the reactions of several people interviewed by Gelles for his Times article.
Jackson, Kentucky, 2023
Another problem fostering complacency is simple familiarity and adaptation. As Gelles’ article points out, a study conducted in 2019 indicates that “[P]eople learn to accept extreme weather as normal in as little as two years.”
Generally, it took just two to eight years for Americans in a given location to adjust their mental baselines of what was normal—in other words, to stop recognizing that those extreme temperatures were in fact extreme.
“The definition of ‘normal weather’ shifts rapidly over time in a changing climate,” the authors wrote.
Jia Tolentino, writing for The New Yorker, puts the consequences of this attitude into focus:
In a 2021 survey of Gen Z-ers, fifty-six per cent agreed that “humanity is doomed.” And the worse things get, the less we seem to talk about it: in 2016, almost seventy per cent of one survey’s respondents told researchers that they rarely or never discuss climate change with friends or family, an increase from around sixty per cent in 2008.
That finding illustrates just how difficult it will be for humanity to recognize and respond to the climate crisis. As Gelles points out, “In a nation focused on inflation, political scandals and celebrity feuds, just 8 percent of Americans identified global warming as the most important issue facing the country, according to a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.” That number will undoubtedly rise over the next few years. The problem, though, is that it won’t rise soon enough.
“This is the last slap upside the head we’re going to get when it might still matter,” said Bill McKibben, a longtime climate activist. “It’s obviously a pivotal moment in the Earth’s climatic history. It also needs to be a pivotal moment in the Earth’s political history.”
The problem of such passive acquiescence to catastrophic climate change has been the subject of numerous studies. As explained by Patricia Prijatel, writing for Psychology Today (and explicating the phenomenon as set forth by climate writer David Wallace-Wells, author of “The Uninhabitable Earth”):
For reasons largely political, but also economic and psychological, the United States has shrugged off the biggest threat to its future. Why? Wallace-Wells lists multiple factors, but the bottom line is that we cannot envision the destruction we might face—even those of us who fully believe in climate science imagine a future much like our past. He acknowledges his own wishful thinking, even in the face of the massive changes he outlines in his recently published book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. The world his daughter will live in, he wants to believe, is not that dystopian future that comes with increased warming, but more like the world he has enjoyed so far.
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The problem comes in the way we choose to see and react to threats, Wallace-Wells says:
We build our view of the universe outward from our own experience, a reflexive tendency that surely shapes our ability to comprehend genuinely existential threats to the species. We have a tendency to wait for others to act, rather than acting ourselves; a preference for the present situation; a disinclination to change things; and an excess of confidence that we can change things easily, should we need to, no matter the scale. We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception.
It’s also worth noting that the initial, reflexive approach in the U.S., even by scientists who actually recognized the looming catastrophe, was to tread a middle ground “between complacency and panic,” an attitude that may have grown out of policies employed by “civil defense officials to manage public anxieties” during the early stages of the Cold War. The continually evolving nature of climate change, however, makes that approach obsolete.
How then, do we combat these attitudes, many of which seem to be embedded in our own nature? There are, of course, several simple ways individuals can reduce their own climate “footprint:” By reducing their intake of meat, by buying fuel efficient vehicles, cutting out superfluous air travel and using public transportation, making fuel-efficient modifications in their homes, reducing water use, and recycling and consuming fewer goods overall. But humans tend to regard the actions of others as a barometer, good or bad, as to how they should act themselves, and they don’t like to make sacrifices they feel aren’t being shared by others: What good are my efforts to conserve if my neighbor is gleefully gunning his gas-guzzling pickup truck on his way to picking up 12 steaks from the grocery store for his Republican friends to chow down in his air-conditioned condo? On a larger scale, this attitude translates into finger-pointing between nations: Why should the U.S. make sacrifices when India and China aren’t stepping up? And vice versa.
Napa, California, 2021.
For humans to effectively confront climate change, however, there has to be enough of a consensus to influence governmental action on a broader scale. For such a consensus to exist, people first have to be adequately informed. One paper prepared for the Germany’s IZA Institute of Labor Economics proposes a massive public information campaign as to the severity of the problem, akin to past anti-tobacco campaigns, to galvanize public opinion. Another suggests emphasizing, on a micro, local level, the impact of climate change on local costs and expenditures and the savings to local communities afforded by preemptive action, while allowing that fundamental reassessments of our cherished cultural frameworks will have to be made, in order to spur corrective action. And some contend that that civil disobedience with a view toward de-mythologizing capitalism is the key to inspiring the public to change their behavior.
Other voices, recognizing the difficulty we have in changing human nature, suggest talking about climate change in strictly economic terms, emphasizing the global costs of failure to mitigate the problem. Along those same lines, on the corporate level, the attractiveness of “net-zero” carbon policies should be recognized and emphasized as a critical element of competitiveness rather than simply a “nice to have” option.
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Some researchers have concluded that the cultural shifts necessary to develop an antidote to complacency will most likely be generational, as each successive generation finds its future to be more acutely impacted. They recommend a sustained effort be made to educate younger people in particular, an action that they believe will produce a greater return than simply attempting to convince current generations through standard media messaging. In making this recommendation, they allow for the fact that socioeconomic shocks by the intensification of climate-driven events such as “heat waves, floods, and severe weather” may prove to be as much of a motivator as any media campaign could otherwise generate. This dovetails with other research that notes a substantial correlation between climate concern and having experienced a climate-related disaster firsthand.
Ultimately all of these suggestions have merit. But as with most efforts to alter an existing paradigm, it’s helpful to distill them into a few major points. Joao Goncalves, writing for Medium, proposes the following framework to combat complacency, incorporating the business principles of change management. Goncalves suggests 1) create a sense of urgency; 2) create powerful coalitions; 3) develop a vision of a green future; and 4) communicate that vision.
Goncalves believes journalists can best act as intermediaries between scientists and our government in order to educate the public about the urgency of the climate problem. Fortunately, it appears that some mainstream journalists are finally beginning to do that (as evidenced by the most recent reporting in the Times and Post, for example). But just as important to communicating that urgency is accurately portraying a positive outcome for humanity, a reason for making the sacrifices necessary to combat the problem. Goncalves notes that in 2019, the World Economic Forum did just that. From their report:
By 2030, your CO2 emissions will be greatly reduced. Meat on your dinner table will be a rare sight. Water and the air you breathe will be cleaner and nature will be in recovery. The money in your wallet will be spent on being with family and friends, not on buying goods. Saving the climate involves huge change, but it could make us much happier at the same time.
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You walk out of your front door in the morning into a green and livable city, where concrete has dwindled and green facades and parks are spreading. If you choose to call a car, an algorithm will calculate the smartest route for the vehicle and pick up a few other people on the way.
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Best of all, because citizens have stopped buying so much stuff, they have more money to spend on other things. This new disposable income is spent on services: cleaning, gardening, help with laundry, healthy and easy meals to cook, entertainment, experiences and fabulous new restaurants. All of these things give the average modern person more options and more free time to spend with their friends and families, working out, learning new skills, playing sports or making art — you name it and there’s more time to do it.
To suggest this process won’t be easy is an understatement. It requires all of us to make a personal effort to educate the rest of the country regarding the urgency of what will (rightly) be seen as a drastic alteration to our comfortable lives. Political engagement to ensure that climate change is always an urgent priority will be critical. That means talking about the issue when other, immediate issues are thought to be more important. That effort will face constant mocking and belittlement by the right-wing in this country, which has no interest in making any type of sacrifices. It will further divide the country between those trying to do something and those who feel that any effort is futile, and it will require extraordinary leadership among our political class.
As Goncalves notes, that leadership is key:
[L]eadership means public actors moving out of their comfort zones, think outside of the “market failure” box, and be prepared to take risks of creating new markets and inspiring society to resolve the long-term issue of climate change. A leader must also reassure the population of the righteousness of the chosen path and soften the inevitable conflict and anxiety that deep change always brings.
Whether the people in this country will ever be prepared to undertake such an effort is an open question. A complete transformation and reorientation of public attitudes will be necessary, and unfortunately, the urgency to do that may have to await the passing of the Boomer generation and the ascent of Generation Z to political power. They are the ones who will be suffering through the consequences of our complacency, the ones most inclined to reject that complacency, and the ones most compelled to try to salvage whatever future they can out of the ashes of our indifference.
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