Environment & Energy
Related: About this forum"Losing Earth" - Nathaniel Rich Expanding His 8/18 NYT Article To A Book, Out Today
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I felt that the story from 1989 to the present has been extraordinarily well told, and exhaustively told. And I didnt feel like I had much to add to the story of industry involvement, the corruption of politicians, the corruption of scientists, the Republican Partys embrace of, first, disinformation propaganda fed to it by oil and gas industry, and then the metastasizing of that into the full-fledged fantasy world of denialism.
What I felt was not understood very well, including by me when I first started researching it, was how we got to that point: the pre-history of our current paralysis. Paralysis not only in the political process but in some sense the dialogue, the public conversation about the subject. Its been relatively unchanged since the 1990s. So there was this opportunity to tell the story of exactly a decade, from the establishment of scientific consensus about the nature of the problem and the birth of this movement to try to bring about a solution. That was the story that I feel like has been forgotten, including by a lot of people who are on the front lines of the climate change conversation.
A lot of activists and advocates are still under the impression that the problem started with James Hansen speaking before Congress in 1988. Even New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the other day was giving an extraordinarily passionate, eloquent speech on the floor of the House about how we need to take action on climate, and she said that the government has known about this since 1989. I dont mean to single her out, but even people on the leading edge of this are still essentially taking for granted the industry talking point that this is a new problem, something that has just come to light as recently as the 1980s. Of course, the government knew about it in the 1950s. And scientists knew about it decades before that. The amount of public amnesia around the issue is staggering.
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Whats changed really in recent months in the public conversation is that the young leaders are now bringing new momentum to the issue. Theyre saying things like, our lives are at stake, you people in positions of power are robbing our future from us. Theyre also making very emphatic connections in the way they talk about how the climate crisis is inextricable from almost every issue of social injustice in the U.S. and globally. When you hear Ocasio-Cortez or Greta Thunberg talk about it, theyre making a moral argument that I think is frankly stronger and more profound, and ultimately more politically effective, than making only the logical argument. Theres a moral tenor to the way theyre talking about it that I dont think was present and couldnt have been present in the 1980s.
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https://grist.org/article/nathaniel-richs-losing-earth-tells-lost-history-of-our-current-climate-predicament/