Open Letter
An Open Letter To The 1 Percent: Climate Change Is Here, And You’re Fucked Too
Welcome to the Thunderdome
“Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems. Humans cannot.” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, draft report
Over the last 16 months, Covid 19 has largely sated the public appetite for apocalypse porn, but with pandemic novelty wearing off, the climate crisis is returning to the headlines.
A draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this week advises that we’re in more trouble than most people understand, saying that the destructive effects of climate change are coming sooner than expected, and are effectively irreversible on human time scales.
Not that we didn’t know this.
We’ve been ignoring warnings about the catastrophic effects of our greenhouse gas emissions on the planet’s climate since 1988 when NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the US House of Representatives of the strong correlation between rising temperatures and human emissions. Since then the evidence has gotten stronger, with only the timing and scale of our self-immolation in dispute.
By the numbers:
The number of climate disasters rose 83 percent in the last two decades versus the 1980–1999 time period.
2020 was the second hottest year on record, in spite of the cooling influence of El Nina (the top seven hottest have all occurred since 2014, and the top ten since 2005).
In the US, 2020 saw twenty-two weather events costing over a billion dollars each, dwarfing the previous record of sixteen events set in 2017 and 2011.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there is a greater than 95 percent certainty that the eccentric behavior of our climate is tied largely to human activity.
97 percent of climate scientists agree that it’s real and caused by greenhouse gases, not sunspots or cosmic rays or Satan or whatever the right-wing crazynet is pitching these days.
The World Bank, which has cheerfully funded a host of environmentally disastrous mega-projects over the decades, has identified a warming planet as one of the greatest threats facing humanity today and called for immediate action.
Even the Pentagon, which spends hundreds of billions annually figuring out more efficient ways to kill people, thinks that climate change is probably a bad idea.
While such reports are often swaddled in the soothing language of bureaucracy, by now it’s obvious to anyone with the wit of a golden retriever that anthropogenic climate change is here, and it’s pissed.
Consider that global average temperature has risen less than a degree and a half Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and we’re already seeing the predicted heatwaves, superstorms, dustbowls, and deluges all around the world. Scientists say that an increase of more than two degrees Celsius means a civilization-threatening disaster (although the most recent studies suggest that even this modest increase is too high). Even so, our international climate change conferences and even the heralded Paris treaty have devolved into expensive vacations for bureaucrats, where non-binding commitments are made and ignored and action deferred.
As it stands, our business-as usual-approach will see temperatures rise at least three degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Start building your Thunderdome now.
And floods and fires are just the tip of the melting, flaming, iceberg. Recent research suggests that reduced oxygen levels from overheated phytoplankton could wipe out humanity within a century or so, and an unrelated study from MIT finds that we’ve set ourselves up for a mass extinction in the same time frame.
To avoid disaster, we’ll have to dramatically reduce our carbon-spewing habits. A study published in the journal Science found that most known fossil fuel reserves will have to remain unburned if we’re to stave off catastrophe and that new sources like the Arctic can‘t even be contemplated.
All of this is bad news for those of us who plan to continue living on earth. But since we’re aware of the problem, and technologies exist that could pull us back from the brink, we’ll just fix it, right?
You’d think. But at odds with what Bill McKibben called “global warming’s terrifying new math”, and the host of justifiably panicked Cassandras shrieking from the wings, is the unbridled enthusiasm of governments around the world for more and more extreme efforts to find and burn carbon, from fracking to deep-sea drilling to the Alberta tar sands.
In support of this multi-billion dollar suicide machine, governments, fossil fuel companies, and their PR minions engage in upbeat, green-tinged marketing campaigns to assure the public that these efforts are reasonable, that the continued use of fossil fuels is benign, and that climate issues are being addressed, or at least will be sometime in the future.
Since there are few things in the human experience less reasonable or benign than the reduction of civilization to bands of scavengers roaming the fetid swamps north of the Arctic Circle, it’s bewildering that so many of our captains of industry and political leaders apparently want to take us in that direction. Because whatever their flaws, these people did not get where they are by ignoring their own best interests.
How then, have so many jumped on board on the most massively self-destructive enterprise in human history? The least charitable explanation would be that our leaders are simply sociopaths, who understand the risks but reason that the short-term personal benefits are enormous, and that they and their progeny will be insulated from it by wealth, geography, or luck.
This idea is delusional. Even if you’re going full prepper and dropping a couple million on a converted missile silo, our collective future of massive storms, collapsing infrastructure, food and water shortages, and migration of environmental refugees is not going to be good to you, a realization that will probably hit home as you’re wheezing your way up a hundred flights of darkened stairs to your penthouse before the neighborhood kids catch you and turn your perfumed one percent ass into Soylent Green.
It’s also possible that the many, especially on the right, genuinely believe, despite the in-your-face evidence, that anthropogenic climate change isn’t really happening, or at least that the risks have been wildly exaggerated by Big Green Conspiracy (only 21% of Republicans in the US believe that dealing with climate change should be a priority). There are a plethora of online echo chambers, comforting safe spaces for the ignorant and the delusional, where non-scientists can spout non-science “proving” such things.
Such an explanation would also account for Canada’s last Conservative government’s zeal for closing labs and destroying research libraries (later emulated by the Trumpists) — it’s much easier to believe something when you’re not being constantly confronted with irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
And self-interest can be very convincing. The fossil fuel industry has trillions locked up in infrastructure and reserves, which must make it easier to convince yourself that the planet isn’t actually warming much, or that if it is the outcome will be less Dune meets Waterworld and more sunbathing in Nunavut.
But now is the time to face facts.
Whatever your reason for ignoring the reality of climate change, whether you’re a bonus-bound executive running a colossal fossil fuel company, or a politician whose next term in office depends on contributions from said company, or a comment troll who thinks climate change is too annoyingly liberal to be true — it’s time to end the fight and join the rest of the human race. Because no amount of money or self-righteous blather or value to shareholders is going to shelter you or anyone else from what’s coming if we don’t act now.
So rich folks, while you’re sacrificing interns to Cthulu at Bohemian Grove or pantsing your fellow plutocrats at Davos, remember that you and your kids and grandkids have to live here too. No one is going to Rapture you. Elon Musk is not taking you to Mars. And we’ve run out of time.