Let’s be honest. Global warming is a dreary subject. Even for those of us — and by “us” I mean “just about everyone in the world except for the U.S. executive branch and a few industry-funded skeptics” — who take it seriously.
Nonetheless, new evidence about climate change trickles out every day. It can be hard to keep track, especially ’cause of the dreariness. So Tom Engelhardt has done a real public service by gathering all that evidence into one essay.
He also addresses, toward the end of the essay, why it is that most Americans seem so unwilling to think about climate change, even when they know it’s real — i.e., he addresses the dreariness, and has some interesting stuff to say:
Instead, it’s quite clear that, faced with various scary scenarios, we’ve become a can’t-do nation; that conservatism has really meant a kind of conceptual hunkering down when it comes to anything but the present moment; and that an increasingly fierce imperial holding-on when combined with a sense of futurelessness and helplessness has consigned the environmental movement to the antlers of a dilemma.
As they say, read the whole thing.
