A Crime Against Humanity

Climate protection is the moral issue of our time.

One Christmas book that came my way was "Facing Climate Change", by Jeffrey Kiehl. It is a Jung-meets-the-climate-problem book. Evidently we should all hug a tree and get in touch with our Selves. It is, in short, preaching to the choir, and that in the gentlest possible way.

While the problem is principally psychological, the climate problem will take more aggressive thought and action to solve. At the same time, it is soluble. A recent New Yorker article focused on negative carbon- ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, which is what we need to have any hope of keeping biospheric catastrophe at bay. It will take country-sized infrastructures and improved technologies to solve, but is solvable. Given the collective will to solve it, there are plenty of policy and technical tools at our disposal.

The main problem is neither technical nor depth-psychological. It is moral, and reminds me of slavery in the US, and the resulting Civil War. Both sides knew it was wrong, and both sides benefitted from it economically. One side had the moral fiber to stand up and say that slavery was wrong, so wrong that it needed to, at least, be confined to the South, and ideally, abolished as an institution. The abolitionists were viewed as extremists and whackos at the time, unrealistic, weak, and sentimental. The other side prevaricated, rationalized, and ultimately fought tooth and nail to keep that system of incredible rapacity, greed, and injustice intact.

We are all implicated in climate change. We all know it is real, even if CO2 is invisible and its consequences relatively nebuous and distant. Denial, among the denialists, is but a stage of grief, for the greedy and wasteful freedoms we all grew up with and would like so much to maintain. The current Trumpian moment is one last hiatus from reason and responsibility, the dead end of an old and immoral regime. The US limped on for decades through the slavery crisis, reaching compromise after compromise, in hopes of saving a divided nation from the bloodbath that came. We have so far limped through two and a half decades, more or less, from the time when global warming was widely recognized, with analogous, if less heated, controversies, denial, and compromises.

Temperatures, decade by decade, and getting hotter.

Thankfully, addressing climate change will not require a war. Those poor nations most affected by it are far more likely to yearn to join the polluters than they are to start a war agaist them. In the US of the eighteenth century, the slaves likewise did not revolt in any successful way- the issue was not pressed by its victims, but by morally engaged onlookers- the abolitionists. Those economic interests most entwined with fossil fuels, at least in the US, are not politically independent, and while their corrupt influence is enormous, they are not unreachable by democratic governance.

What we need is a clear moral statement about the matter, in the vein of Uncle Tom's Cabin. That novel cast a new, brutal light slavery as it had never been lit before- as morally depraved and unsupportable by any civilized person. Climate change is a crime against the biosphere and against future generations of humanity, of vast proportions. We are slowly destroying whole ecosystems and ways of life, and robbing our children, en masse and comprehensively, of a healthy biosphere.

Al Gore started the process with his "Inconvenient Truth". It established the problem as undeniable, and moved many people with its moral urgency. But evidently we need more- a more compelling statement of the impossibility of being a moral person while denying climate heating or leaving it to someone else to solve. Most Americans agree, generally, but not with the urgency that leads to voting or action, and those who are most powerful seem to be most irresponsible on this front. Thus we are very close to a tipping point, and defining the issue with greater moral clarity could push us towards action.

Polar bears can help, but images and anecdotes are not enough.. there has to be a stronger comprehensive narrative around the issue.

With slavery, the logical end point was clear, even though it was also highly unpopular- the full enfranchisement and integration of African Americans into American society. With climate change, arbitrary lines have been drawn, but need to be periodically re-drawn as we spew our way through CO2 concentration limits and temperature thresholds. Two degrees? Or two and a half? This is one more way that this problem is devilishly easy to ignore and evade. The accords that have been reached so far, in Kyoto and Paris, have fallen far short of what is needed, and the only way to change that is through moral suasion- making it morally impossible to do otherwise than what is responsible to our future selves and progeny.

• Regulations? We don't need no stinkin regulations.