Americans Are Concerned About Climate Change—but They Should Be Afraid | Americans still don’t comprehend how imminent, dangerous, and far-reaching the threat is—and journalists are partly to blame.

4 comments

1. Not just Americans.

2. Two points

   * American journalism is truly miserable. They share responsibility for many things. They don’t accept it, their profession has vast rhetorical apparatus to avoid accountability. Blaming them won’t help, as it has not helped in relation to anything else. Just give up on them. The future is Citizen Journalism, professional journalism in this nation is on life support.
   * Perhaps American’s are just well adjusted to being afraid? Mass shootings anyone? American transportation infrastructure and policy? It is constant death everywhere. Perhaps there”s no juice left to be squeezed from the fear glands? Like a drug that has lost potency, we are maxed out on fear.
   * Americans also have a cultural disposition against systems thinking, but prefer to view things as discrete events. That’s a tough nut to crack.

3. Well let’s don’t blame oligarchs’ control of the media.

4. Mostly I think that people just can’t be bothered to try to really understand what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what can and should be done about it. It hurts to think about morality, and to turn that gaze on the world means also turning it on ourselves.

   For many, possibly most of us, it means abandoning aspects of our lifestyles that we take for granted – parts of what we see as our identity, even. Car culture, other forms of toxic masculinity. The ubiquity of plastics, the ease of luxury consumerism and its disposability. That eating meat all the time, every day, is just how life is, never mind the suffering and oppression of so many billions of sentient beings; I need my breakfast sandwich.

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