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Al Gore once told me, “When it comes to climate change, everyone has an ‘oh shit moment’ — that moment when it gets real, when they realize what is at stake.”
East Coasters are having an ‘oh shit moment’ right now. You look up at the sky and it’s orange, like Mars. And it’s deadly. The World Health Organization defines particulate levels above 10 ug/m3 as unhealthy. Yesterday New York City hit 800. “The air quality in New York City was at its worst ever recorded, with apocalyptic scenes being observed,” climate activist Peter Dynes tweeted. “This is not a simulation or a scene from a movie; this is the current climate reality. Time for the masses to realize the severity of this crisis.”
And certainly, plenty of people are paying attention. Social media is a-swirl with people posting pics of orange skies and confessing that they now understand the urgency of the climate crisis. Like, you thought climate change was just a media fabrication? Some tree-hugger fantasy? A socialist plot to take down capitalism?
But if sucking in orange air is what it takes to awaken people to the risks of the climate crisis, so be it. Let’s hope the newly converted take the next step and do everything they can to purge their lives of fossil fuels and vote for politicians who understand that climate change is the central crisis of our time.
Let’s hope too that the orange sky apocalypse erodes the myth that the climate crisis is something that happens to other people — mostly brown people and poor people who live in faraway places.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the climate crisis, but one that many Americans — especially rich white urban Americans — still believe in. This delusion has been part of the climate fight from the very beginning. It is rooted not only in the ancient idea that wealth and privilege buys immortality, but also in foolish economic arguments about the social cost of climate change would be “manageable,” maybe a few points off the GDP by the end of the century.
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In fact, I’d argue that this myth of privilege is a big part of why there has been so little action on the climate crisis, and why it is treated like just another problem, like rising mortgage interest rates or fat content in our diet, instead of a fundamental destabilization of the entire operating system of our planet.
In this sense, the real message of the orange skies in the east is that the climate crisis makes no distinctions for wealth or privilege. It is going to hit everyone, whether you live in a penthouse on 5th Avenue or a grass hut in Ethiopia. As author and NYU sociology professor Eric Klinenberg tweeted: “Climate change means that no nation or city can control its own fate. Generally, the problem is worse for poor places in the Global South. They did little to cause global warming but they suffer most. This week, it’s the capital of capitalism that is powerless and polluted.”
The big question, of course, is what happens to the capital of capitalism when the blue skies return – as they surely will. So far, the Blade Runner skies above the capital of capitalism have not triggered any “oh shit” moments from Congress, or the White House, or the people whose “oh shit” moments are most direly needed.
On the contrary, the fanboys of the fossil fuel industry are revving up their reality distortion field. “Blame Canada,” saystoday’s cover of The New York Post. Inside, an article says the smokey skies are all about bad forest management. And right on cue, Fox News is trotting out ancient tobacco and fossil fuel hacks like Steve Milloy to tell viewers that the air may be ugly right now, but “the reality is, there are no health risks.”
“This is wildfire smoke, this is natural,” Milloy told Laura Ingram. “This is not because of fossil fuels, this is not because of internal combustion engine… This has nothing to do with climate.”
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That’s typical Milloy bullshit, but it’s still a criminally stupid thing to say. For one thing, air pollution is the 4th highest cause of death globally. Every year 7 million people die due to air pollution made worse by fossil fuels. For another, the orange skies have everything to do with climate. The more fossil fuel we burn, the hotter the atmosphere gets. And heat begets fire. Especially larger, hotter wildfires.
“The heat we are pumping into the sky is the prime mover of the climate crisis,” I wrote in my new book The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (you can pre-order it here). “The climate impacts you hear about most often, from sea-level rise to drought to wildfires, are all second-order effects of a hotter planet. The first-order effect is heat. It is the engine of planetary chaos, the invisible force that melts the ice sheets that will flood coastal cities around the world. It dries out the soil and sucks the moisture out of trees until they are ready to ignite.”
You don’t have to look hard to see evidence of that planetary chaos. Just this week, while the wildfire smoke on the East Coast is grabbing all our attention, there were reports of record low sea ice in Antarctica, extreme heat and humidity in Puerto Rico, Siberia and Southeast Asia, and an “off the charts” rise of global sea surface temperatures.
How many ‘oh shit’ awakenings did any of that inspire? To me, the scariest thing about the orange skies in the east is that, in our post-factual, post-truth world, the whole idea of “waking up” to something like the climate crisis just another kind of denial and delusion.
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As MSNBC host Chris Hayes put it: “I always thought there would be *some* kind of climate reckoning when it got bad enough, but Covid has taught me that, no, people will just step on the gas and happily mow people down so they never have to admit taking a wrong turn.”
After more than two decades of writing about the climate crisis, my own ‘oh shit’ moment is the understanding that, when it comes to the climate crisis, there will be no ‘oh shit moment.’ As Hayes suggests, the human capacity for denial and suffering may be equal or greater than our ability to change our ways or admit wrongdoing. This is not to suggest that change is not possible or that we do not have the will or the imagination to build a better world, but only that it will be a long slog, not a sudden awakening. It will be about fighting on all fronts, with every political and technological tool we have, and with the courage and shrewdness of guerilla warriors. These orange skies are battlefield skies, and the war to maintain a habitable planet has just begun.
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Jarastyle – #Canadian #Wildfires #Bring #Climate #Crisis #East #Coast #Lungs #Rolling #Stone
Courtesy : https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/canadian-wildfires-climate-crisis-east-coast-public-health-1234766771/