What, me worry?

Ed Stein's commentary:

It’s becoming increasingly clear that global warming is real, and that human activity does have a profound effect on the global environment. Remember the recent dustup over the veracity of climate change experts, in which emails seemed to show that some scientists were doctoring the results? Two independent analyses have absolved them completely, and confirmed that the scientific findings of accelerated global warming are indeed accurate. The only people left who still believe that climate change is a hoax are those who don’t want to pay the price of cleaning up their businesses and their political allies (and the gullible citizens they continue to manipulate). Yet we dither, as the damage mounts, and reaches a point at which it is irreversible. We continue to believe that new technologies will somehow bail us out at the eleventh hour.  We also believed that the space shuttle wouldn’t fail. And that our understanding of the economy, aided by number-crunching super computers, had become so sophisticated that the markets were immune to risk. And we believed that oil drilling was safe, that the technology was so advanced that something like the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico was highly improbable, if not impossible.

OK, there's no bigger fan of science and technology than me, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use our brains. Generally, this "What, me worry?" attitude doesn't really come from people who value science or know anything about it. It's just an excuse for doing nothing. In fact, it's an attempt to cover up greed, laziness, and short-term thinking. These people want to leave their problems for someone else to fix, while grabbing any short-term value for themselves.

We mine the oceans for cheap seafood and leave the resulting devastation for our descendants to worry about. We keep fossil fuels cheap and dump massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and let our children and grandchildren cope with a planet short of energy and less hospitable to human life. We clear-cut forests for cheap lumber. We blow up mountains for cheap coal. We shrug as millions of species go extinct from our actions and also while man-made chemicals accumulate in our own bodies.

Right now, we could be living in the peak years of human civilization. It's not inevitable, not at all. But it's certainly possible. After this, overpopulation, resource depletion, pollution, and energy shortages could lead us into a spiral of decay. Does this make you feel good, knowing that you yourself lucked out? Not me. I appreciate my luck in being born when and where I was, but I'm embarrassed as hell at what we're doing with all our advantages.