Monday Bulletin
July 24, 2023
Partly cloudy. High 85 degrees.
Coming to Terms
By Carol Tannenhauser
Al Gore. Whose vice president was he? Oh, right, Bill Clinton’s. Whose husband was he? It seems so long ago — 1992 — when the Clintons and Gores burst onto the political scene to the soundtrack of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop [Thinking About Tomorrow].” I’m afraid, Al Gore (Can I call you Al?), we did. And tomorrow has arrived.
Did my generation, the once-idealistic Baby Boomers, cause the climate chaos that is currently ravaging the globe? Did we destroy our gorgeous, Goldilocks planet?
In fairness, it was a member of the Greatest Generation who cornered Dustin Hoffman’s 20-year-old character in The Graduate in 1967 and said, with regard to the young man’s future: ‘I have just one word for you: Plastics.'” Where is he now to tell us how to get plastics out of our oceans and landfills?
I remember Al Gore as being dour. Other problems seemed more pressing at the time — climate change was theoretical, hypothetical, and very far away — until this summer, when the extreme weather Gore predicted in his 2006 book and documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” “seems to have arrived all at once,” said The New York Times.
Canada is burning and we’re inhaling its secondhand smoke. Vermont is counting inches of mud, not snow. Phoenix is hovering around 118 degrees, and, according to USA Today, “Alaska is baked.” CBS News reported that “Heat records are being shattered all over the U.S. South, from California to Florida. But it’s far more than that. It’s worldwide, with devastating heat hitting Europe along with dramatic floods in the U.S. Northeast, India, Japan and China….The Earth is in uncharted territory.”
New York City has been relatively lucky so far. Aside from some super soakings and a surreal orange sky — and virtually no snow last winter — we have been spared the far worse conditions in some other places. Extreme climate change is still something on the news that’s happening to someone else, in some town or neighborhood other than the Upper West Side.
We Boomers could just run down the clock; many of us won’t experience humanity’s darkest — or brightest — days, if they should come. Of course, there’s the niggling awareness of our children and grandchildren….
I was happy to hear that Al Gore is still advocating — “He’s been shouting from the rooftops about the risks of global warming more or less nonstop,” said The Times — and to be reminded that he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 (together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for his efforts. “Gore is probably the single individual who has done most to rouse the public and the governments that action had to be taken to meet the climate challenge,” the Nobel Prize Foundation wrote, “and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
“We know how to fix this,” Gore told The Times. “Clean energy is cheaper than ever, and electric vehicle sales are surging, turbocharged by government subsidies. Put that all together, and…developed economies could draw down their emissions with surprising speed.”
We’re listening now, Al, and here’s to you.
Have a great week!
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Sorry to say but there are plenty of younger people with large carbon footprints etc…..
Like jetting all over the globe for vacations, daily Starbucks and other chain food resulting in trash; fast fashion-throwaway cheap clothing; etc.
Actually my grandparents and many of their peers were the most careful and really adhered to reduce; reuse; recycle.
My depression-era grandparents were very, very frugal, but things were also made to last back then. Major appliances could easily work for decades with proper care, clothing was made of natural fibers that wore better and longer, sneakers didn’t wear out in a few months (my Pumas now routinely get holes in the soles within six months of wear), and furniture was made of solid wood, not wood composite. Even small necessary items like safety pins and razors are flimsy junk now compared to a few decades ago.
Climate change is very real and an issue that must be addressed, but it’s not the only issue. People will not accept freedom of movement restrictions such as restrictions on driving, where one works, vacations, seeing family or air travel in the name of climate change. People will not accept rolling blackouts because we don’t have enough sustainable net-zero energy (there are activists who want air conditioning banned). People will not accept dietary restrictions (yes on twitter there was a whole discourse on why no one in North America deserves to eat bananas or about eating bugs). People will not accept being told they can’t own dogs (yes there are twitter climate activists/YIMBY real estate investors who’ve said that dogs are a mistake in cities just like cars due to negative externalities).
COVID-19 was a test in how much sacrifice people are willing to accept and whether they are willing to accept it permanently or otherwise long term, COVID-19 showed me the answer is no and because of COVID-19, we may not be able to severely restrict society in the name of climate change. There is also a right wing backlash from COVID-19 that will reverberate for decades to come.
People will not accept not having children (coming from the same climate change activists) because each person has an impact on climate change. Especially if such an activist owns a private jet.
We have to start taking this issues more seriously ASAP but we need to define meaningful specific steps that don’t have major impact on a regular Joe, while the elites living their Dolce Vita.
I don’t understand why you wrote a long comment listing so many absurd and far fetched restrictions that in your view people will not accept. There are extremists and crackpots in every sphere. Who seriously argues that we have to eliminate dogs? Climate change activists focus first and foremost on the burning of fossil fuels, which is the primary cause of current climate change, accounting for over 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions. It isn’t about bananas!
You think all those millennials taking vacations all over the place will sit and be told no they can’t take a flight somewhere because they used up their carbon allowance?
There are wealthy real estate developers aligned with the YIMBY movement who purportedly support action on climate change arguing that dogs should be eliminated. Even if the US were to adopt net-zero policies right now, not only would we be thrust into an even worse crisis than the climate crisis, but China will be laughing their way to the bank and to world dominance, they’ll continue to burn more fossil fuels than you could imagine, while they become the world’s superpower and we lose what the United States stands for, a place where, in theory, anyone could if they tried, achieve upward mobility. Yes climate change is a concern, but people will not accept too many sacrifices, they’ll vote right wing politicians like Trump as part of a backlash, they’ll vote politicians like Zeldin (who got 47% of the vote last year) to preserve their comfort, standard of living and quality of life.
YIMBYs want to make it legal to build more apartments which is one of the single best things we can do to reduce carbon emissions; YIMBYs are not arguing for banning dogs, that’s just nonsense.
Here’s the YIMBY in question that wants dogs banned, this is the twitter thread: https://twitter.com/bobbyfijan/status/1681015992221069313
That’s one guy on Twitter – hardly representative
But the people on Twitter are driving political discourse and policy discussions. Policymakers, lobbyists and elected officials pay attention to Twitter, in NYC they’re even said to govern off of Twitter. The urbanist and YIMBY movement would be nothing without Twitter. Plus that guy is a real estate developer and investor. Politics follows the money.
If people don’t start making major changes to protect the planet NOW, there will be no planet, and thus no air conditioning, family vacations, etc. Why do first world countries think they are entitled to use all the world’s resources and maintain their rich lifestyles while poor countries burn? This is not just a moral and physical comfort issue, but is critical to national security.
There are plenty of solutions coming online to address climate change, though probably not fast enough, but they all require every one of us to rethink how we live and work and what we expect. We can still live well. But all that plastic, all those oil spills, all that ozone and particle pollution did not happen by magic. WE created them, and we are going to have to stop. Period.
In theory, people from poorer countries can immigrate to the United States, work hard and be able to attain the same rich lifestyles we do. Part of why we have so many migrants coming here. Not many people are illegally migrating to China to attain their lifestyle including more limited civil liberties and a hukou system, but people are crossing into China from North Korea to get to South Korea. If we don’t use the world’s resources and give people the hope that they can come here and join our party, China will continue to use all the world’s resources and the world will be worse off for it. Us Americans can talk and work things out, in China they can’t.
Do you imagine all the people driven from their homes by climate change are going to come to the US? Do you think we can accommodate them? Do you not understand why our own military is preparing for massive global human dislocations that will destabilize countries and borders and make us all more vulnerable to dictators who run on xenophobia and isolationism?
It’s cooperation to lead to solutions that is needed, which will require buy in from everyone, even the airline industry, billionaires, and agribusiness.
People will not accept not having children (coming from the same climate change activists) because each person has an impact on climate change. Especially if such an activist owns a private jet.
We have to start taking this issues more seriously ASAP but we need to define meaningful specific steps that don’t have major impact on a regular Joe, while the elites living their Dolce Vita.
Echoing the sentiment. The elites are preaching this and that without any sacrifice to their lifestyle while forcing regular folks implement the changes that make little or no impact on climate change.
I would say – ban private planes (look up the amount of fossil fuel they burn), downsize in terms of a number and size of houses, then you can preach to others.
al gore is responsible for the W. Bush administration and everything that has followed.
Gmartin is wrong and Yamo is wrong. The biggest impact BY FAR on our planet resulted from Ralph Nader running for president in 2000, and handing the White House to W Bush. Result: tens of thousands killed and wounded in near-unending war in Iraq and Afghanistan; and terrible economic woes.
Not to mention the Florida residents who couldn’t properly read their ballots. (Thank you, Pat Buchanan.)
If Ross Perot had not run for president in 1992, GWH Bush would have won a second term and the Clintons and Gores would have disappeared from sight. Had Bush won, he would have been succeeded by Bob Dole and W Bush would have been nothing more than a tiny footnote in Texas history. Baby Boomers (and I’m one) have produced the worst string of presidents in history, even “surpassing” Taylor, Fillore, Pierce, and Buchanan.
Excellent, insightful comment—glad WSR chose to publish it. Where would we be without a forum to air such thoughts?
Even assuming this isn’t a joke, this is precisely the type of comment that shouldn’t be published. It has absolutely has no relevance to the story and has no basis in fact.
But, as it was published, hats off to Mr. Gore for conceding the election even when he had legitimate grounds to continue contesting the FL results and won the popular vote by over 5000,000 votes. That’s what a presidential candidate does when they put the country and democracy first.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. For some rise in crime is a fact, for others it isn’t. Let people speak.
This kind of perspective irritates the hell out of me because just like with Covid now, nobody wants to pay attention to a problem that needs serious attention to prevent problems in the future.
Too damned late. Some of us have been trying to deal with the climate crisis since before Al Gore’s book. Like, since the early 90s. And when the next killer variant of Covid happens, it’ll be the same thing.. ” I see now the importance of wearing a mask now that some of my friends died and I ended up with emphysema.” Meantime, my wife’s had to deal with her asthma with air becoming crap for the last 20 years and miss neither of us can work because we can’t expose ourselves to potentially getting Covid for heart and respiratory conditions.
So, you know what, we said it before and we were right with the environment and we’re gonna be right again with Covid and with the environment getting even worse. And I respect your position of now realizing what the situation is but being aware of this and having it affect my life and in the case of Covid, continuing to kill people I know, for what climate and the pandemic have done to my and my wife’s lives, I have no tolerance for people who have just done what was convenient to them until now because reality as Gore said was too inconvenient to help out with.
Talk to China. Unless they change course (and they won’t), there’s nothing we in America can do to stop climate change.
Al Gore got robbed of the presidency by the GOP and the Supreme Court, and the planet took a huge hit as a result. That being said, he ran a distinctly lackluster campaign and only ever seemed comfortable talking about the environment.
I often think about that “plastics” scene. The air of foreboding was spot on.
Kamala Harris may have apologized for her slip of the tongue, but she was right: we need population control. With 8B people (and growing!) on Earth, we continually create more demand for products that have created the current climate issues. Using those blue recycling bins is a help, but until we can find a way to control our population, our situation is similar to trying to bail out a flooded basement without first shutting off the water.
How exactly do you recommend we implement population control? Which population should we start with? I’m always shocked by how casually people talk about cutting the population without thinking about what it means to eliminate huge chunks of humanity.
It may be an explosive issue, but it should be discussed.
There’s a July 23 NPR article about the effect of climate change on migration from Honduras. My sympathy was very much with the families in the article until I got to the part about the mother who had TEN CHILDREN.
How many families around the world (including here) still consider it their right to have large families even when they can’t support them?
There are no easy answers to population control questions, but not discussing the reality of it is absurd.
Addition to the above (I was in the middle of editing my comment when my battery drained):
I don’t think people who can afford it should have 10 children either. The drain on planetary resources is the same either way.
Great article Carol!
I remember after he lost the election and before An Inconvenient Truth was published/ filmed, Gore gave a presentation sponsored by MoveOn.org at The Beacon theater; I was lucky enough to see it and walking out I was totally shaken and I thought, just, everyone needs to see this. I’m 43 now, with no children. I won’t live to see things get really bad, but I think I will live long enough for them to get interesting. I’m doing what I can but, realistically, I’m also enjoying it and appreciating what I can while I can. Individuals can and should be mindful but realistically, my yearly flight to see my family in California isn’t going to be the deal breaker when short-sighted capitalism is running rampant and corporations are unregulated by impotent or disinterested governments. The entire globe, not just the US, is like a student that won’t start the assignment until the night before it’s due… maybe we’ll turn it in on time, maybe not.
Sick of the constant refrain that Boomers are responsible for everything bad. In fact, it was Boomer activism that mobilized against the Vietnam War, for civil and reproductive rights, for government accountability, and took environmentalism seriously. Boomers are the big demographic bulge, so easy to target, but it’s Boomers who are the most conscientious and active to protect the planet.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/22/move-over-millennials-boomers-are-uks-greenest-generation
Some wonderful comments here, but Burtnor’s is the only one that I can agree with 100% .
An inconvenient truth is that many of us cannot resist pre-washed lettuce or the cut up fruit in plastic clamshell containers or remember to bring our own containers for coffee/tea takeout. It’s not too late to take the Plastic Free July challenge https://www.plasticfreejuly.org/take-the-challenge/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwwvilBhCFARIsADvYi7IAKQr_GgpwEC1rp9Ac-IvzY2q9QGK3HiL1dGD0szL2HnvKX4Je6gcaAkphEALw_wcB. There are no perfect leaders. I salute Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Judith Enck (Beyond Plastics leader) , Elizabeth Kolbert and James Hansen who keep us warned, informed and motivated to focus our attention on the fossil fuel industry and the banks who fund them.
Also learn more about environmental issues from It’s Easy Being Green, an UWS environmental group. Go to http://www.itseasybeinggreen.org to learn about our initiatives and sign up for our newsletter (on a break this summer, but will be back in the fall).
The Plastic Pollution Coalition is another organization that is trying to get the word out.
https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org
Thank you Carol for calling attention to climate change. I’d love to see a regular feature addressing how climate change affects us on the UWS.
We need more involvement in these issues
Yes. If you are over 65 join Bill McKibben’s Third Act. Or subscribe to get news from Beyond Plastics or get the UWS newsletter of the UWS climate education and personal action group It’s Easy Being Green. Go to Itseasybeinggreen.org.
Thank you for those resources, SWaskow. I hadn’t known about any of them.
The very detailed composting guidelines on itseasybeinggreen look especially helpful and clear.
Consider subscribing to the monthly newsletter. It’s full of news about NYC’s sustainability efforts, how to be plastic free, updates on composting and legislation. and more. We have 425 subscribers. Go to menu, newsletter itseasybeinggreen.org. We are an all volunteer group.
Nuclear power. That’s something practical that would make a difference here. Right now. But the progressives shot that down
In NYC the discussion is routinely about how vehicles impact pollution, climate change.
But there is almost no acknowledgment that high-rise buildings-skyscrapers also contribute to pollution, climate change.
https://archive.curbed.com/2019/9/19/20874234/buildings-carbon-emissions-climate-change
Yes skyscrapers are actually a significant problem.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90666746/is-building-tall-really-best-researchers-dispel-the-myth-of-climate-friendly-skyscrapers
Did you actually read that article? It recommends that we build to greater densities, close to mass transit, using energy-efficient specifications—if anything, that would favor building more modern skyscrapers in NYC, not fewer.
Brandon,
Properly designed and dense buildings of let’s 20 stories near transit are a good thing, and certainly better than multiple suburban homes.
But glossy skyscrapers are not.
Skyscrapers are bad for the environment.
Not to mention that luxury residents are more likely to use Uber, order e-commerce and other wasteful services.
Suburban homes aren’t as bad as climate activists want you to think. There’s also innovation to make them greener. The same activists going after single family homes are the same activists that will go after historic preservation on the UWS where 71% of the UWS is in a historic district.
We should be taking a page from France and building more zero-emission nuclear power plants. Instead states like New York and California are shutting their nuclear plants, which means we’ll be using more carbon producing energy sources for decades to come to meet our energy needs.
We might as well embrace climate change.
I’m looking forward to palm trees and flamingos in Central Park.
That’s what’s going to happen when enough people are fed up with making endless sacrifices. You see, COVID and World War II had an end date, even the Vietnam War had an end date. Sacrifices with no end date which is what climate activists want will lead to a right wing backlash where climate change gets embraced, but we lose women’s rights, LGBT rights and other rights. Democrats would be smart to drop the demands for net zero and sacrifices like banning cars in order to protect democracy and protect people’s rights.
The Earth is a living organism that is sick due to human conditions that are man made . Our fossil fuel, petroleum, nuclear establishments are putting the planet off balance and eventually will be a uninhabitable planet. The extreme weather we are facing is the result of a sick planet. The coarse of civilization is up to us to change our life on Earth.
One can’t blame an entire generation on how one percent of that generation made their vast amounts of money. Most of the Boomers didn’t have any power then to stop the madness and they still don’t. It’s time to start placing the blame squarely on those individuals who were responsible, and force them to start paying actual money to get us out of this. And until we do it’s all just useless rhetoric.
Are you referring to the fossil fuel industry and the banks that fund them or the elected officials that take money from them to finance their campaigns? Or all of them? Boomers have clout and money. We can cut our ties from the banks that fund them and divest from funds that invest in plastics ( a
byproduct of fossil fuels) and pipelines. Manufacturers of plastic containers need to be held responsible for the pollution they create too. Support the NYS plastic reduction act coming up for consideration again in January.
And Bush 41 called him “Ozone Man “ . My depression era parents called him a “hippie “.
I Just Miss Al Gore and still sing his praises.
Younger generations have been criticized for having a higher carbon footprint, but it’s important to recognize that this situation is influenced by the prevailing contemporary capitalist system, which was established by the baby boomer generation. The 60s and 70s were marked by the boomer’s pursuit of excess and self-expression, often centered around the concept of “personal freedom.” However, many of their ideas did not lead to substantial change and instead contributed to a culture of indulgence.As the baby boomers aged and entered the Reagan era, their capitalist tendencies intensified, leading to a period of extravagant consumerism and materialism. This shift towards excess capitalism further shaped the values and behaviors of subsequent generations.Today, younger generations are simply navigating the platforms and opportunities that the baby boomers helped create. They are often criticized for their carbon footprint, but it’s essential to acknowledge that their choices and consumption patterns are influenced by the environment they inherited.The baby boomers epitomize a generation that pursued personal freedom with little regard for the consequences, embodying a “do what you want” capitalist mentality.