Yesterday, the recently revamped Climate Progress blog had what may be the most sadly typical climate change news round up ever. Here’s the shorter version of each of the six headlines:
Piffling Acts of Home Energy Generation Remain Piffling
Giant Oil Continues to Pay Climate Deniers
People Like “Green”, Don’t Know What It Is
Michele Bachmann Hates the EPA, Can’t Explain Why
Foreign Country Doing Better Than U.S.
Unprecedented Forest Fires Are Bad (Like, Really Bad)
That’s a pretty good nutshell of where we are on climate change. The first and third stories are about the groping and insignificant way ordinary people try to cope with climate change. The second and fourth are about the rump group, primarily fossil fuel companies and their political henchmen, who have a short term interest in pretending that up is down and black is white. The fifth story, about Australia’s implementation of restrictions on carbon emissions, shows how pathetically laggardly America has been; and the sixth story is one of the consequences of that.
None of the above is exactly news to anyone actually paying attention, of course. Climate change is a big, systemic problem that requires big, systemic answers, and as long as those types of things are being checked by the likes of ExxonMobil and Michele Bachmann all the personal virtue in the world doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, America falls behind in general while big chunks of the country either burn or are flooded. Simultaneously, ever rising food and energy prices, combined with our warming planet, have the potential to cause wars and famines all over the place, but our gigantic national security apparatus remains focused on a few assholes in squalid shitholes like Afghanistan and Yemen.
None of this is likely to change any time soon. The great big Blue victories in 2006 and 2008 were only able to get a watered down version of carbon regulation though one half of Congress, and that with great difficulty. Even if 2012 looks a lot like 2008, the odds of meaningful climate legislation being passed are long (and that’s a pretty big “if” at the beginning of this sentence). In the meantime, all we can do is mark the days, take whatever entertainment value we can from the incoherent fustigations of the climate denialists, and watch the thermometer rise.
