The Climate Crisis and a Springtime Bout of Cognitive Dissonance
By Robert Leonard Berkowitz
I picked up the morning’s New York Times. Scanned front-page headlines:
“Mideast Violence Rages,” “Justices Take Case Testing Roe v. Wade,” “Cuomo’s Book Deal Payday Grows to $5 Million.” Not a word about the climate crisis. All not well.
I retreated to the back deck. Filled bird feeder. Watched mama and papa wren feverishly build a nest in the guest house tacked onto the trunk of an ash tree at the edge of the lush green forest preserve and wetlands that border my lot. All well.
Glanced at watch. Spell broken. Time to finish How Democracies Die. Big mistake. Spent a few weary hours reading about how the guardrails of mutual trust and institutional forbearance that have preserved our fragile democracy for scores of decades have become rusted. All not well.
Time for a long walk. Ambled along the nearby verdant village green and wildflower-strewn rolling meadows inhabited by bunny rabbits running happily amok. Crossed paths with several joyfully-relieved, mask-free neighbors commenting on the spectacularly gorgeous weather. All well.
Wandered home, taking in the wondrous scents of the cool spring air, when a primeval feeling erupted from the pit of my stomach. If a feeling could talk it was saying, “What Climate Crisis?”
Which made me ponder the frightful thought that I was just like one of THEM — by which I mean the likes of Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma who six years earlier waved a snowball on the Senate floor to demonstrate that climate change was nothing more than figment of the imaginations of liberal, left-wing, big-government, job-killing, egghead scientists. All not well.
And then I began to worry, how in the world I was going to kick off the evening’s community-wide book discussion of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster– a climate disaster that maybe wasn’t really going to happen — and began to wonder, how I was going to heap praise and adulation on the author Bill Gates who perhaps was just another pro big tech, big-government, job-killing, hot-air egghead scientist. I was hopelessly confused and distressed. All very not well — especially in my aching head.
There’s a clinical term for what I was feeling. It’s called cognitive dissonance — a state of discomfort or stress when one holds two diametrically opposed thoughts in one’s head. In my case, one thought was that all was blissfully well in our twenty-acre natural habitat community. The second was that the 123 billion acres natural habit of planet earth surrounding it was flirting with the real possibility of extinction.
In the moment, the first thought felt more real and immediate — the second more abstract and distant.
I could hear the birds joyfully chirping, see the bunnies elatedly hopping about, inhale the sweet fragrances of the blooming lilacs, and share those wondrous experiences with my exultant neighbors — and all the more so because we were now free of those suffocating, eyewear-fogging and ear-pinching face masks.
What I could not hear were the “canaries in the coal mine” — the melting of the Arctic permafrost, the breaking up the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, and the destabilizing of the ice-like crystalline structures at the bottom of the ocean floor.
What I could not see were the millions of acres of old-growth forests being slashed and burned and the countless loss of species of wildlife.
And what I could not smell were the billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions spewing from the chimneys of hundreds of thousands of power plants and factories across our five continents.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.” I was failing woefully at the test, as did Fitzgerald who drank himself to death in trying to pass it. So, a late morning double shot of Jack Daniels was not the medicinal answer to my bout of cognitive dissonance.
Instead, I made myself a double shot of espresso and began thumbing rather mindlessly through the rest of the Times, whereupon I stumbled on a news item buried on page eleven headlined, World Energy Body Warns That Nations Must Slash Use of Fossil Fuels fast.
As the Times reported, the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world’s leading and most influential energy body, warned in the starkest of language, that if the stewards of planet earth hope to avert the most catastrophic effects of climate change, they will need to massively mobilize a lightning transition to a renewable-energy-based global economy and begin to do so forthwith.
The piece detailed the IEA’s urgent recommendations to get to zero global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 — recommendations that mirrored those urged by Bill Gates in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. They include:
- Quadrupling the annual rate of worldwide installations of solar panels and wind turbines worldwide by 2030. For the solar industry, that would mean building the equivalent of what is currently the world’s largest solar farm every day for the next decade.
- Immediately banning new coal plants unless outfitted with carbon capture technology to trap and bury released emissions underground, as well as prohibiting new oil and gas fields beyond those already in the works.
- Terminating the sale of new oil and gas furnaces to heat buildings by 2025 and installing cleaner electric heat pumps in their place.
- Increasing the share of electric vehicles sold to sixty percent by 2030, up from five percent today.
- Ending the sales of new gasoline- or diesel-fueled passenger vehicles by 2035.
- Eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants in the developed world, fully shifting from coal- and gas-fired electrical power generation to wind, solar, or nuclear by 2035.
- Increasing the share of new heavy truck electric vehicles from basically zero to more than fifty-percent by 2035.
- Shutting down, or retrofitting with carbon capture technology, the rest of the world’s remaining coal-fired power plants by 2040.
- Fueling half of all worldwide air travel by cleaner and more sustainable jet fuels such as bio and hydrogen by 2040.
- And fully replacing all new and existing internal combustion road vehicles with those fueled by batteries or hydrogen by 2050.
Those were just a handful of the many steps the IEA outlined in its Net Zero By 2050 special report that must be taken to keep the average global temperature from exceeding 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial levels. If that happens, the egghead scientists (that Senator Inhofe childishly mocked) fear we will have entered completely uncharted territory in terms of planet warming, and sharply increased the odds of triggering an out-of-human-control planetary catastrophe.
We are currently running at a rate of growth of greenhouse gases that, even if halved, is likely to push us closer to 2.0 Celsius warming by mid-century, and there is no indication that the upward trend line is flattening. Just last month the IEA forecast a five percent increase in this year’s global greenhouse emissions — the steepest in more than a decade. All not well.
Still, coming from the IEA this planetary wake-up call was very hopeful news.
But why in heavens did the Times bury it on page eleven, instead of making it the front-page lead news item it deserved? I decided to give the Times a pass, as it was quite possible that the news editor who made the placement decision was also suffering from a debilitating bout of springtime cognitive dissonance.
I withdrew once more to the quiet solitude of my deck to shake off my bout of it and think about how I was going to kick off the evening’s community-wide book discussion.
Mama and papa wren were still excitedly darting in and out of their cedar-wood bird house in perfect cognitive harmony, beaks filled to the brim with recycled building materials and their feather-weight bodies bursting with tireless energy fueled entirely by renewables.
With that image fresh in mind, I headed for my desk to capture it in words. As I searched for a few final words before calling it a day, I noticed from my second-floor office perch that all was now quiet on the home front. Mama and Papa wren had finished their day’s work.
Ours is still to come.
Robert Leonard Berkowitz is the author of the recently published essay, The Race Against Time: What I’ve learned from Bill Gates about how to avoid a climate disaster. It and many of his other writings can be found on Medium.com.
