Scientists offer a bleak forecast for the future of the climate, and already the urgent need to redress its most dire consequences has turned everyday global citizens into environmental crusaders.
Political systems around the world absorb climate activism with varying degrees of sincerity. Some, like the government of the state of Florida--charged with stewardship over an endangered coastline, and a world-class city susceptible to blue-sky flooding--respond simply by instructing state employees not to speak on the subject. That's hardly reassuring. Along with its obvious call to action, climate change can be regarded as an indirect audit on the health and functionality of any given political entity. As of right now, Florida Governor Rick Scott's administration would not pass, nor for that matter would the Republican majority of the US Congress.
But in some respects we have all been climate deniers. We persist in minimizing the issue of global warming by presenting it as a discrete set of concerns--just another item on the progressive policy menu. Some order it, and some don't.
In our conversations about climate change we fail to recognize the ways in which the task ahead will not just add to or reorder our priorities, it will restructure our politics, forcing unexpected common pursuits upon places and among people previously inhospitable to them, and fracturing others along lines that look trivial to us now.
Either way, the climate imperative will transform politics on a global scale.
Take for example the Middle East, which is right now mired in intractable conflict. We are accustomed to casting disputes between Israel and Palestine in religious and historical terms. Yet, although the region can be described and analyzed by invoking occupation and Zionism, or by pointing to implacable enemies and the need for security, its future politics will hinge more upon its status as coastal Levant, a precarious river basin where water and arable land are already scarce, and will only grow more so over time.
Existing tension over the allocation of natural resources strains the structure and adherence to current agreements between Israel and Palestine; as drought plagues the region and a rising sea level hampers the coastal aquifer, the ability to equitably divide water and land will become, for all intents and purposes, impossible. This could portend still greater conflict (and some suggest the Syrian civil war represents just that), or the need for cooperative projects on conservation and the desalinization of water may enhance the stature of the one-state argument, a proposal to integrate the region into one entity with different districts and citizenship rights for all. Right now both sides spurn a one-state resolution. Nevertheless, regardless of the outcome, the effects of climate change will render the status quo--two parties committed to a two-state peace process in theory, but not in practice--unsustainable.
This is only one pointed example of the way in which the climate imperative will reshape the landscape of conflict, and cooperation. It is not a constellation of issues; it is more a point of rupture, separating our current political premise from what will inevitably follow. So far only presidential candidate Bernie Sanders seems to grasp the transformational reality of global warming, and he has recently mentioned the (somewhat fraught) analogy of war to characterize the level of government mobilization required in response.
Though startling to us now, Bernie Sanders' metaphor will be a standard framework of discussion in the not very distant future.
If progressives fail to anticipate the climate imperative, we will once again be unable to hold moments of crisis accountable to our values, and to influence them according to our ideas. In that sense, we also fail to pass the "audit." I am reminded of a quietly indignant Franklin Roosevelt, forced to watch peacetime US military exercises where the infantry sent trucks into battle with placards that read "TANK" for want of the real thing, as antediluvian commanders assured him that the next war would be won by horse-mounted soldiers and urged him to invest more in cavalry. Meanwhile Hitler stormed through Europe, piercing defenses with the techniques and tools of modern warfare.
To extend Bernie Sanders' metaphor, our meek responses to global warming are trucks posing as tanks, and the Democratic Party's notion, both implicit and explicit, that global warming is just one issue among many deserving of our attention is akin to expanding the stables in anticipation of more cavalry.
Global warming will change everything. So far, although we have proven ourselves able to understand science better than Republicans, we have yet to recognize and organize in anticipation of its far-reaching implications.