Climate Activists Against Drunk Driving

Here’s how my mind grapples with the question of what's an approrpraite inidividual response to golobal climate change?

There’s a bunch of folks in a moving vehicle barreling down the road, heading straight for a cliff that if we go over, will surely be the end for us all. The driver is madly intoxicated, having the time of his life, and could care less about any risks involved. Everybody else in the car is either unaware, sound asleep, or as high as the driver and loving every second of the wild ride. You on the other hand, are wide-awake and can see that unless you take strong action right now, everybody here is toast. Oh, and did I mention that as the car’s speeding down the road it’s smacking into every person and beast it can reach, and that if and when it finally sails over said cliff, the big bang at the bottom will end all life as we know it on planet earth? So that’s the scenario, and the question I keep asking myself is what should I do? What would you do? What would any sane person do in this situation?

Common sense says, do whatever you need to take the wheel away from guy driving, ignoring his protests and the screams of the other revelers, knowing that when everybody sobers up and finally sees the humongous cliff ahead, they’ll be hugely grateful someone was clear headed enough to take the wheel when they did.

What you don’t do, at least as far as I can see, is sit back and watch the show. What you don’t do is hand the driver another drink. What you don’t do is say, I don’t want to get involved here, or I don’t like being aggressive or bossy or loud; I really don’t want to ruffle anyone’s feathers here. I’m too busy now. If it’s really a matter of life and death, and grievous harm is already being done today, there’s really no choice but to act now—not later, not when everybody agrees. Regardless of how much my actions will upset many others riding in the car, I do have a moral responsibility to act.

So, in real life, the car is planet earth. Our driver becomes our political leaders and big corporate execs. The passengers are the world population, and the beasts and people already being harmed are the people and species being impacted today by climate change. The cliff that we’re racing towards is the impending impact of global climate change, barreling down on planet earth at an already frightening but still accelerating speed.

In this true-life situation, what do you and I do? What an ever-increasing number of people are choosing to do is to act. To call out the insanity of our global choices, and to keep calling out ever more loudly if need be, until the human family finally wakes up and sees what modern civilization is doing to planet earth, and what’s at stake with climate change today and for generations to come. Anything less is collusion, if not outright cowardice. 

Now it would be easier to say, let’s just go along and wait until more people “get it”. But the fact of the matter is that every day we postpone action, more people and untold living species are being harmed and in increasing numbers are now dying. Every day that’s lost is billions more tons of GHG ejected into our atmosphere, that become much like a ticking bomb that unerringly if still slowly heats this planet and alters our climate.

As a civilization, now also largely responsible for the well-being of this planet and all its natural inhabitants, we no longer have time for further delay or even for convenient incremental measures. It’s time to hit the breaks today on our fossil fuel rampage, regardless of the short-term pain. Or, according to the vast majority of our leading scientists today, it’s over the cliff we go, with the consequences of inaction being truly grave.

One way to look at this is that it's just a lack of consensus. The jury is still out for some, on the existence of climate change as a whole, and more specifically on whether climate change is caused by human action. Conventional wisdom in this case says, give it time; wait until there’s a greater consensus for action. Putting aside the fact that just like in our speeding car scenario, crowd wisdom doesn’t always guarantee an accurate perspective, another niggling problem with this approach is that it’s not well supported by history, real or allegorical.

Every wonder what Noah’s neighbors thought and said of his strange behavior when he started  building the arK? Put yourself in his shoes and that’s kind of what this situation feels like. 

Then there’s Columbus. Whether or not people really believed the world was flat when he set sail, clearly there were no guarantees he would find anything worth seeking on his voyage of discovery. Yet sail off he did, definitely without full scientific proof or public consensus behind the wisdom of his course of action.

What would have happened if John F Kennedy had taken an opinion poll of the general public and of all the leading scientists of the day to determine how many actually believed we could reach the moon before he decided to launch the lunar space program?

Or Mahatma Gandhi, suffrage leaders, civil rights leaders; if each of these life saving initiatives waited for full consensus of leading experts or public opinion before taking bold action, it’s hard to imagine where our civilization would be today.

Foresight, courage, a clear inner call to right action and just plain old fashioned leadership, over and over have led us as a world family to rise and meet the challenges of our time.

Clearly, the call of climate change, the wrenching toll it’s already taking and the colossal risks to civilization from further bargaining and delay are our Ark, our Lunar Program, our Human Rights Movement, and those of us who see this fact clearly must not fail to act regardless of the personal consequences. We must act today, we must act boldly, we must do whatever’s needed to wake up our sleeping friends and stop the fossil fuel intoxicated politicians and corporate leaders from driving  us over a cliff. Failure to act is a denial of the gift of our individual consciousness and does a dangerous disservice to all.   

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