In 2006, there was an episode of South Park called Man-Bear Pig (MBP Season 10, E. 6) in which Al Gore was warning everyone of MBP. It was real, it was bad, and he was SUPER CERAL about it! And everyone ignored him because he seemed like a crazy guy warning about something no one could tell was real and whining about having lost the presidency (the most annoying thing about an Inconvenient Truth, if we are honest with ourselves).
Fast forward to Season 21 – MBP is back and eating everyone in South Park – and the conversation is about “when we should think about the possibility of being concerned about whether MBP is real.” Everyone agrees that at some point we might start to agree the MBP is real and only then should we start to think about doing something if, in fact, MBP is real. Also, no one should be listening to scientists telling them MBP is real because they are not to be trusted. Everyone is just giving their opinions about whether or not they think its real, and no one is doing a dam thing about it, even if they just saw MBP eat their family– heck some of them still don’t think its real even if they just had that experience!
The new IPCC report is Al Gore telling us MBP is eating our families right now and we are STILL trying to decide if this is something we believe in. The IPCC uses moderate to conservative models to predict what might happen, but things always seem to go a whole lot faster because there are more things involved. Our models are always flawed because there is no way to include everything, everywhere into the model. What we are finding is that the window to act is shorter and shorter and shorter – but those are the conservative models – which means the time to do something was when Al Gore was trying to warn us that MBP is out there and really, really bad and he was SUPER CERAL!
What does that mean? It means we are not going to recycle our way out of this (and BTW it is reduce, reuse, and then recycle – we tend to skip those first two steps!). We are not going to all stop using plastic straws and plastic bags starting today and somehow the climate will fix itself – although it would help with water way pollution if you just reduced the use to 0. We can’t all go trade in our cars for electric vehicles and install solar panels this week – because most of us can’t afford them even if we wanted to. Not to mention the supply chain issue. You having a hamburger once in a while is not going to melt the polar ice caps, but cutting back to once or twice a week would definitely help reduce deforestation and pollution through meat agriculture! Even if all 8 billion of us made these changes today – MBP is still gonna be eating our family and friends.
What we need is a global government response similar to what we had with COVID - only organized and more effective and actually helping the global south and the global majority! We need to put massive limitations on the major polluters and tell them they need to spend their billions in profits from the past few years to implement pollution reductions NOW and GLOBALLY! We need a massive switch to clean energy in the next two years – not just in the US but in Nigeria and India and Guyana and these billionaires and their companies need to be forced to do this. No, they are not going to do the right thing – if they were they would have done it. The only way we are going to be able to actually solve climate change is through a global government response.
But having just watch MBP eat my family (in the form of 12 atmospheric rivers and yet more rain on the way), I am not convinced there is large scale political will power to do something about this. They don’t want to stop MBP because they are making money off it in droves and frankly many of them will be dead before the worst hits their families. So, I am ending this dairy by speaking my own truth - I am frankly not hopeful that my kids will have a planet that is viable in the future regardless of how much I protest, write letters, teach about climate change, and frankly scream into the void. I am not rich enough or powerful enough to stop MBP — so I guess I am writing a diary to others who are already doing the same as I am...