Warm me, globally

Good for you, Al.

Now before anyone takes the piss out of me for churlishness, let me rise in my own defense and say that 90% of the following was written last week. I already hadn’t been reading any of the latest news about global warming when the news broke that Gore had won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the topic. Not from indifference but because I’m waiting for someone to take us to the next chapter, beyond feeling really bad about it.

So far, I don’t see a coherent political action program, and I wonder if the prize, instead of focusing on that thorny question, will only reinforce the sense that things are now okay, or will be soon.

Sure, there are solemn recommendations from think tanks and experts, but they sound like the liturgy from a church service (‘Blessed art thou who purchaseth a flourescent bulb. . .’) Does anyone really believe that our society is going to undergo the sort of radical transformation in consumption that the diagnoses point to?

There’s a peculiarly American habit of associating the identification of a problem with its solution, as if naming the evil somehow casts it out. Our sunny pragmatism is most on display in the televised confessional industry in which people face the Awful Truth as a valiant step on the road to Healing.

Whether this rump psychiatry actually works is highly debatable, of course, but it is clearly a failure when applied to public policy. It’s not enough just to FEEL really bad about global warming.

I trace this habit of mind in the political realm to the Saint Ronald years, in which ‘feeling good about America’ was our top priority. We were coached full-time to think that our feelings were so important that they could overpower, if not replace, disagreeable external realities. The Bush gang is only the reification of that principle taken to absurd heights, and the Bushites themselves a veritable pageant of rich-kid self-reference.

As a Washington reporter I witnessed Reagan’s handlers sacrifice 25 years in responding to global warming with the cynical and opportunist position that the phenomenon needed further study, even though the science was compelling even in 1980. But habitat-destruction didn’t fit into ‘feeling good.’

Now we’re reacting to those Pollyanna years by feeling bad. But Al Gore the prophet can tell us a whole lot of things that Al Gore the president wouldn’t have dared, which tells me that the future of this topic is far more likely to be more schlumping along with a lot of crisis alerts that lead nowhere, Nobel prizes notwithstanding. We bipeds need a catastrophe of mammoth proportions to wean us off SUVs, fossil fuels and plastic Tide containers.

I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that as long as Oprah feels our globally-warmed pain, that’s going to be pretty much enough for now.