Kate Aronoff: What the ‘New York Times’ Climate Blockbuster Missed: "Nathaniel Rich’s article illustrates American failures, not global ones...
...Rich argues that when climate change first entered the American political imagination some 40 years ago, politicians in the United States were keen to confront the problem head-on. Obviously, they did no such thing.... Rich’s story is a dogged, important, and nuanced piece of political journalism. Like much reporting on the subject, his piece attempts to understand a phenomenon feminist scholar Donna Haraway has termed the Great Dithering: our apparent inability and lack of will to curb emissions. Rich covers a lot of ground in the story’s 30,000 words, which is no easy task given how much is at stake. Still, his account still falls short in one important way: It’s still not clear that it succeeds in showing how “we” as a species are to blame for failing to stop a threat fueled mainly by American corporations....
Global warming is presented as a problem that humans aren’t fully equipped or prepared to confront. “We have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over the present,” Rich writes. We “worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.” At a private event unveiling the piece Tuesday night, Rich put it more bluntly. “We haven’t reckoned, at the level of civilization, with what we’ve done to ourselves,” he explained. But who’s done what to whom exactly? Who is the “we”? The fact remains that other nations—197 of them—haven’t been quite as profligate on climate action as the United States, which accounts for around 15 percent of emissions worldwide...
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