The Truth About Environmentalism

Strangely, there's still a debate in the public discourse about climate change, and whether or not it's happening. A lot of people, I find, react with naked skepticism, as if to say “I don’t really have to believe ANYTHING you say.” They aren’t adamantly against climate change, their just against believing anyone’s claims about anything. The “statistics can say anything” and “that’s just a theory, they don’t really know” crowd.

I like to say this:

Forget for a moment about global warming and climate change and sea levels and all of that. Think about what we can see around us every day, things that have happened in our lifetimes or the lives of our parents.

The industrialists told us all the smoke didn’t matter, the world was a big place, it would all disappear. But they were wrong – go to any big city and in spite of the fact that most of them have lost a lot of their manufacturing they’re STILL full of smog on hot days, sometimes bad enough that its dangerous to exercise. 

We thought we could throw our garbage in the ocean forever, because it’s so big. But we were wrong, we’ve poisoned the great lakes and the Gulf Coast and there’s a floating plastic dump the size of North Dakota in the Pacific Ocean where no fish can live anymore. 

We thought we could keep fishing forever, because there’s “always more fish in the see”. There’s plenty of fish in on-line dating, but we’ve destroyed fish (and whale and shark) stocks from the grand banks to the Antarctic. 

People have always wanted to tell you that the crap they did doesn’t make any difference, so that you would leave them alone and they could continue to make their profits by downloading the costs of pollution onto the general public. And although they've usually gotten away with it, they’ve been wrong every single time. 

We can SEE the impact we are having all around us, in the air, in the water, in the wildlife, and now even in the economy.

I don’t want you to accept any specific predictions about the future of climate change, or any specific prescriptions of what we need to do. All I want you to admit is the certainty that our actions have consequences and have done great damage to our world, and that they continue to do great damage and that we have a moral obligation to think about what kind of effect we are having and what we can do about it. 

All I want you to admit is that the only irrational position in this debate is denial.