Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Pay Now to Ensure There Is a Later

Forests in Oregon are burning. Unprecedented floods have killed at least 160 people in Germany and Belgium. Around the globe, people are facing extreme heat waves, droughts, food shortages.

Climate change is accelerating extreme events. It is making our planet less and less livable. Yet, we drag our feet. We avoid action, despite the impacts climate change is having on our lives everyday.

We fear the cost, the disruption to our lives, and in doing so hasten further disaster. It is a common reaction, as Robert Zaretsky, a historian and philosopher who teaches at the University of Houston, points out. In a column in The Forward focusing on the Surfside condo collapse in South Florida, he explains that humans have a tendency to avoid “critical maintenance.”

The condo owners, he writes, delayed spending money on repairs designed to “halt the ‘accelerating’ damage” to the condo complex’s concrete support system in the same way that Zaretsky — like most of us — avoided dealing with the potential expense signaled by his “dashboard light’s notification of a need for maintenance.” He described these pauses or delays as “thinking fast, not slow.” Citing economist Daniel Kahneman, Zaretsky explains that “the power of sensations overrides our power of deliberation, and how our bent for rationalization often trumps our capacity to reason.”

It is reasonable, he says, to perform “critical maintenance,” which costs money in the short term, because this maintenance can avoid more dangerous or expensive consequences down the road. FRAM, the auto parts company, captured the basic argument in the 1970s with its slogan: “you can pay me now, or pay me later.”

We rationalize avoiding the maintenance, however, because it seems to have little benefit to us today. Spending the money seems unnecessary. The car drives fine. The condo is livable. Until it isn’t, and the brakes fail or the building collapses.

I don’t want to make light of this. The loss of life in Florida was as horrific as it was unnecessary. Just like the growing damage caused by climate change.

As the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions points out on its website (c2es.org), the warming world is increasing “the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events,” which come with an attendant loss of life and massive economic toll.

Still, we delay action, avoid spending the money to address the ongoing disaster, pushing the costs into the future so that we can avoid tax increases. Nearly every Republican is opposed to the so-called Green New Deal — a sane plan that would shift us from greenhouse-gas producing energy and would aid workers — arguing it would “inflict ruin” on the economy. Their argument — and the argument of some conservative Democrats like John Hickenlooper, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — is little different than those made by Surfside condo owners, who “balked at paying for the extensive improvements, which ballooned in price from about $9 million to more than $15 million over the past three years as the building continued to deteriorate,” the Washington Post reported.

“It took a lot of time to get the ball rolling, and of course there was sticker shock,” Max Friedman, a former Surfside board member, told the Post. “Nobody truly believed the building was in imminent danger.”

While most polling shows that a majority view climate change as a legitimate threat, they also show that Americans remain wary of paying for efforts to reverse the damage. A 2019 Reuters/Ipsos polls, found that almost “70% of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, want the United States to take ‘aggressive’ action to combat climate change — but only a third would support an extra tax of $100 a year to help.” Other polls show varying degrees of support for added corporate taxes or a carbon tax, but the monetary commitment remains soft.

Unless we can change this, stopping and reversing climate change is going to be impossible. We have to change the dialogue on this, moving beyond small-bore proposals and a focus on individual action — buying a more fuel-efficient car is good, but will not address the real problem unless every single driver does so. The same goes for solar and other personal choices. We need big thinking — like the Green New Deal — and we need a national and international plan to move society toward lower consumption, renewable energy, and a more sustainable economic system.

We need to change our short-term mindset and start thinking long term. If we don’t pay for it now, we may not have the opportunity down the road.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Substack, hankkalet.substack.com

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2021

Populist.com