I hope I'm wrong about this

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

By Richard Anderson

I don’t want to be known as a pessimist, but lately I haven’t been feeling particularly upbeat about humanity’s ability to save itself.

I’m talking about the “fight against global climate change.” And who isn’t talking about it? Everywhere you go, it’s the subject of public service announcements, newspaper headlines, radio spots and TV news items. Words and phrases like “greenhouse gas,” “carbon footprint,” “carbon neutral” and “green building materials” no longer need to be defined.

We know bigger cars and trucks and SUVs consume more fuel and therefore put more carbon dioxide and other pernicious gases into our atmosphere than smaller cars and hybrids. We know compact fluorescent lightbulbs use 80 percent less electricity than standard incandescent bulbs.

Many of us have come to accept that it’s better to walk or bike than to drive, it’s better to bring your reusable canvas bags to the grocery store than to take home more paper or plastic bags, that there are sources of energy other than our dear old friends oil and coal. We know these things. And we recognize that little changes can add up and total a great big change.

And yet, I fear, we’re still in denial. We’re told that we can reverse the trend of global climate change, that we have the technology to make a really good start right now and that more innovation is in the pipeline that will allow us to really get on the right course soon. We CAN. But I’m not sure we WILL.

I’m not a doom-and-gloom apocalypse kind of doomsayer. I don’t think humanity will snuff itself out in a spectacular fireworks display (although I guess I shouldn’t rule that out).

But I think that it will take a serious interruption of the global economy – along with the associated environmental and humanitarian catastrophes that will precede and follow such a crash – to finally wake us all up, to touch us all in very personal and unfortunately painful ways, before we make the changes we need to make. Before we’re FORCED to make the sort of changes we need to make.

Our president has famously declared that we are addicted to oil. You don’t shrug off addiction because someone tells you to. You fight addiction each and every day for the rest of your life. We aren’t fighting hard enough. We’re still rationalizing and saying the problem isn’t me it’s my neighbor or it’s big business or it’s China and India.

We’re still patting ourselves on the back for being hip and conscientious as we put clever bumper sticker slogans on the rear ends of the carbon-spewing machines. Or we’re smugly suggesting that the data doesn’t add up, that the danger is overstated, that it’s all part of some liberal agenda.

Sooner or later, it’s all going to change. I’m thinking sooner than we think.
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