The bumper sticker on the car in front of me this morning read, “There is no Planet B.”
How profound. Senator Bill Armstrong once said, “We could change the world with a bumper sticker if we could figure out what to write on it.” He understood it is almost impossible for most people to ignore the philosophies stuck on strangers’ cars, and he touted their effectiveness in his own campaigns.
They are as effective as billboards, such as the now-famous 1990 Greenpeace billboard in New York that scolded, “It wasn’t the Exxon Valdez captain’s driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.”
Shakespeare wrote in Richard II, “How long a time lies in one little word!” It’s a classic description of how serious concepts can be described in short slogans. To some degree, it shows that Americans love to psycho-analyze themselves and tend to believe the worst. When someone accuses us of destroying the planet by driving to work, we don’t take offense and say, “How dare you!” More often, we think to ourselves, “Oh, we’d better stop doing that.”
This morning’s bumper message was straightforward. We are running out of time to save the Earth and must take serious steps to reduce our carbon emissions. If that means putting coal miners out of work, switching power plants to natural gas, and then restricting the production of natural gas, too, so be it. Perhaps it requires subsidizing wind farms and solar panels across the country and mandating the expensive switch to electric cars by a certain date. Maybe it also suggests support for international climate conference policies demanding the U.S. pay reparations to the rest of the world for major weather events. Amazing how much international debate and controversy can be summed up on a 5-word bumper sticker.
Perhaps it’s effective on cars because it implies the most important thing we can all do – drive less. That applies to me, and to you, and just about everyone with a car – except of course the person driving in front of me with the bumper sticker. There was no indication of that driver’s own willingness to ride the bus or get to work some other way, nor was he driving an electric car. It was one of those evil gas-guzzling SUVs.
The theory behind this bumper sticker was that there is no alternative planet for us if we destroy Earth, that we have nowhere else to go. Believe it or not, there is not universal agreement on that point, even from environmental activists. In 2002 the World Wildlife Fund published a “Living Planet Report,” claiming that Earth’s population would require two more planets within 50 years if natural resources continued to be exploited at the current rate. Even the imminent Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking agreed in 2006, saying “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming…” and he suggested people begin colonizing other planets to ensure human survival. Some advocates have suggested Mars, ironically, because it contains a good supply of carbon dioxide (which EPA calls a planet-destroying pollutant on Earth).
Maybe we’re all lucky the man who called global environmental protection his “life’s work” is now King of Great Britain. In 2009 as Prince of Wales, Charles III warned that “we have only 100 months to act” (by 2017) to head off catastrophic destruction of the Earth. If that happened as predicted, I missed it. He warned a Brazilian audience that even if deforestation could be stopped, global warming would kill the Amazon rain forest anyway. The hypocrisy is palpable when he says we should “make it cool to live with less stuff,” while splitting time between the 40,000 square-foot Clarence House, his 900-acre Highgrove Estate, castles in Scotland and Wales, and now Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace – driven between them in a fleet of Rolls Royce limousines.
For most observers, the debate about climate change is confusing. Surely if nothing else is clear, it is that more research is needed. We ought to quit polluting the air however we can, whether it causes climate change or not, because it is the right thing to do. But to shut down electric generation or ban the internal combustion engine (as California, Colorado and other states are planning), would show a reckless disregard for the health, welfare, safety, and happiness of millions.
There are better solutions to these complex issues, which everyone could easily understand, if only the entire discussion could fit on a bumper sticker.
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