[This post is somewhat off-topic & on Global Warming, but given that it ties back to the Climate Ride, it does belong here on Trainer Confessions. What you see below is the text I intend to send to a few local news papers for inclusion in the Letter to the Editor section. If you see any text that could be improved upon before then, please let me know. And of course if you want to make a donation to the Climate Ride, please follow this link.]
When I signed up for the Climate Ride (a charitable 5 day 300+ mile bike ride to support sustainable solutions, bike advocacy and environmental causes) a few of my cycling friends thought it was a way for me to indulge my passion for cycling. While there might be an ounce of truth behind such thinking, without question my primary motivation is help convince others to take action to avert the worst of what man-made Global Warming has already set in motion.
A long time ago, I once associated Global Warming’s impact with Polar Bears and glaciers – things in faraway places with only indirect consequences to my life. In recent years as I learned more, I felt compelled to take Green actions as part of my parental duties; not only did I want to raise happy and healthy children, but I also wanted to make sure they inherited a livable planet when they grew up.
But as I look back upon the increasingly numerous climate disasters in 2011 (unprecedented droughts, floods, and heat waves that impacted people all over the globe), it now has become clear that action is needed to make changes NOW and in my lifetime. Global Warming isn’t something bad that could happen at some point in the future; it was one of the factors in 2011’s record setting number of Billion Dollar weather disasters in the US (a cost that doesn’t account for the devastation incurred to the hundreds who also lost their lives in these events).
But why doesn’t everyone realize this? Why do you rarely hear news coverage of Global Warming, except for when it snows out during the winter and Fox News decides to roast Al Gore once again? Why is it that all of the leading GOP presidential candidates even go so far as calling Global Warming a hoax perpetrated by greedy scientists looking for grant money?
And why is it that when I asked someone recently for ideas on how to raise money, they responded by saying “Global Warming isn’t like raising money for Cancer. Everyone knows someone whose life was threatened (or worse) by cancer. Global Warming just doesn’t impact as many people.”
I know first-hand of cancer’s far-reaching impact; I lost my half-brother to the disease when he was still just a child. Cancer takes the lives of tens of millions of people ever year, so unquestionably those raising money for cancer deserve the support they receive. But why can’t I convince people that the same is true for man-made Global Warming, which already is impacting the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and within a decade or so could be impacting all 7 billion members of the human race?
The comparison to cancer got me thinking a bit more as to why too few people today feel there’s reason to take Global Warming seriously. Many decades ago, the scientific evidence on smoking was indisputable; if you smoked scientists proved that your odds of getting life-threatening cancer sky-rocketed. Yet highly skilled marketers and lobbyists funded by the tobacco industry cast just enough doubt on the science, and as a result, millions of people dismissed the warnings and continued to smoke. Big Tobacco’s profits continued to swell, even as people’s lives were ended by cancer.
Today Big Oil and Coal are following the same game plan to protect their record breaking profits, even going as far as using some of the very same former Tobacco marketers and lobbyists. For example, even as the people of Texas continue to suffer through an unparalleled drought, the successful marketing and lobbying campaigns funded by millions of dollars of coal and oil money have the governor of that state, and presidential hopeful Rick Perry, declaring that Global Warming is a hoax and that there’s no reason for Texans to question the doubt as anything other than a natural occurrence.
It took millions of deaths to finally bring the end the influence of Big Tobacco. Absent of their money and messaging, now you’d be hard pressed to find someone willing to challenge the science connecting smoking to cancer deaths. Unfortunately today Global Warming science, now backed and supported by virtually every major scientific body, is still not widely known or believed by significant portions of the country. Much like the chain smokers of the 60s and 70s whose health was on the decline, today we see the worsening signs of Global Warming, yet we fail to believe the science that would give us a path away from our terrible addiction. I just hope that it won’t take the deaths of tens or hundreds of millions before we finally break from the shackles of the influence of Big Oil and Coal.
And that is why I signed up for the Climate Ride again this year. It’s for a cause that’s deeply important to me, and now I hope that you might find a reason to think that it’s important to you as well.
