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| The Hiroshima Peace Memorial, which commemorates the first use of a nuclear weapon in war. Photograph by Thomas Hoepker / Magnum Photos |
Hiroshima has a special grip on the planet’s consciousness. To see the remains of the great explosion is moving, and it’s equally powerful to realize that basically every building you drive by was constructed after 1945. Millions of people come here to tour the museum—its exhibits all the more chastening for their dry and almost clinical precision. Hiroshima has become symbolic shorthand for the nuclear horror that still haunts humanity; when we think about weapons of mass destruction, it’s the mushroom cloud above the Japanese city that we see in our mind’s eye.
Kyoto, in a different way, could have become shorthand for another, equally huge problem—global warming, which is producing changes even more far-reaching than a nuclear standoff. It was in Kyoto, twenty-one years ago, that the world first came together to try to address the climate crisis, reaching a small but useful agreement to begin limiting carbon emissions. Yet the pact accomplished little, and has slipped into history.
I saw no sign in Kyoto that the conference ever took place—no shrine or statue, and, what’s more, no discernible change in the way that the city operates. (Japan met its obligations to the treaty by using offset techniques, such as planting trees and purchasing carbon credits, while emissions rose.) In what is a race against time, time has largely stood still here, as it has in most places.
It’s not as if we have solved the nuclear issue, but at least we understand that it is a crisis. The entire act of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, depends on the collective understanding that these weapons are uniquely, intolerably awful. Even Donald Trump dimly groks that denuclearization is good. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is filled with the texts of treaties that have brought the number of warheads slowly, steadily down; we could see that mushroom cloud and understand its danger in our gut. With climate change, it’s different.
The explosion of a billion pistons inside a billion cylinders every minute of every day just doesn’t induce the same tremble. True, Trump is alone among world leaders in dismissing global warming, but most of his peers might as well agree: they’ve done very little of what’s required even to begin addressing this issue. As a result, the explosions go off constantly. Scientists estimate that, each day, our added emissions trap the heat equivalent of four hundred thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs, which is why the Arctic has half as much ice as it did in the nineteen-eighties, why the great ocean currents have begun to slow, why we see floods and storms and fires in such sad proportion. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only atomic bombs we ever dropped; climate bombs rain down daily, and the death toll mounts unstoppably.
I can think of several explanations for this difference in attitude. The most important, probably, lies in the power of the fossil-fuel industry, which has spent billions of dollars defending the precise practices now wrecking the planet. The industry’s disinformation and lobbying campaigns—the details of which have slowly come to light, though the broad outlines have been clear for decades—have been spectacularly effective.
I remember watching the closing moments of the Kyoto conference, in 1997, as delegates congratulated themselves on what President Bill Clinton called “a huge first step.” I was standing next to a lobbyist for the energy industry, who had spent much of the week trying to water down and derail the agreement. He took in my tired pleasure and said, “I’m glad we’re going back to D.C., where we’ve got this under control.” That turned out to be accurate, though even he could not have predicted the ultimate success of his work: an American President who insists that the entire thing is a hoax manufactured by the Chinese.
Still, global warming doesn’t haunt even the uncorrupted imagination in quite the same way as the bomb, perhaps because it unfolds more slowly. On a geologic time scale, a day and a century are roughly the same unit, but for the purposes of a news cycle, the difference is crucial. Every single day, climate change is the most important thing happening on the planet—there’s nothing even remotely close.
But, on any single day, there’s always something more dramatic, more urgent. It feels as if we have time to deal with global warming, whereas deportations or assault rifles or lunatics in white vans mowing down women must be dealt with now. (In fact, climate change is the one problem that the planet has ever faced that comes with an absolute time limit; past a certain point, it won’t be a problem anymore, because it won’t have a solution.)
And the fact that it’s happening everywhere, which should mean that it engages us more deeply, seems in some ways to do just the opposite. Hiroshima was an obvious, hideous breach of the ordinary. (The curators of the museum at ground zero understand this: you enter through a room filled with pictures of normal life in the months leading up to the bombing, and these pictures of smiling schoolchildren are at least as powerful as the images of charred bodies by the exit.) But the sheer repetition of flood and firestorm ratchets down the terror some; we’re in the process now of routinizing global warming and the destruction it wreaks. It’s becoming the baseline. Hurricane Katrina was shocking; Harvey and Irma and Maria, less so.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps the free-falling price of solar and wind power will be enough to spur the necessary transition. But I doubt it. Inertia is such a strong force that, without a decisive push from a motivated human population, we won’t make the change in time to defuse the climate bomb. That was my sense watching normal, unchanged life in Kyoto and reading the editorial in Monday’s Yomiuri Shimbun, which called for balancing economic and environmental interests. Climate change would be helped, the editors said, by the advent of new technologies that turned off lights when people weren’t in the room.
Between the power of an amoral industry willing to lie and the particular tricks of human psychology that make us willing to overlook our greatest threat, it’s possible that as a species we’ll slide straight into a new, hotter, more desperate world without quite recognizing it—without a Hiroshima moment at which, at the very least, we finally acknowledge reality.
*Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker staff writer, is the founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College.
Links
- The Atomic Origins of Climate Science
- A Floating House to Resist the Floods of Climate Change
- How to Read Today’s Big Climate-Change Headline
- Tangier Island, on the Front Lines of Climate Change
- Darren Aronofsky Says “Mother!” Is About Climate Change, But He’s Wrong
- A Tiny Coral Paradise in the Great Barrier Reef Reckons with Climate Change
- What’s Missing from “An Inconvenient Sequel,” Al Gore’s New Climate-Change Documentary
- “Eden is Broken”: A Caribbean Leader Spotlights Climate Change
- Margaret Atwood, Evangelizing Against Climate Change, and Greek Tragedy
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