Michele Bachmann is a bigot and a hypocrite. She’s culturally inept and politically unsophisticated: Her thinking on many social issues (abortion and gay marriage, for starters) fall well outside the mainstream of Western Civilization, and she is demonstrably lacking in a fundamental understanding of the legal and historical framework underpinning the nation she was somehow elected to serve. She’s what I like to call a dumbass, or, in other parlance, a Republican. But it may well be that Bachmann, or some Republican like her, holds the key to the survival of our existence as we know it. Or, at least somewhat as we know it, because it’s pretty clear to anyone watching closely that “as we know it” is careening toward its expiration date.
Ask yourself: what are the truly critical issues facing humanity today? Abortion; the Sanctity of Marriage; gun ownership; the War on Drugs? Haha. No. The Debt Ceiling? Terrorism (or, more equitably, religious extremism)? Nope. Global Climate Change? OK, now we’re getting somewhere. But even terminology so broad as Global Climate Change tends to oversimplify what’s happened, and make it seem like a separate “thing.” But it’s not just an item on a checklist, something to which we may allow ourselves to attach fluctuating priority depending on how the day is shaping up. Rather, it’s a tangible, leering Grim Reaper, staring us all in the face.
Boiled down to very simple terms, the earth is a substrate for life, just like a laboratory Petri dish is a substrate for the growth of bacteria, fungus, etc. There is a fixed amount of substrate in both cases. When all of the nutrients have been sucked out of the agar in a Petri dish, the bacteria stop growing. Of course, they keep metabolizing for awhile….keep generating waste which contains substances toxic to further growth. And eventually start dying off, being broken down into more toxic by-products, etc. But basically, a Petri dish is a very limited closed system, which, left unchecked, will very quickly overproduce and then crash, and eventually become a mass of smelly goo. And so it is with the earth.
Our planet is obviously much larger, and our ecosystem much more complicated, than a Petri dish. But the bottom line is that the earth is, for all practical purposes of human life, a closed system. There is a fixed amount of land, water, and nutrients. When biologists look at ecosystems and populations, one of the parameters to which they frequently refer is “carrying capacity.” Simply put, this is the load (number of organisms) a system can handle indefinitely, given the amount of resources available and the rate of turnover of nutrients. So, you ask, what is the earth’s carrying capacity, and how soon will we reach it? Bad news, guys. We strolled casually past that shit decades ago, as we might pass a bum on the street begging for quarters, not really even noticing. The ecosystem is now in decline, and heading for an inevitable crash. Sure, our continued advances in technology and agriculture have made us more efficient every day at harvesting the earth’s resources. But these advances are not a hopeful path toward a solution; the incredible efficiency with which humans have learned to extract food and other resources is, in fact, the problem. Our own cleverness is what has allowed us to march beyond the point of no return with almost no one even noticing.
(Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Michele Bachmann; back to that crazy bitch in a few. Hang in there, this is important.)
If the earth’s resources were a bank account, we could say we’ve been dipping into the savings side for a long time now, and it is not being replenished. We aren’t accruing interest, and it’s going to be empty a lot sooner than most people are willing to accept. Colloquially speaking, we are fucked. No, I’m not saying we are fucked “if we don’t do x or y.” I’m saying we are fucked, period. As Paul Gilding tells us in his book The Great Disruption, it’s too late to reverse the damage we’ve done to our planet. All we can hope to do at this point is manage the decline. Pump the brakes and look for the safest spot to crash. Gilding, whose message is somewhat more optimistic than it might sound so far, talks about heroic human action in past times of grave crisis, and believes that in the end, we’ll come round to seeing the truth of things, and that our response as a species will be massive and effective. But if course it will be too late to save everyone, and too late to salvage many of the paradigms of “life as we know it.”
I’m not going to try to anticipate or conjecture about the specific manifestations of the impending crash. Gilding and many others have been doing this for a long time. We’ll see soon enough which predictions were more or less accurate, and it’s not going to make anyone happy to be able to say “I told you so.” What’s not in dispute by anyone who examines earth and climate science, is that fundamental changes are coming soon. Like, in our lifetimes. Most of us can stop thinking about “our children, and our childrens’ children” and start thinking about ourselves. As soon as we do that for real, and abolish the easily-shunted abstraction of “the future,” we’ll get to work. But that hasn’t happened yet. It will, inevitably, and the point at which that moment of clarity nucleates within the minds of enough people is what will ultimately decide how manageable the coming crash will be. Obviously, the longer we wait, the worse off we’ll be when the new equilibrium is reached.
You see where I’m going with this yet? One of the increasingly active dialogs in our political milieu is what many refer to as the “global warming debate.” Those three words amount to one of the most grievous crimes ever committed against humanity by the mainstream media. “Debate??” There isn’t one. Not a real one, not among intelligent people who are able to assemble collections of data and draw critical conclusions. There’s no real debate among climate scientists, and no real debate among people who pay attention. There’s only a fake debate, perpetrated by the media and funded by Exxon-Mobil, the Koch Brothers, and other powerful lobbies. Sure there is some “quibbling” among peer-reviewed scientists about the details, but overwhelmingly the scientific community tells us, again and again, that human activity is now having a deep and lasting impact on the earth, and that our ecosystem’s carrying capacity was exceeded long ago. It is an irrefutable fact, when you look at the numbers, that we are depleting our resources even as our own population continues to grow unchecked. No fair and balanced media source would honestly pit two experts against one another, one advocating for “global warming” and one against. First off, it isn’t even possible to find an “expert” who claims that global climate change isn’t happening, unless that “expert” is on the payroll of one of the aforementioned lobbies. What if we assume that someone on the payroll of Exxon-Mobil is capable of producing unbiased science, and admit them into a legitimate debate? Even then, if we wanted to be fair and balanced, and present an accurate picture of current scientific thought on the matter, we’d have to offset each such corporate funded “expert” with roughly 472 published climate scientists who hold the broadly opposing view. That’s not even an exaggeration. That’s how deep the consensus runs.
And the word “warming” is itself an unfortunate term here, as it allows naïve people who don’t understand the difference between strongly-supported hypotheses and anecdotal information to reject the reality out of hand. As in “Global warming, my ass! Twenty degrees below zero in early November? Ha! Bullshit!”
But I’m not writing this to convince you of a truth that you almost certainly accept if you’ve read this far. If you are easily bamboozled by junk science, and are one of those people who finds it easy to just accept any dumbass thing that flies from the delusional pea-sized brain of Michele “Carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of nature!” Bachmann, then you stopped reading this somewhere short of the second sentence, and anyway you probably aren’t all that fired up about reading in general.
Now, this is a generalization, and I am well-aware there are numerous exceptions, but the issue of Global Climate Change is broadly split down party lines. You won’t find many liberals who question it, and an insane number of conservatives still follow the words “global warming” with the word “hoax” more often than not. It’s too bad that Al Gore had to be the one to produce one of the more important treatises on GCC, because I think that really pushed things hard in the direction of a partisan split. There’s also the fact that Congressional Republicans of the last 20 years or so are more likely than Democrats to shamelessly work against the interests of their constituents for money. Campaign finance reform is desperately needed, but that’s another story. At any rate, the R’s try to feed you bullshit about GCC being a hoax, while the D’s generally stick to a different brand of bullshit.
Now, you begin to see the great potential of a truly moronic politician, with a truly simple-minded and moronic following, to shift the balance, don’t you? Ultimately, this is not a political post. Not in the small, Western, partisan sense. It’s meant to encourage an examination of what’s really important. And it isn’t difficult to see that a major planetary crash might well supersede all of the garbage that tends to get media attention. You might even begin to conceive of the odd compromise that may one day make it possible for humanity to persist far into the future without going full-on Road Warrior: maybe, just maybe, if a bat-shit crazy person like Michele Bachmann (or Sarah Palin, or Mitt Romney, etc.) were to wake up one day and smell the rotting Petri dish of our certain doom, all of the bat-shit crazy people who voted for her would be willing to accept the gravity of our situation, and get on board with some things like sustainable food, steady-state economies, and renewable energy. Maybe. So long as the rest of us were maybe willing to have our abortions and gay married sex in secret.
It’s honestly not such a stretch. Everyone’s got a tipping point. We know all too well that for someone like Bachmann, that tipping point is unlikely to be confronting a roomful of lucid experts on climate change. Who cares? Maybe it’s one of those dumbass anecdotal things, like a couple of hot days in November where her bra sticks to her stupid saggy boobs and makes her itchy and annoyed while waiting for her turn to speak at an NRA rally. Maybe she visits a lake in Texas where her uncle used to take her bass fishing when she was six, and finds out it’s all dried up forever. Doesn’t matter. If something, anything, causes a moment of crystallization in her mind (or the mind of Mitt Romney, or any one of those nutjobs seeking the Republican nomination), and this happens when they are in a position to influence policy, then maybe we all get an ironic gift from someone who’s otherwise horribly unqualified to represent actual people on a grand scale.
Maybe I’m just deeply afraid of the next election, and seeking silver linings here. Nah, I don’t think so. For the most part, I don’t believe the person in the Oval Office is going to have a huge impact on my daily life. Barack Obama has already soured me on believing that there is any real hope for change being channeled through a lip-service paying, corporate-funded, status quo politician. The political center of gravity will have to shift on a much more fundamental level (like, in my Facebook Newsfeed) before it shifts at the level of national elections.
But I stand by Gilding’s assertion that facing GCC is inevitable, and that the crystallization of national (and international) sentiment will happen eventually, though it’s difficult to say when or how. And someone as nutty as Michele Bachmann, or perhaps any Republican with an overzealous, undereducated following, could, under the right set of circumstances, catalyze that crystallization, even as they do their best to take us backwards in other areas. I, for one, could tolerate a lot of backwards-ass social policy shifts in exchange for, you know, still being around and having a society at which to be pissed. Hmm. I might even consider voting for Newt Gingrich, now that I think about it.
UPDATE: I just read through this again, and despite the wall of unrefined text (damn, that’s a lot of words, eh?), I still feel like I wasn’t explicit enough in separating the concept of Global Climate Change as its own thing from the actual deeply-integrated ecosystem clusterfuck that’s approaching. It’s deeper than ‘climate,’ much deeper than simply ‘warming.’ It is a profound over-exploitation of the entire planetary ecosystem. In fact, I hereby propose that we abolish the phrases “Global Warming” and “Global Climate Change” in favor of GEC: Global Ecosystem Collapse. Or Catastrophe. Or, Clusterfuck.
