The Washington Post’s top front-page story this morning anxiously fretted yet again about insufficient “action” in the face of pending climate doom as world leaders gather at the United Nations this week but still haven’t settled “collectively” on a plan to “quickly . . . slow the warming of the planet” ahead of November’s “crucial global climate summit in Scotland.” Crucial? Says who?
Quoting officials and partisan allies from within the leftist echo chamber, Post reporters Brady Dennis and Steve Mufson threw around well-worn words and phrases that included “tipping point,” “already worse than we thought,” “irreversible damage,” “worsening catastrophes,” “more frequent flooding,” and “more intense wildfires and heat waves.” The original draft of the email below was sent to the two of them, copying their senior editors and constructively suggesting that such overheated rhetoric is defeating their purpose.
Dear Brady & Steve,
By now it should be abundantly clear to you, your editors and all of those concerned global leaders you write about — the same folks who fly private jets to attend a celebrity former president’s 60th birthday party at his multimillion-dollar, energy-sucking island mansion built in close proximity to the supposedly rising sea — that your breathless, ever more dire climate rhetoric isn’t working to captivate, much less motivate, the general public, most of whom are stuck in coach [“ At U.N., urgency to act on climate,” A1, Sep. 20]. It’s a lot like trying to persuade folks to get vaccinated by telling them they’ll be murderers if they don’t. Soon enough, they just tune you out.
So, if you’re really in this for more than just panic clicks and invitations to appear on NPR and MSNBC, which is to say if you really want folks to pay attention to never-ending climate change now — after 4 billion years of it — you need to think and speak in terms other than wholesale changes to economies and living standards and massive redistributions of wealth, all of which you’d presumably like to have overseen by an imagined, always benign One World Government of some kind.
Instead, you need to start thinking and speaking in terms of smart, manageable bites of mitigation on a nation-by-nation basis with the consent of the governed. Baby steps. Like green roofs, retractable sea walls, nuclear & hydro power projects, industrial scale desalination plants like Israel’s, and a network of pipelines to move that fresh water where it’s needed. And you have to understand that most of us think marginally warmer weather is a good thing. Far more folks worldwide freeze to death each year than die of heat-related causes. Even eighth graders know plant life — and thus agriculture — generally thrives with more CO2. And many seniors see longer golf seasons as a bonus.
So please, stop with the ticking doomsday clock. No one but neurotics and paranoids and young bartenders-turned-socialist-politicians who want the Leviathan State to dominate and destroy the individual are listening. Go reread Aesop’s fable about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” and come back to your reporting with a more sober, grownup approach.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.