How can we try to reach some sort of compromise, let alone a consensus, about how to fix a problem, when millions of people refuse to acknowledge the problem exists at all? An especially clear example of this problem is the refusal to accept the reality of climate change due to carbon combustion.
The increase in temperatures globally is producing measurable changes in the severity of weather events now, and these events will worsen in the future, so we need to take steps to mitigate these hazards, as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change make clear in its report Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation:
Understanding the multi-faceted nature of both exposure and vulnerability is a prerequisite for determining how weather and climate events contribute to the occurrence of disasters, and for designing and implementing effective adaptation and disaster risk management strategies. [2.2, 2.6] Vulnerability reduction is a core common element of adaptation and disaster risk management. (pg. 8)
These efforts will be expensive, long-term, and will necessarily entail major changes in lifestyle, and displacement of whole communities. Accordingly, communities, and nations, must accept the situation, and agree to make the sacrifices required to reduce the adverse effects of climate change.
And the US is, far and away, the primary purveyor of climate change denial:
American climate change deniers have been remarkably successful in confusing public opinion and delaying decisive action. They receive considerable media attention and enjoy access to key Washington power brokers.
This is on full display not just in Beltway debates and demonstrations, but in local decision making:
On the Delaware Bay, N.J. town struggles against sea rise.
People who live in these communities don’t all agree with scientists who say they are on the front lines of climate change. Some insist it’s a temporary phenomenon that could be endured with enough effort and money.
Downe Mayor Robert Campbell discovered the township on a Sunday drive 35 years ago, fell in love with it, and stayed.
Now, Campbell, also a GOP candidate for state Assembly, is fighting to keep Downe’s six communities — which also include Fortescue, Dividing Creek, Newport, and Dyer’s Cove — viable. Scientists, he says, just don’t get it.
“There is no sea-level rise, and it’s a bunch of hogwash,” Campbell says.
This bayside community, whose homes are literally becoming submerged as sea-levels rise, elected as their leader— the person who will represent their interests with the state and federal governments— someone who believes climate change and sea-level rise is ‘hogwash’.
Even those that acknowledge the problem have been cowed into a ‘neutral’ stance when it comes to the reality of climate change:
Wren, a founder of the Bayshore Center, a nonprofit in nearby Bivalve, tries to downplay the politics over climate change.
“Regardless of what’s causing it, or who, I don’t want to be political, but pragmatic. The fact is we’re going to have more storms and more frequent higher tides. It’s the unnamed storms that do the most damage.”
“Regardless of what’s causing it, or who, I don’t want to be political...”
This well-intentioned advocate feels she cannot publicly state what the cause of the problem is— the earth is warming, causing sea levels to rise, leading to flooding that will wipe out these towns. For all intents and purposes, she is surrendering the framing of discourse to the climate change denialists, in the hope of gaining cooperation in addressing the problem. But the climate change denialist won’t cooperate with any solution, since in his view, there is no problem to be solved— why would he agree to spend tax dollars on a hoax?
There is no way to address the problems we all face without ‘being political’. Not because we live in an especially politicized, polarized time, but because everything is political. We rely on functioning political institutions to deal with issues that affect each of us
Our ability as a society to remedy the problems we face is diminished when we can’t even arrive at a shared view of basic reality.