Virtuous Actions Won't Save the World - Neither Will the Democrats

Democratic members of Congress intend to offer up a resolution that will declare that the United States government considers the climate crisis to be an official emergency.  In the Senate, Bernie Sanders will offer this resolution for a vote, while in the House of Representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) and Earl Blumenauer (Oregon), will offer a similar resolution.  The assumption is  that this resolution will somehow stimulate some sort of meaningful action on climate crisis. 

Even if the resolution passed and was signed by the president, it would not force any action on climate change. But advocates say similar efforts in Canada and the United Kingdom have served as a leverage point, highlighting the hypocrisy between the government position that the situation is an emergency and individual decisions that would exacerbate the problem.

This year the Democratic House has passed seven "sense of Congress" non-binding resolutions including the Green New Deal.  A proposal that the Democratic Speaker of the House has denigrated as, “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it right?”  The Senate voted to not even hold a vote on the Green New Deal resolution. In that action, where 60 votes would have put the resolution up for a vote, 53 Republicans, three Democrats and one independent voted "no" and 40 Democrats voted "present". By voting “present” those Democrats did not have to take a position on the Green New Deal pro or con. Is it reasonable to believe that a Democratic controlled Congress would aggressively address the climate crisis?

Maybe it’s important to publicly declare that the climate crisis is an emergency and hope that will encourage people to do something? But, what exactly should people do when the United States government and most members of Congress in both parties refuses to do anything to deal with the climate crisis. What should individuals do to change the current course of the world - the nations that continue to burn coal, the fossil fuel companies that continue to drill, the politicians that continue to ignore the existential crisis? 

In the United States, government has responded to the climate crisis  through relatively timid incremental actions and many of those are being reversed by Trump and his enablers.  Around the world as right- wing governments take power, the United States and Brazil are two critical examples of this, climate crisis activism is being ignored or suppressed.  

Although some nations have taken strong stands and have aggressive plans to reduce CO2 generation - those actions are swamped by the overwhelming inaction of the largest generators.  Instead of strong, collaborative global action we have been encouraged to content ourselves with individual action – actions that might be virtuous, but which are mostly symbolic.

The belief that this enormous, existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous; it’s dangerous. It turns environmentalism into an individual choice defined as sin or virtue, convicting those who don’t or can’t uphold these ethics. When you consider that the IPCC report outlined that the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions come from just a handful of corporations — aided and abetted by the world’s most powerful governments, including the US — it’s victim blaming, plain and simple.

All those virtuous activities have had no impact on the inevitable.

A new study shows just how hard it may be to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial times.

The world’s existing power plants, industrial equipment, vehicles and other CO₂-emitters are on track to pump out enough carbon dioxide to blow past that target by midcentury, researchers report July 1 in Nature.  Add in future power plants that are already planned, permitted or under construction, and we could emit enough by 2033 to raise average global atmospheric temperatures by 1.5 degrees, the researchers say.  

While we’ve been recycling, going meatless, etc., global corporations and many nations continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere with virtual impunity.

While we’re busy testing each other’s purity, we let the government and industries — the authors of said devastation — off the hook completely. This overemphasis on individual action shames people for their everyday activities, things they can barely avoid doing because of the fossil fuel-dependent system they were born into. In fact, fossil fuels supply more than 75 percent of the US energy system. 

The clock is ticking.  There is a growing consensus that we have a dozen years (or less) to implement the most substantial and expensive global program in history.  One that will require a level of international coordination and cooperation that we have never before seen.  Who's going to lead that effort?