What Will It Take To Involve Americans In Global Climate Change?
If you scroll to the bottom of this article on climate change, you’ll find a good video on an extremely important and interesting subject: getting Americans to embrace this as a major issue that requires urgent action. The presenter points out:
• This subject is already at the top of the priority list for most of the world outside of the United States.
• Here in the U.S., this is a generational thing; those over 60 tend not be as concerned as those under 30 – perhaps since older people won’t be around a few decades hence, when the damage will become more severe.
• Most people will require a reason that “hits home” in order to escalate this subject in their thinking, and thus in their voting behavior. Even events that have already occurred which many people attribute to climate change, e.g., super-storm Sandy, did not affect people outside of a small region and thus had limited effect on most Americans.
The guy quotes a number of surveys, so it’s hard to believe that this is simply an uninformed opinion. Yet it’s awfully cynical in its assessment of human motives, isn’t it? Is it possible that we really care so little about other people?
You can claim “Super” storm Sandy was a result of global warming but I think that you are skating on thin ice.
There have been Nor’Easters before and we will have them again. The convergence of high tide, approaching winter storm with low pressure and a CAT 1 hurricane was unfortunate but not attributable to climate change. All these individual events have occured before.
But now the damage was extraordinary. The foolish men and women who built their house upon the sand have been doing this for generations and have mocked the laws of nature. Now they expect the government to pay for the damage caused because they built their dream house in the wrong place. The billions of dollars of damage would have been considerably less if a rational shoreland policy had been in place for the last generation or two.
By bailing these folks out of their misery we are just enticing more people to do ecological damage to the shoreline. Mixing climate change into the arguement is a distraction from the important issue of whether there should be federally subsidized flood insurance available in flood plains and whether zoning laws should even permit this construction in the first place.
Stumbled onto the film “Cool It” a couple of nights ago. I understand the thesis, but in a way, the film makes it a bit easier to dismiss the subject matter by those who tend to view it in a superficial fashion. I don’t know the answer to reasonably accurate analysis that is easily misinterpreted, but I remain in the court of pessimism regarding our country taking meaningful actionable steps. In one part of the film they even mentioned the moral hazard of speaking to solutions such as geoengineering, given the typical reception being “see, there’s no problem”. We live in interesting times.