[MCN] Climate cop-out: When environmentalists let the populace deny/ignore personal responsibility: Covid epidemic is showing it’s wrong.

[Lance Olsen]

Politico 04/21/2020

What Covid Is Exposing About the Climate Movement
The “it’s not you” approach might be good politics, but the Covid epidemic is showing it’s also wrong.

MICHAEL GRUNWALD <https://www.politico.com/staff/michael-grunwald>
<<https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/21/earth-day-individual-climate-impact-198835 <https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/21/earth-day-individual-climate-impact-198835>>>

Opening paragraphs

Fifty years ago, 20 million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day, voting with their feet against the degradation of the planet. Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly captured the moment with his legendary anti-pollution poster: “We have met the enemy and he is us <https://library.osu.edu/site/40stories/2020/01/05/36-we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us/>.”

On Wednesday, environmentalists around the world will take to their keyboards for the 50th Earth Day, forced online by the coronavirus crisis but still dedicated to saving the planet from the slower-motion climate crisis. As the earth has begun to broil, though, the Earth Day movement has reshaped its narrative, arguing that the enemy isn’t really us

In recent years, green activists have pivoted away from guilt-tripping us about our carbon footprints and embraced a more politically appealing message: Our personal choices don’t really matter, so we should stop worrying so much about what we eat or drive and whether we recycle or compost. The new environmentally correct message is that only large-scale political and institutional change can save the climate, so lecturing ordinary people about using plastic straws and other individual behaviors with relatively paltry climate impacts is a distraction from government policies and corporate abuses with catastrophic impacts.

In other words, if you care about the earth, you should focus on the damage being done to it by real enemies like President Donald Trump and ExxonMobil, not the damage being done to it by you.

“You Can’t Save the Climate by Going Vegan,” a leading climate scientist proclaimed in a USA Today op-ed <https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/06/03/climate-change-requires-collective-action-more-than-single-acts-column/1275965001/>. “I Work in the Environmental Movement. I Don’t Care If You Recycle,” a climate activist declared in Vox <https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/28/18629833/climate-change-2019-green-new-deal>. A Daily Beast columnist explained <https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-your-carbon-footprint-is-meaningless> “Why Your Carbon Footprint Is Meaningless,” while a Guardian writer claimed <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals> “Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals.” The new thinking might have been best summed up by a recent headline in the eco-media site Grist: “This professor wants you to give up your climate guilt <https://grist.org/fix/this-professor-wants-you-to-give-up-your-climate-guilt/>.”

For a movement trying to broaden its appeal, it’s an alluring message. Americans don’t want to feel guilty about driving, flying, eating beef, having kids, buying too much stuff, moving to bigger houses in outer-ring suburbs or other ordinary human activities that increase greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate activists don’t want to reinforce stereotypes of enviros as self-righteous anti-fun scolds. And it’s true that there’s no way to solve climate change without major systemic change.

But the idea that our individual actions don’t particularly matter is fundamentally bogus. And over the past several weeks, the coronavirus has been revealing that in unexpected ways.

The newly iconic photos of a crystal-clear Los Angeles skyline without its usual shroud of smog are unwanted but compelling evidence of what can happen when individuals stop driving vehicles that pollute the air. Nobody is happy about what’s causing a 95 percent drop in air travel, but nobody will ever again be able to claim that massive reductions in airline emissions are impossible. And the dramatic reductions in overall emissions during this time of individual confinement are a clear demonstration that most emissions are caused, directly or not, by individual activities—the fuel we burn, the electricity we consume, the factories and farms that make the stuff we buy and eat. It’s horrible that it took an economy-crushing public health disaster to illustrate this on a large scale, but when people do less, for awful, virus-related reasons or noble, climate-related reasons, they emit less.

FULL article here 
<<https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/21/earth-day-individual-climate-impact-198835 <https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/21/earth-day-individual-climate-impact-198835>>>
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Greta Thunberg boils the basics down to just 5 words: “… and it will get worse”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhQVustYV24 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhQVustYV24>


She knows it will get worse because climate scientists had made the same point; e.g., ….


Camilo Mora: “ ….  our choices for deadly heat are now between more of it or a lot more of it.”
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/circoutcomes.117.004233 <https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/circoutcomes.117.004233>

Michael Mann: ““A new normal makes it sound like we have arrived in a new position, and that's where we're going to be. But if we continue to burn fossil fuels ... we are going to ... get worse and worse droughts, and heat waves, and super storms, and floods, and wildfires.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/climate-change-is-making-wildfires-more-extreme-heres-how <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/climate-change-is-making-wildfires-more-extreme-heres-how>

Kate Marvel: “The whole idea that everything’s going to work out isn’t really helpful because it isn’t going to work out ” said Kate Marvel a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Climate change is going to worsen to a point where millions of lives, homes, and species are put at risk she said. 
https://newrepublic.com/article/151608/case-against-climate-pessimism <https://newrepublic.com/article/151608/case-against-climate-pessimism>

My own view: <<https://mountainjournal.org/why-rising-temps-mean-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it>>

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