Thoughts on Paris

Let me tell you all a little story. It's the story of how I became active in environmental issues, and I'm telling it now because I hope it will contextualize for you my feelings about President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, which are, from what I can tell, different from many of yours.

The summer before eighth grade, like every other summer, I went to Cleveland with my family. That particular summer, the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo had an exhibit on rainforests, which, to be completely honest, I was not very interested in until the end. As visitors left the exhibit, there was a sort of digital clock, simultaneously displaying the global population (continuous growth) and acres of rainforest (continuous decline).

I was horrified. My first instinct was to scrounge up some loose change and put it into whatever donations box the Zoo had set out. But there was no box. There was literally no action I could take in that moment to assuage my horror. I just had to live with it.

I don't know if it was just incompetence that led the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo to fail to partner with a non-profit and to provide a box for donations -- it very well may have been. But that failure left me feeling like I had not fulfilled my duty, that my knowledge left me with an obligation that I had not met, and because I couldn't leave my spare change in a donations box, I would instead have to meet that obligation in some other way. Instead of donating a few dollars, I became an active advocate for environmental issues. I majored in environmental studies. I have developed an ethical and political orientation that is profoundly informed by the sense of injustice that I developed that day. I obviously didn't single-handedly save the rainforest, but that moment, the absence of that box, set the course for my life.

The Paris Climate Agreement was like that donations box. Paris was never going to solve climate change, and I would argue it was almost worse than doing nothing, because it left many of us with the false belief that it was an adequate response to the threats we face. I'm under no illusions that we are going to devise an adequate response to climate change -- doing so would require dramatic restructuring of economic, political and social systems that I have a very hard time believing any of us would feel comfortable with -- but all hope is not lost.

We need to continue to be forward-looking, and to be realistic about what we can accomplish. Climate change is happening. Perhaps we can mitigate some of its most dramatic consequences, perhaps we cannot. What we can do, without question, is understand what those consequences are likely to be, and respond to them. I have chosen to consider the disaster-related consequences of climate change, but others are working in agriculture, economics, engineering, epidemiology and public health, and many other fields, with a similar goal in mind.

I'm not happy the United States has reneged on our commitment, weak though it may have been, to fighting climate change, but I think in this area more than others, the political energy generated from our frustration has the potential to actually accomplish something, which, again, the Paris agreement does and did not. If you want to keep fighting climate change, I won't discourage you. But I would encourage everyone to consider ways that we can protect people from the consequences of climate change. I'll grant you, 'let's effectively manage our inevitable decline' is a less appealing mission than 'let's save the world,' but I think our chances of success are better.

I'll close by saying that I'm not angry about Paris, but I'm glad that you're angry about Paris. There's no box for your donations anymore, and now you have an obligation to so something real. Let's get to work.