Once again, we have a bulletin from The Dept. of the Blindingly Obvious:

The U.S. probably won’t take significant steps to curb climate change until an environmental disaster sways public view and prompts political action, Robert Stavins of Harvard University said.

“It’s unlikely that the U.S. is going to take serious action on climate change until there are observable, dramatic events, almost catastrophic in nature, that drive public opinion and drive the political process in that direction,” Stavins, director of Harvard’s Environmental Economics Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said today in an interview in Bloomberg’s Boston office.

…

“There’s a legit reason for the public to be skeptical about climate change because they don’t see it,” Stavins said.

Grabbing the public’s attention would require a dramatic development, such as a “well-observed melting of parts of polar ice caps that result in some amount of sea-level rise,” Stavins said.

…

Climate change “is one that is going to require some kind of enlightened leadership from the top down,” according to Stavins.

This issue of a tipping point in American support for meaningful action on climate change is a topic that has been on my mind a lot the last year or so, and increasingly so in the last few weeks. It’s a deceptively complex notion, and it involves a lot of gut-level assessment of American voters and politicians, which is hardly an exact science.

Still, I think the following points collectively describe our situation:

  • Right now, meaning in late April, 2011, the American public has zero interest in doing anything of substance to address climate change. Still-high unemployment, an economic recovery that’s barely chugging along, and, of course, the all-purpose dampener of American spirits, “high” gasoline prices, all contribute to this inward looking and sour mood. You can argue all you want about what we “should” be doing and whether such factors are a legitimate excuse for continuing to do nothing in the short run, but it’s inarguable that that’s where we stand.
  • We have already experienced what many people a decade ago (likely including me, frankly) would have considered a “wake up call” that we blithely ignored. Katrina/New Orleans, watching the Europe heat wave of 2003, plus the Russian heatwave and the Pakistan floods just last year leap to mind. In fact, ask the average American what he or she would think of a heat wave that killed well over 30,000 people in Europe in a single summer, and you’ll likely get a horrified look. Then tell that person it not only did already happen, but it was less than ten years ago, and the odds are very good that the conversation will get decidedly uncomfortable as the other person tries repeatedly to deny it happened, often suggesting it’s just more crazy talk from the Internet.[1]
  • The next obvious thing to grasp for is the possibility that something can happen that’s big enough to serve as a “Climate 9/11″ that will force a tipping point, as Stavins suggests. This is where we separate the idealists from the pragmatists (or the optimists from the pessimists, if you must), with some twisty little passages along the way. In his book The Great Disruption[2], Paul Gilding offers the opinion that we already have enough hard evidence to change our ways, but it won’t be any single event or accumulation of evidence that does the trick. We will have to change first and then become open to seeing and responding to the evidence in hand. Gilding refers to this answer as “unsatisfying” (p. 105), and I agree. Talking about such a drastic and desperately needed change of heart that just mysteriously appears from the fog of mass psychology is not the least bit productive; essentially it says we should sit back and wait until we spontaneously wake up and leap into action.
  • So, if I’m hitching my hopes to a big, inciting event, what do I think it would take, one might well ask. I apologize in advance for the imagery this leads to, but the best name for it is not a “Climate 9/11″ but a “Climate Hiroshima” or “Climate Holocaust”. In other words, something vastly larger and more horrible, something that will not only get the attention of the average American (see above comments about the Europe heat wave), but will move those people to demand action in such large numbers that they overwhelm both the acolytes of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, et al. and the paid influence of the fossil fuel industry and their hangers on, like the railroads that make a significant portion of their profits from hauling coal all over the US. That’s an exceedingly tall order, to say the least. What might such an event or series of events look like? An immediate collapse of a large piece of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf, triggering a rise in sea level of sever inches to over a foot? It would be a huge news story — for perhaps one day — before being forgotten. Yearly outbreaks of tornadoes like the ones that visited so much death and destruction across the US South in recent days? That might do it, but the outbreaks would have to be very regular; every good year with no significant damage would provide fodder for the climate change deniers in their tireless quest to delay action. Crippling drought in the US Southwest and/or floods in other places? Probably not, simply because it would be so easy for the deniers to say that drought and floods always happen, we’ll get over it, etc.[3]
  • Bottom line: Will a big event push America to a mental tipping point? I fear that it will have to come to this, but it will have to be so big to overcome our inherent denier tendencies plus the powerful propaganda forces fighting change that it will entail near-catastrophic costs. Even worse, because timing means everything in this situation, we will be so much farther down the path of business as usual that it will make our chore vastly more difficult. We’re spewing CO2 into the atmosphere (which already carries far too much of our waste since the Industrial Revolution) at such a high rate that delay of another 20 years really will make a big difference. We’ve all seen and used the metaphor of driving toward a cliff or wall at a high rate of speed, with our remaining time and space to turn the wheel and/or hit the brakes dwindling fast. At some point we’ll be so close to disaster that such safe maneuvers won’t be enough, and our only hope will be to dive out of the moving car and hope that we suffer nothing worse than some bad scrapes and bruises and perhaps a broken bone or two.[4] Is humanity at that point yet? I don’t think anyone can be completely sure, but my hunch is that we aren’t, and even with all the committed warming (“in the pipeline”) and latencies of associated with public policy and implementation of a meaningful plan of action, we likely have another couple of decades. But the costs we incur between now and then will be ghastly and escalating.
  • All of this brings me to flerbnitz. One of the e-mail groups I’m in got into a somewhat heated discussion about views of our current climate situation and whether having, for lack of a better word, faith in public policy to address these looming horrors. The jumping off point was a comment someone spotted online from someone calling such a view just another form of denial, since it was so unrealistic. I was one of several people who objected strongly, saying that arguing against widely established science is a far cry from a belief in our ability to do something about it. That belief might well be accurately described as naive or idealist or even hopelessly deluded, but it’s not denialism. The conversation orbited this point for a bit and I offered the suggestion of calling this state of belief in a policy solution flerbnitz just to avoid the denialism tag. On a more substantive note, I think we have little choice but to embrace flerbnitz[5], simply because there is no other choice. Anything else is nothing more or less than fatalism and surrender to self-imposed circumstances, bordering on the civilization equivalent of suicide. (Auto-genocide, pun intended?) Are you ready to throw in the towel, sit back and see what happens as we continue to dump several tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere (and, therefore, the oceans) every year, and hope for the best? I’m sure as hell not, and I plan to keep fighting in whatever way I can to fulfill the original mission of this site, first expressed eight years ago, to educate and activate people about our energy and climate issues.

[1] Yes, I’ve done this, with both friends and strangers. The results are as depressing as they are predictable.

[2] Yes, I owe you all a review. To boil it down far too much than it deserves: Gilding’s book breaks new ground in that it’s a mainstream presentation that relates some truly awful details other authors and books shy away from. It has some passages that almost leap off the page for their sheer bluntness. We need far more of this. The problem is that he makes some assumptions about how we’ll respond to a climate emergency that I think are wildly optimistic to the point of being wishful thinking. We already have far too much of that sliding into the Pollyanna Pit of environmental writing. I will try to get a full review up soon, but don’t hold your breath.

[3] I predict that this is the pattern we’ll see arise: Increasing human and monetary costs of impacts and mitigation long before we wake up. Consider it the climate equivalent of our oil mess, where the US refuses to get serious about reducing our use of massive amounts of oil, mostly imported, year after year, decade after decade.

[4] I will leave it as an exercise for your imagination — or nightmares — what diving out of the moving car means in the real world.

[5] Embracing flerbnitz is a very wide and intentionally fuzzy category. It includes everything from writing letters to editors to self-education about relevant issues — something we greenies stink at, to be blunt — to participating in mass efforts like those of 350.org to getting off your ass and voting in every single election.

Photo by MEJones.