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What’s That In The Road? A head?
Over at Yale Climate Connections, a recent article exhorts us to abjure climate doom and gloom.
“This is the fight of our lives, and it’s a multigenerational task,” Hassol says. “We need what’s been called ‘cathedral thinking.’ That is, the people who started working on that stone foundation, they never saw the thing finished. It took generations to get these major works done. This is that kind of problem. And we have to all do our part.”
The difficulty with this view is that it requires several unstated conditions to be true.
1. The collective will of the humans of earth is a multigenerational transnational Climate Corps. No autocrats, dictators, gangs, kleptocrats, wars, shareholders, corporations, pension funds, or religious proselytizers can interfere significantly.
2. The planet has all the years it takes to build a cathedral. It took 83 years to build the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. It took 200 years to build Notre Dame, 240 years to build York Minster, 35 years to build St. Paul’s in London, 120 years to build St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, but only 4 years to build St. Peter’s in Manhattan.
3. While climate activists are succeeding, no new fossil fuel, chemical, deforestation, or mass extinctions are increasing at the same time, defeating the advances in climate…
