This past week Joanna Macy came to Boulder to lead a workshop regarding climate change. She is a religious scholar who has been and continues to be an activist, fighting to make our world a better place in which to live.
I was reminded of a story she told another time I heard her about how one day one of her children said to her, “What is the difference between ignorance and apathy?” When she said she didn’t know, her son said, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
Everyone in the audience laughed and then she went on to say that she looked up the meaning of apathy. The Greek word means nonsuffering.
She said that she has pondered at great length why many people do not seem to want to hear about climate change. What she now believes is that people are not being selfish, but they are utterly overwhelmed by how much they do care. It’s just too much for them to take on and they don’t feel they can make a difference.
I think the time has come when each of us must come forward with some small token of what we can do to move us in the direction of a sustainable future. I don’t want to get into politics and frankly I don’t care whether you believe that the earth is heating up due to humans or to fluctuations in climate cycles or to the hand of God, one thing we can all agree on is that we are experiencing climate change.
All my life I have worked within the confines of the social system. I have made a career as a public educator and raised my children to respect our government. So for me, at the age of 70, to leap into the public arena and risk discomfort, it’s obvious that climate change is of great importance to me. I rode the Climate Train to New York City and walked along with 400,000 other concerned citizens in the Climate March this past September. That was a pivotal point for me.
What I have come to recognize is that nothing is going to get done unless there is a grassroots effort on the part of “we the people.” We must feel our own power and let our legislators know that we have a solution. We must contact all parties, right, left and everything in between, and tell them that they need to support a bill that puts a fee on carbon at its source, and then return that money back to the citizens. That way it doesn’t become a tax. If you raise the price on fossil fuels, alternative energy entrepreneurs are incentivized to use the marketplace to create cleaner energy and new jobs.
This is a nonpartisan proposal that can lower CO2 emissions and could also save 13,000 lives annually due to reduced air pollution. This information is from a study by Regional Economic Model Inc.
In the end I do believe that we all do care so much about our planet. That’s why presenting a solution that all sides of Congress can agree upon becomes essential. No new taxes, more jobs, decreased health risks, lowered CO2 emissions: this is a marketplace solution. Now that sounds like something all parties could agree on. I know there will be many things still to work out but it is a beginning and we need to start somewhere.
Collectively we may not want to suffer by thinking about climate change, as Joanna Macy suggests. But in the end we must join hands with our fellow citizens, opening our eyes and our hearts, and help our representatives: Cory Gardner, Michael Bennet and Jared Polis to reach across the aisle and pass a carbon fee and dividend bill.
Roberta Benson lives in Boulder.
