Bill McKibben: This is how the earth works now

[GliderGuider]

32. The reason that position is bullshite

Is that before about 2005 there were no "doomers" claiming nothing could be fixed. From the 1960s on there were a lot of people claiming that if we didn't act right fucking now, things might not be fixable later on. That is the Chicken Little claim that Big Energy reframed as "doomerism" and tarred all the climate realists with - the claim that you apparently bought hook, line and sinker. Up until 2005 virtually all the guys like me were saying "Pitter patter, let's get at her!"

Then in about 2005 we all realized that nothing was fucking happening. Nobody was listening, nobody was changing, the climate summits were a litany of nada - just window dressing. A few people began to say we just might already be in that place we worried about earlier that we'd get to some time down the road - in a corner we couldn't get out of. As time went on, and more people had more time to investigate the root causes, those voices grew louder.

I've got almost 100 articles on my web site that detail why I think we're screwed, and mostly it comes down to the human brain and our cultural narrative. If we could change our cultural narrative we could act, but we'll only change it after the crisis hits - not before - because that's the way our brains are wired.

A lot of us have realized this, and it has caused us to abandon the path you're on - we've seen that it has no destination, and we understand why that is. But from the first Earth Day in 1970 up until half a dozen years ago, we were all true believers in Hope, because we hadn't yet figured out what was preventing change. We thought the somnolent paralysis was due to a lack of education, or a moral failure on the part of leadership or something equally facile and superficial - but something amenable to education or exhortation. It turns out that the reason is neither facile nor superficial, and it isn't amenable to being changed by anything short of a massive change in the world's physical circumstances. Its roots are buried in our reptilian and limbic brains. These are the parts of our brain that hold the self-aggrandizing qualities of leadership and the herding instincts that keep us all together - following our leaders and blinding our rational neocortex to the simple fact that those leaders are leading us over a cliff for their own gain, while we all cheer them on.

We can't fix it because the problem is not in how we act, but in why we act the way we do. Your deep-rooted desire to blame doomers is simply another manifestation of the problem. The problem isn't "doomers" - the problem is in every mirror in every bathroom on the planet.