Climate Scientists on "Don't Look Up:" It's Infuriating, Soul-Sucking and On-the-Nose

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I come from a team of climate scientists, analysts and advocates. For us, “Don’t Look Up” was both like pulling teeth to watch and air-punchingly validating. We felt desolate and seen. (JLaw, if you’re listening, this 90% female team is here for Kate Dibiasky.) We saw the futility of our work reflected, and its necessity. We feel hopeful some people can be moved to action. And more than ever we want to gnaw the bones of the obstructionists. (Legal says to be clear that’s humor.) So basically, another day at the office.

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So then, are climate solutions like averting a comet strike? No again. Unlike nuking the comet to stop its impact, we don’t have any time left to stop climate change. It’s here. We’ve already forfeited the climate we have; we already live in a “new normal.” So just as we don’t face a choice between stopping the threat or getting annihilated, we also don’t have a date beyond which all is lost. The climate will continue to change, rapidly or slowly, punctuated by critical tipping points, depending on what we do today, then tomorrow, then the next day. Every 10th of a degree of warming seen or avoided matters and actions now matter most for avoiding that warming.

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The comet analogy and the movie don’t give the fossil fuel industry, its political lackeys and their decades of obstructing climate action their scathing due. In the movie, the political machinery is so bent on power and the capitalist’s appetite is so insatiable, they’ll risk all of humanity to get them. It’s both mind-boggling and terrifyingly familiar. In reality, fossil fuel interests bent on keeping the coal, oil and gas flowing have, for decades, directed U.S. politicians, distorted science, misled the public and quashed policy action. Those were the decades in which we urgently needed to act and even now, when the risk to all of humanity is clear and acute, they double down.

Look at the Build Back Better Act, the nation’s best shot at deep, timely emissions reductions, which has been rejected by every single Republican in Congress and held hostage by coal-baron democrat, Joe Manchin. Right now, they’re risking our very future (and theirs) for their continued profit and power.

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