As Ida Hits, We're Still Ignoring Climate Crisis
There's no real public pressure on policymakers to act as climate crisis intensifies .... just knee-jerk unpreparedness & stunned looks with every passing disaster.
Publisher’s Riff
Hurricane Ida is hitting Louisiana, particularly New Orleans, on the 16th Anniversary of the monster climate change warning shot known as Hurricane Katrina. Yet, there are multiple signs that we didn’t learn much from that. Nearly two decades later and the threat of Ida not only shows us how destructive climate crisis is, but it finds us still unprepared like the last time, still relying on the same inadequate state, local and federal planning, and still tolerating the lethargic - at best - response of policymakers. Even as climate crisis impacts intensify, one side pretends like they’re acting urgently enough to tackle it and the other side pretends it doesn’t exist. This is, indeed, the most significant and dangerous threat of our time - but, we don’t know it, yet.
Once Ida hits, we’ll get the same public response: a mix of fascination and relief if we’re not, personally, in the impact zone. Few meteorologists, especially local ones, will even mention the words “climate change” to describe what’s going on. We’ll just talk about the hurricane as if it’s confined to itself, somehow - and ridiculously - divorcing it from the broader climate crisis emergency. Public discourse will definitely acknowledge it took place, but the public will fail to directly connect this to climate crisis and will do what it always does: watch a city get devastated by high winds and flooding, watch governments stumble on response and then, when the torrential rains and winds pass, get occasional dispatches on the clean-up and recovery. We may get a warning or two from an anxious expert on a talk show who will be treated as an alarmist (… even as we’re all melting under heat waves, choking on bad air quality and burning up from unprecedented wildfires).
House and Senate Democrats, along with the Biden White House, literally afraid to say “climate change” since the Denialists control the media narrative. So, instead, they will amplify their push for more “infrastructure” as the magic bullet to slay climate crisis. It’s so comically insufficient, however, and they know it. But, we’ll do this dance all over again until we have no dances left.
A big problem is that the public, at this stage, just does not care. Media happily feeds that ignorance with very limited coverage of or focus on climate crisis … see Media Matters here …
Or, a recent Media and Climate Change Observatory report on recent media trends here …
Scientists, researchers and other assorted academics have just not figured out, yet, how to speak on a layman level that stresses how critical it is. Activists are marginlized and candidates for office are not running on the climate threat as a major issue.
It shows how unimportant climate crisis is in polling, see this recent NBC News national issue poll …
Nearly half of voters, a combined 46 percent, either don’t believe climate crisis is caused by human activity, don’t believe it exists or are not sure, according to the most recent Economist/YouGov poll …
And a majority aren’t really making the connection between climate crisis and unfolding disasters like the very alarming drought out West, the destructive and unprecedented Pacific Northwest heat wave, or the current and very active hurricane season …
A majority are saying they haven’t felt the effects of climate crisis or they don’t know …
Still, interesting enough, climate issues are ranked 2nd in priority of issues - and it does intersect directly with health care, which is the top issue (even though voters won’t see it that way). That may present an opportunity to elevate the issue: making the direct linkage between climate crisis devastation and the negative impact that will continue to have on human health and the economy. We can make the argument that both the economy and public health are deteriorating as a result of a collapsing environment …
This most recent Ipsos poll might show a promising sign, at first glance, of increasing prioritization of climate crisis and the environment …. but, it’s still a very small slice of the electorate and it, unfortunately, defined almost exclusively by party lines …
Bottom line: it’s not nearly enough pressure on policymakers. These are still just very small minorities of voters who’ve identified this as a top issue. It’s still relatively fringe in the minds of most.