Two Worlds
We live in worlds with and without climate change
In the first decade of the 21st century, an American presidential candidate named John Edwards had a stump speech in which he talked about “two Americas,” one for us rich bourgeois and one for the rest of you proles. He was young, handsome, popular, and right on the money, pun intended. In fact, he even became the vice presidential nominee on John Kerry’s presidential ticket. Unfortunately, a scandal about a child out of wedlock showed that he was not a very nice guy and so he was cancelled, before we called it that. Call it what you will, he and the two Americas were never heard from again.
But the two Americas analysis was too timely and correct to stay dead. It was revived in the form of “the 1% and the 99%” by the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. It has assumed a permanent place in our political landscape ever since.
Both “two Americas” and “the 1%” are catchy slogans to invoke the terrible and increasingly more terrible problem of wealth inequality. The 1% is the better slogan for today, though, because wealth inequality is a global problem, not only an American one.
But I’m here to highlight a different “two Americas,” a different “two worlds” that we live in now. These worlds do not split by population. Every one of us lives in both worlds. You may live 1% in one world and 99% in the other, or 50/50, or even 100/100. I’m talking about the world of global climate change. We all believe in it to some extent, and do not believe it to some extent. I feel like I am living 100% in both worlds. Let me describe the worlds, and you will see what I mean.
The Global Climate Change World
In the global climate change world, climate disasters are happening all around us.
Species are going extinct by the day—quite possibly including homo sapiens.
Arctic ice is disappearing, antarctic ice sheets are breaking off the continent, and Greenland is melting. Glaciers are vanishing around the world, devastating the drinking water supply in many places.
Temperatures are rising to levels that will make some parts of the world that are populated today soon become uninhabitable. Sea levels are rising and have already begun flooding some of the world’s most important and populous cities.
A highly infectious disease continues to ravage the land.
Authoritarian rulers are gaining power in country after country.
And so on.
Civilisation has already begun to crumble.
The No Global Climate Change World
In the other world, we know that global climate change is a thing, but we continue to live as if it were not.
We read about the climate disasters and see them on the news, but we don’t feel like they threaten our very civilisation. We feel like it can’t happen here, not in my town, my city, my blue state, my democratic country. Not to my family. Not to me.
We think it still makes sense to fire gigantic rockets to circle the moon, to go to work every day and save for our retirement, to have babies. At least, we keep doing these things. They exist in a separate world from our World With Climate Change.
We still burn fossil fuels, and open up new oil and fracking fields, and build new LNG infrastructure, even while simultaneously funding green energy projects and research, and building carbon-capture and sequestration demostration plants.
We still struggle to increase agricultural yields. We open up new land for farming by chopping and burning down huge portions of the Amazon rain forest, one of the earth’s greatest natural carbon sinks.
In the No Climate Change World, we look forward to a future of high-speed bullet trains, more mega-cities, the metaverse, more miraculous bio-engineering, further unraveling of the mysteries of the quantum realm and the birth of the universe. We honestly believe man will soon walk on Mars, perhaps even colonize it.
We believe that the future will be better than today.
The Two Worlds
Why do we live in these two worlds? Let’s think about it.
Surely you have at some point in your life considered the thought experiment, “What would you do today if you knew for a fact that the world would end tomorrow?” Maybe you would get drunk. You would make love to your spouse/secretary/pool boy. You would torture your enemy. You would forgive your enemy. You would stay in bed all day sobbing and reminiscing. You would go to work as usual. You would go to church.
But we are faced with a much harder problem. What would you do if you knew for a fact that civilisation was collapsing, not tomorrow, not this year, but within your lifetime? What will you do? What are you doing?
All of us (who have not yet been directly affected by a climate disaster) are going to work as usual and simply living our normal lives, for the most part. We need to, because we our normal lives are what we have right now. Most us will almost certainly have them next year, and the year after that, with diminishing probabilities as the years go by. So we still need to shop for groceries, pay our bills, and live our lives.
And so we live in the No Climate Change World, even though we know that the other world, the World With Climate Change, is there. At the same time, we live in the World With Climate Change, where we fret about it and probably do what we can to alter our normal routines to mitigate it. (If only everyone else would do what we do!)
Some of us put some portion of our time and energy into tyring to fix climate change, whether through activism, scientific research, concrete projects, maybe prayer, or writing dumb articles like this.
For most of us who need to or choose to spend a lot our time in the No Climate Change World, constantly freting about the crisis would not be productive for us or for the world. To the extent we can, we tend to push climate change into the background or even to our subconscious while we live in the No Climate Change World. We can do this with a clear conscious because we know that we will also spend time in the World With Climate Change, whether we want to or not.
In other words, we compartmentalise, a healthy and productive strategy for coping with life.
Another reason that we live in the No Climate Change World is that we cannot think of any meaningful, useful actions to take in the World With Climate Change. At least, that is a reason for me.
Sure, some people are full-time climate activists, but I don’t see that moving the needle. I certainly don’t see my joining them as moving the needle.
Some people are purposefully planning and acting to survive the coming climate apocalypse by prepping, forming self-sustaining communities, moving to somewhere they expect to have better climate outcomes, or buying property for their eventual getaway when necessary. Good for them! I don’t know why everyone isn’t doing something along those lines.
But I do know why I’m not: because I am not planning to survive.
So what else would I do, besides living in the No Climate Change World? Fuck my pool boy? (Note to self: Put in a pool and hire a pool boy.)
— Lannie Rose, November 2022
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
