Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.
Goddamit, Paul, it ain't the planet that's in danger. The Earth won't be in danger until the Sun winks out and fries it to a crisp in about 5 billion years or so.
The danger is to LIFE on the planet as we're accustomed to it. It's going to change and probably not to our benefit.
But the larger reason we’re ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.
Yeesh. Lobbyists. They can always lobby later to get the money they're so desperate for printed on asbestos, I guess.
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