You, Too, Are in Denial of Climate Change

You, too, are in denial.

A woman displays a placard during a demonstration
 in New York on June 1, 2017, to protest US President
 Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris
climate accord deal.

We all are, nearly every single one of us as individuals, even those of us who are following the bad news that suggests “the climate change problem is starting to look too big to solve”; every nation, almost none of them meeting their climate commitments, and most (not just the United States) publicly downplaying the threat; and even many of the alliances and organizations, like the IPCC, endeavoring to solve the crisis. At the moment, negotiations at the organization’s COP24 conference, meant to formalize the commitments made in the Paris accords two years ago, are “a huge mess,” perhaps poised to collapse. Last month, scientists warned that we had only about 12 years to cut global emissions in half, and that doing so would require a worldwide mobilization on the scale of that for World War II. The U.N.’s Secretary General has warned that we have only about a year to get started. Instead, on Election Day, voters in deep-blue Washington rejected a modest carbon tax and those in crunchy Colorado rejected a slowdown of oil and gas projects. In France — conservative America’s cartoon of unchecked left-wing-ism — the worst protests in 50 years were provoked by a proposal to increase the gasoline tax. If communities like these won’t take action on climate, who, in the next dozen years, will?

Read the New York Magazine story by David Wallace-Wells - “You, Too, Are in Denial of Climate Change.”