Battling the Straw Men

THERE ARE SEVERAL good and interesting arguments to be had about climate change: Should we tax carbon? How much? Concentrate on electric cars or on public transit? How best to reduce the factory farming that creates so many emissions? Dealing with this crisis will involve the biggest and most rapid transition in economic history, so it would be strange if there weren’t debates about how to proceed.

But one debate not to have is: Is global warming real? By now it’s entirely obvious that the scientists are basically right—that’s why there’s half as much ice in the Arctic as when they started warning us, and half as many coral reefs. Donald Trump aside (there’s a nice thought), this one is so clear even the oil companies don’t dispute it, though of course they try to delay and minimize the need for real change.

Deprived of that point of contention, those who want to disrupt the push for climate action fall back on two particularly dumb straw-man arguments, which are worth engaging just long enough to dispose of.

One is that climate activists want to “turn off fossil fuels tomorrow.” You hear this from oil companies, but you also hear it from liberal politicians who don’t want to take strong action against oil companies. When local environmental justice groups, for instance, asked then-California Gov. Jerry Brown to stop permitting new oil wells next to their schools and homes, he responded with roughly the sensitivity and candor of Oklahoma’s climate-denying Sen. Jim Inhofe. Environmentalists, he said, wanted him to “snap my fingers and eliminate all gasoline in all California gasoline stations.” And if he did that, he said, “What would happen? Revolution? Killings? Shootings?”

But of course no one had asked him to do that—just to stop granting new permits for new oil wells so that gradually the state (and the world) could transition to safer sources. Climate activists are consummate realists—they know better than anyone else how entrenched fossil fuels really are, and how much work it will take to root them out. It literally can’t happen overnight; it literally must happen fast enough to match the demands of physics.

The second straw man is even more annoying. Whenever there’s a story about a climate protest, the comments section of the website is sure to include a line of people saying “they drove a bus to the demonstration and that bus burned gas,” as if this somehow undercuts the action. We live in the world we are trying to change: If it requires driving to change it, then of course it makes sense to do it. Anyone can do the math. I flew when I had to to fight the Keystone XL pipeline, and I’m glad I did because for nearly a decade the protests we helped organize kept 800,000 barrels of very dirty oil in the ground every single day.

The very fact that one must drive or fly to do this work makes clear why it’s needed—you can’t take a train if there isn’t one and at least in America that’s usually the case. If you stay home to be pure, the system doesn’t change. So I happily Skype into most of the speeches and lectures I give, but when I need to hit the road I don’t worry.

Especially because I know there’s no satisfying these critics. When Seattleites took to the water by the thousands in small boats to block the giant Shell drilling rig headed to the Arctic, their opponents said, “Yes, but their kayaks are made of plastic, and plastic comes from oil.” These are not the objections of people sincere about hypocrisy; these are the absurd last-ditch objections of people who have run out of real arguments.