Great to see a writer without a famous name roil the blogosphere, as Adam Sacks sets off a storm with an accusation flung in the face of fellow environmentalists on Grist:
We're deniers every time we say “80 percent by 2050,” or
even “80 percent by 2020”; every time we refer to tipping points in the
future tense; every time we advocate substituting “clean” energy for
“dirty” energy; every time we buy a squiggly light bulb or a hybrid
vehicle; every time we advocate for cap-and-trade, or even a carbon tax; every
time we countenance the mention of loopy geoengineering schemes;
every time we invoke the future of our children and grandchildren and ignore
the widespread suffering from global climate disruption today.Every time we say these things and more, we’re promoting
denial of dire climate reality, the reality that’s spinning out of our grasp so
fast that we conduct our frenetic climate “solutions” efforts in a
kind of stupor, obsessing with parts-per-million statistics, keeping
desperately busy to ward off our own utter collapse borne of despair.The reality we’re denying?
We’re denying that we’ve put so much carbon into the atmosphere already that
positive feedback loops are well on their way to amplification hell.[1] We’re denying that time lags between carbon
emissions and their effects are frighteningly relevant, and that the disastrous
effects we’re seeing now are from emissions of 30 years ago. We’re denying that non-linear responses of
physical systems cannot be calculated and therefore are perilously ignored.
We’re denying that our consumption and waste have far exceeded planetary
capacity, possibly irreparably so.
He's got a point. If it's up to environmentalists to preserve our current climate, we may have a problem.
At one time we could claim that it's not our fault, we weren't driving…but we've been driving for approaching a year now, and hardly seem to have changed course. As Ted Rall impolitely points out:
Kit Stolz 