A gorgeous young woman drives an enormous red SUV through a
gleaming, modern city. Sweeping,
pop-serious music swells behind her. In
voice over, the woman resolutely enumerates her personal odds in a city of
"two million, four hundred and thirty-four thousand, three hundred and
eleven people." As we begin to hear
the lyrics - "this is MY LIFE!" - and the music reaches a thundering
crescendo, all I can help but think is - we are F***ED.
What does this ad - what does anything about this ad - have
to do with the CAR they are flogging?
Yes, I obviously get the stretch they're making (car = powerful) but...
really? What does this striving young
hottie in a business suit have to do with how the car is engineered, or how
well made it is, or the features it has?
Oh - and - since I care about the emissions that are causing
our climate to change... what's the MPH?
The 2015 Ford Edge gets "up to 20 mpg city, 30
highway." That's per Ford. That's their mileage brag.
These big, bulging SUVs - all curvy lines and jellybean
colors, replete with cup holders and mini computer screens and icy air
conditioning and GPS - are rolling off the factory lines at a tremendous pace
and selling like hotcakes.
They're being sold the same way everything is sold these
days, via shameless appeals to the id and the limbic system. Is mileage even mentioned in this ad? Nope.
Is it mentioned in most ads these days?
Not that I have noticed.
Instead, we're buying gas guzzling cars at an amazing pace,
because... personal ambition. Love. Sex.
Family. Babies.
They all do it, although the Subaru "Love. It's what make a Subaru a Subaru." ads
make me craziest.
And every industry advertises the same way, with powerful
music and gauzy images of happy, sexy, vibrant people. The ads make us long for the feelings
promised by the images and the music, and make us greedy - nay, LUSTFUL - for
more.
We have never been more marketed to, and we have never been
hungrier for MORE.
Anyone who knows anything about climate change should know
by now that we must SLASH CO2 (and other GHG) emissions by HUGE percentages
immediately in order to have a hope of slowing climate change and keeping the
total warming under 2 degrees Celsius.
But we're buying SUVs and pick-ups like they're going out of
style. We're consuming like it doesn't
matter what we buy. We're addicted to
enormous cars and air conditioners and riding lawn mowers and immense TVs and
power tools and heated swimming pools and cities that blaze like brush fires at
night with light after light after light after light... and we're mostly ignoring an issue so immense
that it boggles the mind.
If you haven't read Margaret Atwood's piece about "it's
not climate change - it's everything change!" I encourage you to do so at
your earliest convenience. And then I
challenge you to get a good night's sleep, or stay on the sidelines of the
climate change fight.
Into this apex consumption moment, President Obama has
rolled out his new national Clean Power Plan, requiring that U.S. power plants
reduce their emissions 32% below 2005 levels by 2030.
No, the plan doesn't do anything about personal consumption,
but bear with me.
Personally, the majority of Americans seem to prefer to keep
the status quo. They want their SUVs and
their McMansions and their rooms full of flashy new appliances.
So maybe government can help? Maybe government can implement sensible
regulations, and work with private industry, to rapidly bring online cheap,
renewable energy that will allow us to continue our lavish collective lifestyle
without emissions? Surely President
Obama would like to include BOLD, effective action on climate change in his
legacy, no?
Actually, yes. He
would - hence the plan. The only problem
is that, compared to the scale of the action that we need to take, this is an
almost laughably meager effort. No less
an authority on climate change than James Hansen says the new policy is
practically worthless.
Nevertheless, the usual troop of willfully ignorant howler
monkeys are ENRAGED that our imperial muslin communist usurper president would
DARE to make even the tiniest change to the relevant EPA regulations. The GOP is prepared to fight with everything
they've got to stop this new presidential action in its tracks.
And here we are, and that's why we're f***ed.
There's no personal will to learn about climate change and
take sensible, immediate, personal action.
All the vast majority of us want to do is consume, consume, consume and
damn the torpedoes.
There's no political will on the right to act with
intellectually honesty and take immediate, urgent, "war effort" style
action on climate change. All the vast
majority of politicians - left and right - want to do is get along to go along,
appeal to their base, take Big Daddy Oil's money, and get reelected.
The president - our intelligent, caring, effective, fired up
president - puts forth a demonstrably timid climate change plan that is doomed
in the cradle.
A national plan that would actually make a difference on
emissions would be centralized and coordinated federally. It would take enormous effort and enormous
will and unprecedented amounts of cooperation and "reaching across the
aisle," to use a tired old phrase.
It would require immediate government action and personal
sacrifice from every single American.
And we're not there.
The people don't even care enough to worry about the mileage their new
gas guzzling SUVs get. The republicans
pretend climate change isn't happening.
And our next president very well might be Donald Trump - the actual
living embodiment of the MORE IS MORE personal credo of consumption.
Yep. We're doomed.
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