We Should Be Doing Anything But Trusting the Government About Climate Change

By Matilda Bickers (October 10, 2018)

I think the thing that drives me the most crazy–after the sheer helplessness of having to live through these times, that’s definitely the MOST crazy making–is listening to well off white people say “we’ll get there eventually. We have to,” and other platitudes about climate change.

It’s not that I don’t believe them–although I do not–it’s the fact that they use this to try to comfort or reassure me and others: “we’ll get there eventually.” “Eventually the US government will act in its own self interest (assumed to be that of the people of this country) and invest in whatever solar wind power, they have to.”

I mean our current administration is acting in ITS own self interest and hardcore committing to making everything worse so that’s a very optimistic assessment already. But also: people are already dying of climate change. And the assumption that we don’t need to worry because eventually the rich white people behind climate change will change their ways is just ignoring the hundreds of thousands-millions of people who will die before then because they live on islands or they live in Karachi or they live in the desert, whatever, those people have already begun losing their lives to climate change related heat waves, floods, storms…

At best, the platitudes are just trying to get me to be less wound up about something I can’t control and I get that, but the  blithe dismissal of the hundreds of thousands of people who are going to die over the next few years even, and then who are going to be trying to get to safety as we make their homes unlivable, and accept that as a fair cost for not changing our ways… It’s not going to be okay. We should be grieving and we should be… doing anything but trusting that the government will change course in time to mitigate the worst of it.

mb

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.