What Ever Happened To Climate Change? – How An Issue Disappeared Without A Trace

Chicken Little said ‘The Sky Is Falling’, and everyone believed him; and so it was with progressives who cried and wailed and shouted until the whole idea of climate change became an existential crisis.  Unless we acted now, The End of Days, Armageddon, would soon be upon us.

Of course not everyone was taken in by the tomfoolery.  If anything winters were getting worse, the Charles had frozen over, the Florida citrus crops were under frost warnings, and Seattle had a series of blanketing snow storms.  Besides, if the climate was warming – warming and cooling cycles have been common since the beginning geologic time – modern technology was more than up to the task.

Not only would coastal cities become wetlands, New York a Venice, genetically engineered crops produced to withstand higher temperatures, and wheat, soy, and corn moved north; but the entire human genome would be reconfigured to accommodate the new temperature reality.  Energy sources needed to satisfy increased cooling demands would be brought on line – nuclear fusion, hydrogen power, and a range of yet unexploited, new ways of converting solar power into usable, efficient resource would be realities.

 

So, the entire idea of a global catastrophe was never anything but the product of a febrile, worried collective mind.  It was the progressive dream – one, global, unstoppable, universal, all-encompassing problem that would unite liberals everywhere.  The big tent that progressives had always dreamed of, a place where all would be welcome – black people would lead the parade and fill the choice seats. Gays, lesbians, and transgenders would fill in the ranks.  Socialists would beat the drums and play the tubas and French horns.  Women would be the lion tamers, the clowns, and the mistresses of ceremony.

Then, all of a sudden in one short, indefinable moment, climate change was gone.  No one bothered with it any more.  It was off the front pages, replaced by ambitious plans to dig, frack, mine, and bore; to make America energy independent and free from the clutches of Arabs, Africans, and Russians.  Along with the cockamamie ideas of gender fluidity and the redefining of sexual identity, out went climate change.  In a muscular American foreign policy confronting Iranian nuclear ambitions and support of Middle East terrorism, concerns of a warming climate were realized for the fairy tale stories they always were.

The story of the emperor’s new clothes was never more relevant.  In the tale, the balmy emperor walked around the palace stark naked but his subjects commented on his new, sumptuous, royal ensemble – the gold embroidery, the silk finery, the magnificent jeweled pantaloons – until a child shouted, ‘The emperor is not wearing any clothes’, and the whole fanciful charade was ended.

When the new Trump Administration came to power and said that climate change was a hoax, a progressive scam, and a wild, impossibly childish fairy tale, Americans realized that what they had been seeing was nothing but a fanciful invention.  Old Joe Biden had been as naked as a jaybird.

There were a few in the liberal trenches that refused to admit defeat.  Climate change was the same existential threat it always had been, and especially now with a naysayer in the Oval Office it was time to act with renewed energy and commitment.

Bob Muzelle, a progressive’s progressive, a man committed to the neo-socialist, reformist liberal agenda forever, was one of these outliers, a man whose entire career had been based on the presumption of climate disaster.  There had been no doubt in his mind that the ozone layer was kaput, solar radiation was scorching the earth, rivers were drying up, gullies and arroyos were empty, rocky fissures, and great chunks of ice were being hived off from the Ross ice shelf as Antarctica itself was disappearing.

Millions of Americans had listened to his pleas, had worked for environmental reform and prayed for divine guidance. The hand of God who had destroyed the world once or twice before should be stayed. His people should be given a chance to restore the Garden of Eden, to make the worlds verdant, lush, and embracing as it once had been.

It was a marvelous movement, a juggernaut of righteousness, a perfect, seamless, brilliant effort to make the world a better place.

So, how could this Utopian dream have so quickly and summarily disappeared?  What Bob had seen was so palpable, real, and undeniable nothing could erase it, expunge it, and remove it. Yet there were the front pages, blank, devoid of the most incidental notice of climate change.  Only in the Style section was there a reference:

Gardeners! Worried about the heat? Don’t be. Burpee has just released a new variety of nasturtium that will survive even the worst Washington summer.  Don’t be a worrywart, plant your garden with Magic Grow and never again give a second thought to rain.

Climate change anxiety had fizzled, flamed out, disappeared like so much detritus and road trash.  In its place was good ol’ American can-do ingenuity.  AI, robotics, and the jiggering of the human genome were only the first steps towards the post-human generation one increasingly freed from brick and mortar, the capriciousness of the environment, the old economic nostrums of supply and demand.  A brave new world of opportunity and limitless possibility.

These myopic alte kockers who couldn’t see beyond the nose on their face might keep on howling about climate ruin and human disaster, but their voices were only faint echoes in an empty rain barrel.

Bob went on in a whirling dervish St. Vitus’ dance despite the emperor’s new clothes.  He, like his fellow progressives, could simply not believe that the cause they had fought for decades had now disappeared like a wisp of smoke.

 

He turned ugly and nasty, shaking his fist like a demented street corner preacher. ‘The end is nigh’, he shouted. ‘Repent and prepare to meet your maker’ until he was shuffled off by sanitation workers who needed to clean the gutters.

‘Climate change? What’s that?’, asked a seven year old; and so it was that the adage of the old soap opera As The World Turns was as right as rain.