I found it hard to focus on this week's material, and not just because I'm stressed that my mother came to visit and I'm trying to rush through this post and take her to the zoo or something. See, along with all my usual environment-related feelings of guilt and cognitive dissonance I've added hypocrisy. In Gidden's discussion on risk perceptions, he highlight the difficulty of keeping a given risk in context and the prevalence of "attention fatigue." I am well-versed and concerned about climate change issues, it is my field of study and tied to my potential career goals, and even I am not infallible to this attention fatigue and the "inclination to 'forget all about it and get on with ordinary life'" (34). Hence, slogging through more of the same warnings and literature, missing the nuances because I feel so saturated with it, and packing up to go to the zoo. My guilt and feelings that I am a hypocrite extend even further as I acknowledge that basically the entire point of my sustainability video (please don't watch it) was to get people to think about these problems that may seem futile or easy to ignore in their complexity and time insensitivity.
McKibben expands upon similar issues with the attitudes surrounding climate change. As he puts it, "Most of us are fundamentally ambivalent about going green: we like cheap flights to warm places, and we're certainly not going to give them up if everyone else is still taking them" (43). Well, at least when I flew to the Virgin Islands in August I was not falling prey to overstating the risks of flying. I might have thought twice if I was going to Malaysia. I'm not sure if my point here is that I perpetuate some of the very lifestyle choices that I objectively scorn in academic writing, or that we need to reshape our framing of risk messages. But who wants to talk about climate change while we're all side-eyeing our airplane seat mates for ebola, anyway?
I suppose I'm just part of our "dithering" society - and that's the word of the week courtesy of Victor, who actually uses it twice in Global Warming Gridlock to lament our collective bumbling toward catastrophe. When interests inform policy much more than science, how many more arguments can we make about the bottom line of two degrees, or the numbers of gigatons (who can even conceptualize gigatons??) or the absolute necessity of a low-carbon economy? The IPCC tells us we've got to stop using fossil fuels by 2100...and we all laugh at the news because we know our current political will and the interests shaping it are a juggernaut compared to such dire reports. That's an "inconvenient number," like Victor said of the scientific assessment of a "safe" amount of ozone, and it's still true that we have little idea "how to get to zero in a politically feasible manner" (44). We can just keep dithering over the effectiveness, or lack thereof, in UN climate talks while simultaneously giggling over the nickname "Gee-gees" (Giddens, 28-30) and deciding whether we should write "Fat Boy" or "Little Boy" on the side of our figurative carbon bomb and literal failures.
I'm going to the zoo now.
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