(content warning: climate anxiety)
Everything happens for a reason, of course.
I didn’t get into MIT for grad school because God wanted to me to meet my wonderful Chicago friends. I got depression because struggling with it made me a better and stronger person. The weird cognitive symptoms I’ve been having with my recent headaches are confirmation that God doesn’t want me to go into pure math research.
And millions of people are going to die from the coming climate nightmare…
a) …because God is punishing us for putting too much faith in technology?
b) …to teach us a lesson about the dangers of scientific illiteracy?
c) …as part of Joe Manchin’s character development?
I know that my habit of making up satisfying “reasons” for things is a bad one, and I’ve been trying to break it. But I still can’t help feeling that the alternative, especially for something of this magnitude, is just a frightening and absurd nihilism.
In case you aren’t familiar with climate science, here are three basic facts:
Climate change is real and will be responsible for the deaths of millions of people and seriously devastate our (and others’) way of life. Without decisive action, it will easily be one of the worst things humans have ever done to one another.
Fixing climate change will require collective government action, which will be difficult to pull off without the participation of the American government. The 3.5 trillion dollar bill in front of Congress is too small by at least an order of magnitude.
If the 3.5 trillion dollar bill does not pass, a combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and GOP opposition to science make it unlikely that America will mount any sort of effective defense against climate change in the next decade or so.
(If you’ve ever wondered if you’d have stepped up to prevent one of the atrocities of the past few centuries, your response to this situation is your answer. There’s a lot more paralyzing anxiety and indecision and helplessness than I expected!)
At the time of writing, there’s a good chance that the (already too small) bill won’t pass because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are on some sort of bullshit power trip1, with Manchin shamelessly opposing both deficit spending and empirically harmless tax increases to cover the spending, and Sinema refusing to even stake out a coherent position.2 The sheer pettiness of their refusal to care about other people would be laughable if it were not linked to the mass suffering and death of the world’s most vulnerable people.
In other words, our country is on track to take actions (or rather inaction) that we straight-up know are going to kill a lot of people in really terrible ways, just…because.
What are we going to tell our grandchildren when they ask us why there isn’t enough food and why so many countries are at war and why natural disasters seem to come so, so often?
“We didn’t know it would be this bad?” But we did! We’ve known without question that we’re on track for a truly awful future since I was a child!
“We didn’t know how to stop it?” But we do! Not all the way — we need some really good luck when it comes to technological advances and solving collective action problems — but we already know how to make the future a lot better than it’s currently on track to be.
We’ll be stuck saying something like “well, we had one chance to change things and everybody knew it and fifty-two mostly-old mostly-white mostly-men just kind of decided not to for no good reason.”
Nobody in the entire world would ever be satisfied by this answer because it’s absurd and frightening and sounds like the actions of some nihilistic death cult and not an institution that unironically refers to itself as “the world's greatest deliberative body.”
(And where is the church in all this? Why has my church never given a single sermon on one of the most important moral issues of all time? Maybe it’s time to update The Message with “Whatever catastrophes you gave to the least of these because you were too greedy to give up the half a million dollars your coal mine made you each year, you gave to me”. )
If this post comes across like I’m angry, then good. I am. And you should be too! This isn’t some abstract disagreement — this is about more real people than I’ve ever met, who we know will suffer and die because of the choices of a few greedy leaders who are intelligent enough to know this is the decision they’re making. (Along with, to the extent that they had a choice, the people who voted them in.)
Originally this post ended with a walk through the bible’s view on this sort of “suffering for the masses caused by a handful of rich evil people” thing and the promise of heavenly justice, particularly in Isaiah 53 and 57. But it felt disingenuous to try to “explain” something I just fundamentally don’t understand.
I don’t understand why God lets people like this stay in power. I don’t understand why people I care deeply about seem to be okay with what’s happening. I don’t understand how misinformation and “not caring about other people” became two of the main hallmarks of a religion that bears Christ’s name, at least in the United States.
And I don’t really know what to do about it, either.
I will continue to donate to funds that fight climate change. I will continue to try to minimize my carbon footprint. I will try to be there for my friends who this is hitting particularly hard. I will continue to pray that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and so many others would repent before it’s too late.
It doesn’t really feel like enough. It probably isn’t.
But I don’t really know what else to do.
If the villains holding our grandchildren hostage were at least making demands, we could perhaps negotiate with them to save the future.
But how do you argue against someone who just flat-out doesn’t care?
All that’s left is vanity, I guess.
A technical term referring to a power trip which is also bullshit.
Not to mention the 50 Republican senators who continue to support mass death for no particular reason other than “liberals don’t like it”