On Climate Change

It's hard to imagine a louder alarm than the brutal heatwave blanketing the Northern climes, yet the level of concern regarding an existential threat remains low.

The comedian Jack Benny made a living pretending to be a miser and a terrible violinist, when in real life, he was a generous philanthropist and an accomplished musician. He employed misdirection in service of an obvious but funny-anyway joke. After all, that’s show biz.

His act was mostly self-deprecating humor—he got his biggest laughs by laughing at himself. He had a famous bit that played on his faux persona as a penny-pincher. In it, a mugger confronts him and says, “Your money or your life.” Benny deadpans to the audience in hesitation, and the gunman sticks the revolver deeper into his ribs, and repeats the threat, “I said, your money or your life.” Benny turns to the camera, then turns slowly back to the robber and says, “I’m thinking.”

It’s funny because no one would really have to think long about surrendering the money in their pocket in exchange for getting to live. Or would they?

In the present climate crisis, CO2 is the mugger, and the US Congress is the tightwad. Only in this scenario, the crisis is real, so real as to be existential, creating a reality where our inaction and refusal to spend now to save the planet later creates a scenario where there is no later.

Climate activists are trying to save us from ourselves. Many climate change deniers are just trying to save some money. (And some are acting out of religious fervor as believers in “Dominionism,” the Christian religious theory that says, among other things, the Earth is a gift to man from God, and therefore is man’s to do with as he sees fit. It also, rather conveniently for men, keeps women under their thumbs.)

But our subject today focuses on the economics of fighting climate change. It seems a worthy topic as we experience, just as climate scientists have predicted for at least two decades, rising sea levels, and ever more threatening severity in storms, droughts, floods, and temperature extremes.

If activists are wrong about climate change, we’re out a lot of money, and our only consolation is cleaner air and water. If they’re right and we do nothing, we leave the next generations a hostile and increasingly uninhabitable planet.

The question seems binary: Should we save money and lose the planet, or spend money and save the planet?

Normally, I would cite specific scientific studies and empirically based facts in an effort to convince, but I think we’re beyond that now. It’s truly now a case of who you are going to believe, the climate change deniers or your own lying eyes.

And there’s a reckoning coming. Millennials, and the generations following them are fed up with the ancient leadership of the McConnells, Grassleys, Shelbys, and the rest who like things like they used to be, and have tied this country in knots, preventing climate change amelioration and any other change that doesn’t benefit the immediate prospects of the old, monied rulers in our society. (And not to put too fine a point on it, or appear to be a self-hating ageist, but Diane Feinstein needs to retire about ten years ago, along with any number of other octo- and nonagenarians who should yield in favor of new blood and new ideas. And don’t get me started on term limits for electeds and appointeds like Supreme Court justices; in 1776, a lifetime appointment meant you’d serve until you were fifty; times change and rules should too.)

Back to climate change specifically, where it’s hard to take a guy like Joe Manchin (D-Big Coal) seriously. Manchin, a DINO, or Democrat in name only, became rich beyond the dreams of avarice as a founder of Ennersystems, a coal brokering company. Even though he has his, it is impossible for him to do the right thing for the rest of us. While he said all the right things about protecting the Earth on his various Sunday show appearances, when the rubber met the road (the coal met the furnace?) last week, he was MIA, refusing to put our money where his mouth was.

Back in the good old Cold War days, we relied on the simple notion that the Russians loved their children too, and wouldn’t provoke a world ending nuclear war. Maybe nuclear holocaust, with its instant destruction of our world, and the lingering effects of “Nuclear Winter” that would snuff out all life unlucky enough to live through the first burst of flaming hydrogen eating the atmosphere, is easier to grasp than the slow motion destruction wrought by climate change over a series of decades, but the threat is real enough, and our kids know it. They just lack the political capital and position to turn things around in a timely, world-saving fashion.

©2022 Jon Sinton