Climate Scientists Need to Get a Lot More Political
Climate Scientists Need to Get a Lot More Political
The people warning us about climate crisis also need to instruct people on how to become disruptive ecovoters in these 2022 elections
Publisher’s Riff
We’ve been seeing an uptick in dire warnings and protests from climate scientists and climate activists recently as climate crisis instigated by excessive use of fossil fuels keeps accelerating destruction of the only planet we’ve got. Those warnings do not go unnoticed or unheeded …
Here’s the Washington Post recently reporting on increasingly edgy climate scientists …
As time runs out for the planet to avert a future of climate chaos, scientists around the world are throwing down the gauntlet. Climate change science has been settled for decades, yet policymakers have yet to take sweeping action, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb to record highs. Climate scientists began to publicly make policy recommendations based on their research in the late ’80s, and their warnings have become increasingly strident. In April, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said emissions must peak by 2025 to avoid catastrophic consequences.
Now this inaction is driving some scientists to engage in civil disobedience, while others are striking against the IPCC, calling for a halt of further reports until governments mobilize. It’s a dire situation that’s taking a toll on the mental health of scientists, and raising the question of what climate advocacy scientists should engage in as politicians imperil the planet.
Such warnings also lead to a growing sense of give-up and fatalism about the world around us, with younger people - particularly Generation Z members - expressing a lot more cynicism about their fate as its tied to the future of this planet. Meanwhile, the crisis gets worse, as The Guardian reported in recent months …
The impacts of the climate crisis are proving much worse than predicted, and governments must act more urgently to adapt to them or face global disaster, the UK president of the UN climate talks has warned on the eve of a landmark new scientific assessment of the climate.
Alok Sharma, who led the Cop26 climate summit last year, said: “The changes in the climate we are seeing today are affecting us much sooner and are greater than we originally thought. The impacts on our daily lives will be increasingly severe and stark. We will be doing ourselves and our populations a huge disservice if we fail to prepare now, based on the very clear science before us.”
[T]he Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is expected to show that droughts, floods and heatwaves will increase in frequency and intensity, with devastating consequences, and all parts of the globe will be affected.
But, notably, one element that seems missing from this growing movement of agitated scientists is a unified political strategy. There’s lots of emphasis on camera worthy acts of civil disobediance and mostly White people in lab coats chaining or tying themselves to the White House. There’s also some form of protest each day in some random downtown of a major city or in the lobby of a big bank branch. Yet, in the United States - which is the largest contributor of cumulative climate-crisis-triggering emissions in the world …
… there’s no conversation or open calls-to-action for movement of climate scientists, activists and some young people who managed to make it to an Earth Day event or two to go vote en masse on this issue in crucial 2022 state and federal elections. We have no idea if there is a strategy for that or if climate scientists are getting shrewdly political and attempting to rapidly convert people into ecovoters as opposed to just depressed citizens who don’t believe they can do anything.
Rise of the EcoVoter(?)
Is there a growing segment of the electorate we can classify as angry ecovoters? We don’t know. Just like corporate news media won’t report on the climate crisis as much as it needs to, neither will pollsters ask about it all that much either. Everyone knows there is a climate crisis, but few are acting as if we’ve only got one planet to live and exist on as it fast eats away at every critical ecosystem needed to keep us surviving. Thankfully, “climate change and the environment” have made it to the Top 3 issues of importance as ranked by YouGov’s weekly Economist survey …
And interestingly enough, Millennials and Boomers seem more concerned about it than Gen-Zers and Gen-Xers. Worrisome is how low on the priority list it is for Black and Latino respondents compared to White men and women, despite the fact that climate crisis hits so-called “BIPOC” populations harder than Whites, in very real and lasting ways. Yet, climate crisis is not as prioritized.
More voters or respondents seemed to gravitate to climate issues as a top issue when everyone talked about it during the usual obligatory Earth Day rounds in April …
But, yet, as the recent CBSNews/YouGov poll showed, alarmingly fewer people in 2022 prioritized the future of the planet than did in 2021 …
A recent Pew survey shows only about 42 percent of adults making it a top priority, which is distressinly low …
Part of the problem is, well, first: we don’t really get the public riled up about the potentially apocalyptic state of our fragile environment until Earth Day once a year, and then - afterwards - we move on to other topics. There’s only one or a few exceptions: when a major cataclysmic disaster or a few in sequence or all at once happen and there is irrefutable evidence those events happened as a result of climate crisis. The other part of the problem is climate scientists are not conducting advocacy or having the passionate public conversation about this issue in a political context. It would be helpful to start getting political and prompting average citizens to identify 1) policymakers and elected officials who are pro-fossil fuel and anti-climate response (and those do tend to be Republican) and 2) prepare to vote them out of office and vote for people who will work aggressively towards addressing and fixing the climate crisis. Here we have a major election in 2022 that’s coming up, and no push from climate scientists and other advocates to make the election year a well-played referendum on policymakers who are in the way of doing anything about climate crisis. There is no major campaign telling people a set of crucial state and federal level elections are coming up and one big and very effective way people can send a message to elected officials or “politicians” who keep caping for destructive fossil fuel interests is to simply run them out of office. That would prompt a seismic shift in the way American policy institutions are tackling the issue.
Interestingly enough, Republicans already notice that environment and climate crisis have slowly creeped up to the top of issue priorities. Congressional Republicans just last week, in a bid to gas and scam voters in 2022, released a “climate plan” of sorts that didn’t even mention the word climate, but was designed as a political spectacle to make it seem they finally came around on climate crisis. But, as Republican voters are now increasingly faced with climate pressures on everything from hurricanes to droughts they feel compelled to stage something to make it seem like they were on climate issues when they never were.
Climate scientists, environmental groups and Democrats need to step up the ask for ecovoters in 2022 - and be clear on laying out the vision for what ecovoter domination on the electoral map looks like in 2022. Be more direct about calling out the people, the power groups, business interests and very much largely Republican elected officials and strategists who continue to maximize oil and gas profit at the expense of human civilization. The point should be made that if Republicans retake both House and Senate at the federal level and are able to expand their grip on state Capitols in legislatures, gubernatorial seats and other races, there will be little to no chance of any essential climate response policy being passed or implemented as fossil fuel interests will have even greater political control.
Full ecovoter turnout can change that. Climate scientists need to give something for people to do that, if engaged at maximum numbers, will create the needed disruption to force policymakers to distance themselves from fossil fuel interests and finally make the necessary moves to avert total planetary collapse. How bad climate crisis gets directly correlates with how much democracy erodes. Republicans, at the moment, are poised to destroy democracy (what little is left) in the U.S. - which means the pace of planetary destruction will speed up. That can be avoided, however. Climate scientists and assorted environmentalists need to stop being performative and make that connection now.