Why I don't really care about the climate

Miami Herald

17-05-2025

I try to be a thoughtful guy. Before I make up my mind, I try to look at all the evidence. I read and talk to people with different perspectives and values than mine. But on one subject, as the evidence piles up to make a more and more solid case, I can't seem to get myself to change.
I know Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the popular New York progressive, is right when she says, 'We don't have time to sit on our hands as our planet burns. For young people, climate change is bigger than election or re-election. It's life or death.'
Elon Musk, the unpopular Trump acolyte, spoke for science when he said, 'We are running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.'
Al Gore, an almost president who has been at this the longest, is not wrong when he says, 'In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.'
I think it is probably true we are all going to be killed in an environmental catastrophe as the planet burns.
But — and here is where I get lost — the world-burning, humanociding, planet-killing catastrophe isn't big enough to get AOC's buddy Bernie Sanders out of a private plane, the most carbon-intensive way man has invented to travel. Climate change is important, it seems, but not important enough for him to change.
That's garden-variety hypocrisy. All movements harbor plenty, but there's something worse.
A $1.6 billion, Obama-funded solar power plant in California is on the road to closure, in part because of environmental opposition to the death toll it has caused among tortoises and birdies. Climate change is important, but not important enough for the Sierra Club to overlook its other priorities, like tortoises and birdies. Environmental opposition has slowed or stopped solar power development all over the country.
A wind-power plant in New Jersey would help push humanity back from the brink of extinction, but that's not enough for Clean Ocean Action, which is among groups suing to stop it. We'll all be dead, but the sardine population will have clean water. Environmental opposition has slowed or stopped solar power development all over the country, heck, all over the world.
Then there's my favorite. Nuclear power is among the most abundant climate friendly sources of electric power we have, but we're shutting them down all over the world due to age, green-movement opposition or other left-wing activism while little gets done to replace them. It is important to, you know, not have life as we know it end, but not important enough to keep our nuclear plants operating.
Even when the most environmentally conscious among us, like Californians, come up with solutions to climate change and start implementing them, they choose solutions that are slower and more expensive than they need to be. Just compare wind and solar power in California (state mandated and subsidized) with wind and solar power in Texas where the government doesn't give two figs about climate change: Texas has twice as much generating capacity and is installing new power plants faster. Please explain to me why a state whose political leaders don't care build solutions to climate change faster than those who do care? I'll wait.
Anyway, here's the deal, when the people who tell me that my children are going to die if we don't do something about impending climate change doom start acting like their children are going to die if we don't do something about impending climate change doom, then I'll change my mind.
Until then, I am with Texas. Acting like you don't care seems to be the best way to show you care anyway.