Blake Hounshell over at Foreign Policy’s Passport blogs about The guys who matter when it comes to climate change, although it isn’t absolutely clear which guys matter. It might be Hilary Benn, the UK’s Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (and former Secretary of State for International Development). Or it might be voters in Ohio, because Mr. Hounshell asks The Right Honorable Member from Leeds Central an interesting question: How do you get the issue of climate change to the point where a congressman in Ohio needs to worry about losing his seat over it?
The Rt Hon responds quite forcefully, including this persuasive bit: “What are we going to do when refugees turn up on the shores of your country fleeing not political persecution, but environmental catastrophe?”
I keep wondering if conservatives—that is, not the leaders of the Republican Party, but people with a Conservative mindset—cannot be persuaded that swift and severe action on climate change is the only chance to preserve something like the status quo, the norms ordained by the Divine and hallowed by tradition. Sure, there will be some sacrifice, but that sacrifice is in the good cause of defending what is. Because the times they are a-changing, and if you don’t want to hear a lot more foreign language spoken in Ohio, perhaps it’s worth paying (gasp) taxes to keep all those Chilean chins above water.
Me? I’m ready to start putting money away for adjusting to the brave new world, which will have such people in it.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Which is, after all, what makes the world interesting and fun.
Fuckers.
Me, I hang out with the SCA, ’cause when global warming makes the seas rise and the Chileans move to Ohio and the Four Horsemen and magnetic pole shifting and Utah is the new Antarctica, my friends will know how to brew some wicked mead.
It’s the only rational choice, really.
peace
Matt
“we close the borders — it’s our water” is where i think wingnut leaders are headed, on that question.
a lot of people seem to think the national security angle is the icebreaker. (some) oil money funds terrorists. (but that argument is almost more a swipe at chavez than a real complaint.) refugees. wars and dangers.
i’d rather go the long route and teach people the science of it, and teach their kids and grandkids, because we’ll all need to know. teach them what’s broken, why it can’t all be fixed in one place, and why us rich countries have an extra large share of mess to clean up. i don’t want to have one layer and then another layer of story to scrape off. it makes us stupid and slow, under the circumstances, to be so centrally-motivated.
i don’t think there’s one answer, though. every group has its own ideas about the scope and scale of the problem and their own goldilocks story about components of mitigation regimes. the brand thing weighs heavy on us — this solution is true blue, that one’s pure granola pink-o.