The Real Fear That Climate Change Should Inspire

When it comes to climate change, fear plays an obvious role in the discussion.  For progressives, the fear is losing the only planet we've got.  For conservatives, as Chris Hayes points out here, the fear is the obvious solution:  a greater role for government in regulating pollutants and requiring alternatives to fossil fuels.  Hayes' response to that is to build on conservative big-government fear by urging progressives to paint a portrait of a post-climate apocalypse world--one in which resources will be scarce and some form of "big government will be needed to not only enforce rationing, but perhaps even take more drastic steps to manage the decimation of Earth.

It's a potentially clever approach, one that makes the big government component of the issue essentially inevitable, and pointing out that a little more government now might mean a lot less government later.  But it doesn't really deal with what is, for me, the underlying question:  why, in the face of so much mounting evidence to the contrary, do conservatives continue to go out of their way to pretend that climate change isn't happening.

I think the answer as as simple as it is disturbing:  They want it to happen.

Despite their rhetoric to the contrary, they believe that climate change is real.  They just see the possibilities in it for themselves, from mining at the poles to changing the political make-up of the nation, as the politically blue coastal regions sink into the ocean, creating new coastlines and expanding the economic strength of the interior, where conservatives dominate the political, economic and cultural scenes.  With apologies to Margaret Mitchell, frankly, they don't give a damn about the hardships caused on a melting planet.  They're too busy asking the one question they always ask:  "How can this benefit me?"

So they are content to play a long game, denying the existence of climate change until its effects are irreversible, and then using their leverage to finish the job of remaking the United States in their own image.

Unless, of course, you do something about it.

Climate change is the supreme political issue not just of our lifetimes, but of all time.  Literally, the planet's survival, and ours, is at stake.  And even if we survive physically, we may not survive the exploitation of its effects not by big government, but by the big businesses that have spent the last three decades making sure that their control of the economy would ultimately be complete.  And climate change could provide the capstone to their efforts.

Unless, of course, you do something about it.  Will you?  It's not yet too late.  But, if you decide to sit at home for the next election, that may change along with the climate.