Have you watched our panel featuring Senator Elizabeth Warren and the writers of Don't Look Up talking about the need for boldness on clean energy?
The LA Times profiled it and over 55,000 people have watched it!!
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LA Times columnist Mary McNamara was one of over 55,000 people who tuned in Wednesday to our virtual panel on climate change and energy prices with Elizabeth Warren and Oscar-nominated Don’t Look Up writers Adam McKay and David Sirota.
This column was her takeaway: "The only thing we should be talking about is the climate crisis."
Missed our event with Elizabeth Warren and the Oscar-nominated "Don't Look Up" writers on clean energy and gas prices? Watch the video here! And share it with your friends on Facebook and on Twitter.
Here an excerpt from Mary's column in the LA Times:
As I was contemplating the value of writing a column in which I simply state outrage and the obvious in as many ways as I could think of, a colleague alerted me that the Progressive Change Campaign Committee was hosting a Zoom conversation among Adam McKay, David Sirota and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on this very topic. Thinking they might have some answers, I zoomed in.
McKay and Sirota share story credit for the Oscar-nominated "Don’t Look Up." Written and directed by McKay, the film follows the travails of two astronomers who try to warn the world about the enormous asteroid they have discovered is hurtling toward Earth and an extinction-level impact. Spoiler alert: No one listens, and extinction occurs.
The parallels between the asteroid and the climate crisis are obvious and intentional, as is the tragic (albeit with darkly comedic top notes) ending. Still, I must admit it was a bit weird to hear McKay saying exactly what I had just been thinking: Why are we -- the media, the government, the citizenry -- talking about anything but the looming possibility that life as we know it is going to end in less than 10 years?
How old will you be when climate scientists stop offering any hope at all?
As McKay told the more than 2,000 people who joined the meeting, he is very concerned that there has been a communication breakdown around the climate crisis. The media are not reporting on it often or urgently enough, he said, so people are not acknowledging the crisis on an emotional level.
Until we do, nothing will change.
"The panic, the fear that should be happening isn’t happening," McKay said.
More important, neither is the collective resolve.
Referencing "The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz," McKay added that it’s as if the people of England learned that they were about to bombed by the Germans and rather than prepare, they did nothing and said, "Oh, it’ll be fine."
"When Britain met that challenge, everyone came to life, everyone did their best thinking," McKay said, and that is what should be happening now in this country around emissions control.
So acknowledge the fear, then Keep Calm and Demand Clean Energy.
"It’s not that we don’t have the solutions. We do," McKay added. "Clean energy is better and cheaper than it’s ever been. That’s the tragedy of what is happening — we have the science and the solutions. The only thing that’s lacking is the awareness."
Sirota and Warren echoed those sentiments and the list of obstacles: climate deniers, broken incentives, an under-informed and increasingly overwhelmed public, those who would politicize a nonpolitical topic and, above all, powerful lobbies.
Speaking from a basement room in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Warren said the political influence wielded by oil and gas companies is "so baked into this place that they don’t need to ask for a special thing. They just need a lot of inaction."
"There’s a segment of the populace that understands the threat but doesn’t understand the urgency," said Sirota, a journalist and political commentator based in Denver. "If we can move those people, we can make this an electorally salient issue."
Terms like "electorally salient" may not help make our reaction to the climate crisis more visceral, but the point is clear: It must become the No. 1 issue in any election.
We all need to vote — and agitate — as if our lives depended on it, because they do, and we need to remind ourselves of this on a daily basis.
"Talk about it in your day-to-day conversation," said McKay. "If you knew there was a giant comet coming to Earth, it would come up. This culture is pressuring us to believe that everything is normal, when it’s not."
To be fair, many people do regularly discuss the climate crisis (The Times has a whole newsletter, "Boiling Point," devoted to it), and this culture is an ever-shifting tension between protest and reassurance, the granular and the universal. We use relatively small events, like Smith’s slap, to discuss larger things, and that’s as it should be.
But if we weren’t ready to demand action on the looming climate catastrophe when it was 30 or 20 years away, we really need to do so now.
If a few days of outrage over Disney’s tin-earned response to Florida’s heinous "Don’t Say Gay" legislation can force the company’s chief executive to do a 180, image what effect voters could have on their elected officials if they put the same targeted effort into demanding that this country lower carbon-dioxide emissions starting today.
So sure, deal with other issues, weigh in on whatever controversy is trending. I certainly will, because it’s my job. But don’t pretend that there isn’t an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, because there is. An asteroid we created, so we’d better do our best to stop it, and fast.
If you missed our event that inspired this LA Times column, watch the video here. And share it with your friends on Facebook and on Twitter.
Thanks for being a bold progressive.
-- The PCCC Team (@BoldProgressive)
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