Some days it seems like we’re doomed
“I love these mountains,” said the workman driving the pickup truck as he admired the ridgetops. Then he tossed his empty drink cup out the window. The wife retells that anecdote now and then. She was in the passenger seat.
For a time in the 1990s, New Agers called this area the Sedona of the East. Others call it the Paris of the South. People in certain circles toss around words like mindful and intentional, whatever they mean. That’s aging hippie lingo to a lot of people just trying to pay their bills each week as expenses rise and paychecks don’t. Some people need to be whacked upside of the head for concerns like climate change to sink in, even when notice arrives at the front door.
Helene whacked a lot of people upside of the head here on September 27. And still the broader patterns may remain invisible to people like the guy in the truck.
Los Angeles got its own whacking last week. The question is will residents spared and who lost homes see the bigger picture, or like here in WNC will they be too busy rebuilding the lives they had to rebuild them differently.
“[E]ven in this place where there is little dispute that the danger is only getting worse due to climate change, we don’t leave,” explains David Siders at Politico. Even in “fire-gutted, heavily Democratic Altadena … climate change was nowhere near top of mind,” he found:
“When the wind gets like that, I’m sure that’s been happening since the beginning of time,” said David Allen, a writer whose own home was spared, but who was surveying a less fortunate neighbor’s. In this neighborhood full of doctors and professors and scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Allen said he suspected people here just might become more animated about climate change. He nodded to the darkened sky obscuring the daytime sun — a “toxic wasteland,” he said.
But everywhere else? The country had just elected Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, joked about rising seas creating “more oceanfront property” and promises to “drill, baby, drill.”
“We’re in a stage where half the country’s thinking magically about things,” Allen said. “They’ve allowed themselves that luxury to be anti-everything — the end of expertise.”
Another blast of wind. Another fire. Okay, this one was nastier than most. Apocalyptic, like the Helene winds and flooding that killed over 100 in Western North Carolina and altered the landscape. But were the Los Angeles fires apocalyptic enough to change minds?
“Blame?” said one resident Siders spoke with about the fire. “No,” he said, “We don’t know what started it.”
There’s an idea I’ve heard from many Democrats, especially in California, that more experience with natural disasters might spur more urgency around climate change. And in fact, polling suggests people affected by extreme weather do draw a link. California’s former governor, Jerry Brown, told me when we met last month in Sacramento that Trump might represent something of an opening for Democrats on the issue: “If the assault on the environment is as extreme as expected, then I believe the fervor for protecting the environment will increase far beyond what it is today.” Attitudes about climate might shift, he said, when “we get a big set of fires or floods, which we’re going to get.”
He was right, it turned out, about the set of fires. And the climate science was right there with it. The same day I visited Altadena, a group of researchers released a study describing how climate change had accelerated “hydroclimate whiplash” between wet and dry conditions, increasing the risk of fire. Its lead author, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California’s agriculture and natural resources division and UCLA, told me that one of the challenges when it comes to public opinion about climate change is that while people “correctly understand that climate change exists,” many “don’t feel it is viscerally or tangibly affecting them.”
Major catastrophes are relatively rare, and when they do happen, not everyone draws a connection to climate. He called it an “information crisis.”
And it is a political one, too. Even if people do accept the reality of climate change, and even if they are concerned about it, the issue tends to rank low on people’s list of priorities when it comes to electing politicians who can shape public policy.
There are dozens of cartoons picturing a pair of dinosaurs and the Chicxulub asteroid. “Maybe it isn’t going to be so bad,” says one from The New Yorker.
I imagine dinosaurs in MAGA hats sneering, “Cry more, asteroid.”
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