Fight against Climate Change? Maybe tomorrow

Damian Carrington’s piece on why it’s so hard to stop climate change mentions three key barriers preventing us from taking action; politics and economics, cheap fossil fuels and not enough low-carbon energy. Short and to the point, I do think that he missed a few other barriers that are worth noting.

The first barrier I would add to Carrington’s list the lack of confidence in global warming science in the United States. This is so vitally important because if the world hopes to see any sort of climate agreement, it’s essential for the US to take a lead role, something that will prove impossible if the American public doesn’t have faith in science. For whatever reasons, a frightening large number of Americans think that climate change science is bogus, and therefore feel no need to support efforts to combat climate change.

A second challenge to fighting climate change is the lack of motivation from those who believe in it. Back home, almost everyone I know believes that it’s happening and that humans are the main culprit. But other than that, they don’t change their actions to lessen their environmental impact. A great quote comes from the film Hotel Rwanda, when Don Cheadle’s character, the local hotel manager, begs an American cameraman to send footage of Rwandan atrocities to news outlets abroad so that people will call for intervention. The cameraman responds by saying “I think if people see this footage, they'll say Oh, my God, that's horrible. And then they'll go on eating their dinners.” Climate change is the same way. People may notice it and worry about it, but it amounts to nothing more than a few worries in the long run. With climate change affecting many faraway things such as tropical coral reefs and African farmers, Americans are quite removed from the harshest effects of global warming and consequently, it’s difficult for Americans to get motivated to do something to slow climate change.

The final barrier that I would add to Carrington’s article follows the previous paragraph and regards the desire for people to keep their ways of life. The problem is that we need to change our ways of living to make a true impact, yet none of us are willing to do so. We’re seeing climate change partly thanks to the “American way of life”; big cars, big houses with big backyards, long commutes and lots of stuff. If we really want to be serious about climate change then we need to make sacrifices, and not sacrifices like buying a Prius or eco-friendly office supplies. We need people to move into smaller houses, give up their cars, fly less, and consume less of nearly everything else. People simply aren’t ready to take these sorts of steps, and until we realize that our culture itself is contributing to global warming, global warming will continue unabated.