We Are In The Dying Years Of Climate Change Denial

Climate change denial, created with the most asinine and dangerous series of lies any power elite has ever pushed, can’t last much longer. Reality won’t allow it to. As places like Miami are now under permanent submersion in some sections, the Trump administration reassures its supporters of the climate’s stability by calling these water encroachments “recurrent flooding.” Three in ten Americans, saturated in the propaganda of garbage sites like Brietbart, can believe this explanation. But these are the last years where they’ll be able to keep believing it.

The final shift toward awareness of what’s happening will no doubt come sometime in the 2020’s, since sea levels are projected to rise around half a foot in American coastal cities by 2030. As flooding in these areas becomes more and more common, climate change will finally become acknowledged within all social circles. Starting in Miami and other places closest to the ocean, this awakening has been already going on for years.

For many people, especially those who denied the planet’s illness, the changes in the landscape will represent a dramatic and disorienting moment. But these human emotions will look insignificant amid the larger upheavals we’ll be seeing take place-the expanding of deserts, the newly routine appearance of extreme hurricanes and tornadoes, the submersion of low-lying regions, and the drastic change in temperatures will humble, terrify, awe the human imagination.

As this collapse takes place, the history of the period that preceded it will be scrutinized like a religious myth. In the last years before the crisis, future people will observe, society oriented itself the most toward the behaviors creating that crisis. At the start of the 2010’s, when the catastrophe deadline for the climate was just a decade away, this society’s unelected rulers the Koch Brothers had put billions into making climate change denial dominant in Republican politics. 

Just a few years away from that deadline, this society had expanded its military-the largest consumer of fossil fuels-so much that there were 800 U.S. bases around the world and an American drone program that helped drop tens of thousands of bombs yearly. Even in the year where unparalleled hurricanes and fires were pummelling North America, this society’s political leaders from both parties agreed on advancing the corporate capitalist system that put earth in peril. And the parts of this society that tried to change its direction were attacked with electoral fraud, media marginalization, online corporate censorship, and assaults from a militarized police.

Why, they’ll wonder, didn’t this society correct its behavior earlier on? Why didn’t it use the outrage over the Vietnam War to dismantle the military industrial complex? Why didn’t it reject to the calls for neoliberal economic reforms during the 1970’s? Why didn’t it manage a popular resistance against starting the drug war and mass incarceration? Why didn’t it abandon fossil fuels when the dangers of climate change and the finite nature of an oil economy first became clear? We failed to take these actions because a culture of compliance, which can be manufactured on mass scales with modern propaganda tools, leaves power roles open to despots and sociopaths. But this culture can be changed. 

The climate crisis is the ultimate repudiation of any exploitative or elitist system. It proves a social order that enslaves, represses, or endlessly extracts will destroy itself. Last year those who protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline used that repudiation to bring change. Despite police bludgeonings of the protesters, attacks from the corporate media, the complicity of Democrats in the pipeline, and paid infiltrators to disrupt the protests, they lit the nation’s psyche and created a movement that continues to block fossil fuel ventures. Their achievement is a hint of how humanity will react to the coming catastrophe.