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February 7, 2012 Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Why the Energy-Industrial Elite Has It In for the Planet
Two Saturdays ago, I was walking with a
friend in a park here in New York City. It was late January, but I was
dressed in a light sweater and a thin fall jacket, which I had just
taken off and tied around my waist. We were passing a strip of bare
ground when suddenly we both did a double-take. He looked at me and
said, “Crocuses!” And, dumbfounded, I replied, “Yes, I see them.” And
there they were, a few clumps of telltale green shoots poking up from
the all-brown ground as if it were spring. Such a common, comforting
sight, but it sent a chill through me that noticeably wasn’t in the
air. Even the flowers, I thought, are confused by our new version of
weather.
Later that same week, as temperatures in the Big Apple crested 60 degrees, I was chatting on the phone with a friend in Northampton, Massachusetts. I was telling him about the crocuses, when he suddenly said, “I’m looking out my window right now and for the first time in my memory of January, there’s not a trace of snow!” Of course, our tales couldn’t be more minor or anecdotal, even if the temperatures that week did feel like we were on another planet. Here’s the thing, though: after a while, even anecdotes add up -- maybe we should start calling them “extreme anecdotes” -- and right now there are so many of them being recounted across the planet. How could there not be in a winter, now sometimes referred to as “Junuary,” in which, in the United States, 2,890 daily high temperature records have either been broken or tied at last count, with the numbers still rising? Meanwhile, just to the south of us, in Mexico, extreme anecdotes abound, since parts of the country are experiencing “the worst drought on record.” Even cacti are reportedly wilting and some towns are running out of water (as they are across the border in drought-stricken Texas). And worst of all, the Mexican drought is expected to intensify in the months to come. And who can doubt that in Europe, experiencing an extreme cold spell the likes of which hasn’t been seen in decades -- even Rome had a rare snowfall and Venice’s canals were reported to be freezing over -- there are another set of all-too-extreme anecdotes. After all, in places like Ukraine, scores of the homeless are freezing to death, pipes are bursting, power cuts are growing, and maybe even an instant energy crisis is underway (at a moment when the European Union is getting ready to cut itself off from Iranian oil). And that’s just to begin a list. And yet here’s the strange thing. At least in this country, you can read the “freaky” weather reports or listen to the breathless TV accounts of unexpected tornadoes striking the South in January and rarely catch a mention of the phrase “climate change.” Given the circumstances, the relative silence on the subject is little short of eerie, even if worries about climate change lurk just below the surface. Which is why it’s good to have TomDispatch regular Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, take a clear-eyed look at American denialism and just what it is we prefer not to take in. Tom The Great Carbon Bubble |
