(An Unlikely Apologetic On Behalf Of Human Consumers)
The first published, peer-reviewed research
confirming that CO2 can trap heat in the atmosphere was conducted in 1856 by Eunice Foote. Her experiments were made by burning coal. This is the point of origin for scientific awareness of anthropogenic climate change. 120 years later, in 1976, Al Gore began to present the latest climate data to the public in congressional hearings.
The human brain isn’t new. Its structure hasn’t changed for hundreds of thousands of years. In each of the last 170 of those years, more pieces of the climate jigsaw puzzle have been set in place by the scientific community. So why the mad scramble to confront the crisis now?
Aggregate popular movement is an expression of individual choices. It’s easy to say we could have implemented gradual measures forty years ago and distributed the transition away from fossil fuels over such a long period that it would barely be felt now. But what would that have looked like at the time?
During the recession of 1983, people were out of work. They needed jobs, money, security. They were worried about their families. The oil shortages of the seventies were over. Gas was cheap. Few people wanted to hear about alternative energy or lifestyle adjustments to serve a greater good forty years in the future. The average American had more immediate concerns. At the first suggestion of potential price hikes, the discussion would have been over. The same could be said after the Black Monday crash of 1987.
We rarely feel economically secure, no matter how much easier in hindsight things may have looked between crises. The average consumer is consumed by the day-to-day. Meanwhile, above our heads, the skies are clear on a sunny day. There are always fluctuations in the weather. Natural disasters are reliable visitors, their intensities varying year to year. Climate change’s superpower is invisibility.
Electrification is considered a fundamental part of the solution today. But nobody in the mainstream thought electric cars were viable until the 2010s. Say what you will about Elon (and I won’t stop you), but he gets the lions share of the credit for that. In the absence of a new breakthrough in power storage or generation technology, the realistic path forward is probably a combination of nuclear and renewables. Nuclear power in the 80s was a disaster. No one was going to make a case for its expansion, at least not as long as it remained in private hands and undersupervised. Even today, the shadow of nuclear’s early failures and the outsized harm to poor communities makes many climate advocates nervous.
The power grids weren’t as close to capacity as they are now. We knew the system was inefficient, but there was more overhead then. There’s still intense resistance (no pun intended) to what would essentially amount to nationalizing the power grid. In the 80s that would have been unheard of. But distributing renewable electricity where it’s most effective will require either a nationalized grid or aggressive, top-down regulation to fasttrack long-distance interconnects across private enterprises. That’s a big ask even now.
Yes, decades ago the experts could see where the curves were likely heading. Responsible policy should have taken them into account. Leaders should have introduced the conversation into the public sphere, regardless of how it would have been received. Al Gore did, and he did it early. The apathy and outright mockery he received says a lot about how comfortable we were then with our conventional-wisdom assumptions about our lifestyle. If this post serves as an apologetic for the blind consumers we’ve always been, then it is unreserved in its criticism for those of us who still, now, refuse to see climate change as a concrete threat requiring a concerted, overdue response. Now we have no excuses left.
— Dave Coulter
12/11/2023
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