It’s not Pollyannaish to say “yes” to a form of practical optimism when the world’s been given a near-fatal diagnosis of economic enfeeblement and overwhelming human tragedy and displacement caused by climate change.
Pessimism is a paralytic agent. It’s worse than any dire prognosis itself. It’s like being a fly bitten by a spider, rendered inert, and wrapped in a cocoon to be leisurely eaten alive.
That’s what it felt like last week when the White House released the government’s congressionally mandated Fourth National Climate Assessment, which was followed up the next day by clear data from New Mexico’s booming Permian Basin that the fossil fuel industry has no intention of cutting back on its CO2 producing fuels. Pessimism lurked like a sticky web ready to bind us all in despondency and hopelessness.
But what is there to be optimistic about? Human nature? The rational impulse? Techno-miracles? Haven’t we already been done in by Mad Magazine procrastination over the last three decades, allowing climate change to get a strangle hold? Is there any hope of us ever being able to catch up? I think there is, slim though it may be.
As our population ages, more and more of us are getting trained by life in how psychologically to deal with bad news and dire times. We know that it’s just as easy to scare ourselves to death as it is to be lazy and stupid about our physical upkeep and basic health. The “C” word can plunge us into the frozen lake of pessimism so fast we’ll resign ourselves to a best-guess prognosis and fold our tents. Climate change is becoming a “CC” phrase, causing the same kind of frigid paralysis as the “big C.”
This is not to imply that “it’s all in our heads.” But people used to hard times, and miserable pains that don’t kill you but require that you adapt, have learned personal lessens that also make environmental sense.
The first thing you do with a gloomy prognosis is to find a community, even a community of two, to negotiate the medical establishment, learn about the illness, find out options within the system, explore alternatives, research successful treatments and unexplained “spontaneous recoveries,” assess your inner resources and your financial strength, and nurture a helping network of family and intimate associates.
In the wake of the Fourth National Climate Assessment released by the White House less than two weeks ago predicting climate-caused economic decline, and following the news that fracking and oil and gas exploration in the Permian Basin in southeastern New Mexico leads the nation in fossil fuel extraction, we are caught in a situation not dissimilar to being diagnosed with a fatal wasting disease. While we may be personally ineffective in healing the wounds of climate change, we can join forces with others in creating another kind of helping network of like-minded people in our immediate vicinity who would be willing to lobby local government to become radically more proactive in preparing to face the grim consequences of global warming. We could work though the alumni associations at our universities to advocate major curriculum changes across disciplines to turn “higher education” into an intellectual force creating practical solutions for surviving the climate craziness to come. We could form study groups to research successful adaptations in other localities similar to ours and lobby to have elected leaders explore their feasibility in our area. We could create conservation consortiums in our neighborhoods to explore increasing the efficiencies of water and resource preservation and decontamination. We could create brain trusts to explore small advances in ecological sensitivity and appropriate action with appropriate technology and explore how to apply it to our immediate area. We could replace our book clubs with climate change seminars amongst ourselves to increase our efficiency as advocates of aggressive adaptive planning for what is likely to face our area in the future.
If climate change diminishes our national economy by 10 percent, as was predicted in the National Climate Assessment, we should perhaps gather with our children and grandchildren to explore the possible impacts of such a decline and research adaptive measures in other economies to see if they might be useful in efforts to survive a steep, long-term climate change depression.
We know that fracking and fossil fuel exploration takes vast amounts of water, contaminates the water it uses, and pollutes the surrounding environment, in addition to directly producing the fuels that cause climate change. What can anyone do about that? Perhaps the best thing to do is use the reality of fossil fuel production, and the immense profits that come of it, as the ultimate reality check to jar us out of our various complacencies.
All of us will live to see the beginnings of a long commercial conflict, if not to say war, between the death-throes strength of fossil fuel conglomerates (and the governments that depend on them) and the blossoming business prospects of the alternative energy industry (and the governments that could come to depend on them). We need to know for sure which side we are on. And if it’s the alternative energy side, we must educate ourselves to be knowledgeable and effective lobbyists. In New Mexico, we need to advocate strenuously for state government to wean itself from the stranglehold of fossil fuel revenue and dramatically diversify our income portfolio to include, among other things, alternative energy sources and the business incubators that could decentralize energy production around the state.
We can also, at long last, pay hopeful attention to the invigorated membership of the U.S. House of Representatives, and young new members such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as they promote the notion of a “Green New Deal” to completely revamp national environmental and economic policy by 2020. It’s a long shot for sure, and details are not worked out. But sometimes politics, despite its futile madness, does provide some uplift of the spirit.
Climate change, like any terrifying diagnosis, calls upon us to vacate the frantic helplessness and hopelessness than can kill us faster, really, than the “disease” itself, reassert our self-reliance and empower ourselves to innovate, to think ahead, to build community, to expand our knowledge, and to do everything that we can do, and then some.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image derived from photo by Paul Lowry)
There is almost always some reason for optimism, at least about some things. Thanks for breaking that down for us. The Climate Change document made me optimistic, then its coverup by the administration took that optimism away. Some of the bright new minds in Congress are a cause for optimism, but the optimism they generate won’t last if its back to business as usual with mainstream Democrats and their Republican counterparts. Each time another of Trump’s crimes is revealed I experience optimism: that the revelations will finally be enough to nail him and rid ourselves of this seemingly invincible monster. And then he sails through again. We need optimism, if for nothing else than as an energy source to keep on struggling, working, trying to take our country back. Here’s to a better 2019!