Better get used to global warming

Sure it’s hot,

But I don’t care;

I’ll just go

Turn up the air.

One nice aspect of global warming for Americans is that even though we cause it, other folks pay for it. Sure, we have some farmers in California and Texas who may have to pack it in from the drought, but they probably shouldn’t have started business there in the first place. Same for those Florida homes built too close to the shore. But on a global scale, our problems are peanuts.

The real sufferers, as usual, live in Africa, Asia and some ill-fated Pacific islands. They’re already dying of starvation and flooding. Unfortunately, this does not make convenient TV footage, so we’re not yet very aware. Besides, they’re typically also caught up in some violent conflict, which tends to get the blame. Plainly none of that is our fault.

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Why, then, should we sacrifice any of our saintly lifestyle? We earned it. Everyone knows that those proposed cap-and-trade rules on energy will surely filter down to our wallets, and that corporations will just as surely find a way to make a buck on the deal.

That already seems to be what has happened in Europe, although those countries have succeeded very well indeed with gas taxes. Everyone drives small cars over there. In this country we feverishly avoid those higher taxes. Instead, we allow high market prices to tamp down gas usage and then stand aside as oil companies sop up the gravy.

Of course we all truly do lament the demise of polar bears, beluga whales and emperor penguins, but hey, no one said life was a picnic. We want to believe that the problem can be licked by each of us personally getting a smaller car and buying Rainforest Crunch. No need to raise taxes, turn off the AC, dry the clothes outside, withdraw from wars, have fewer kids, eat less meat, take the bus, stick windmills along the shore, put solar panels on the roof, or all those other little inconveniences that do-gooders keep asking us to accept.

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And so far those requests for modest personal sacrifice have had little effect. Dick Cheney demeaned them, and despite heartwarming exceptions in magazine feature stories, most citizens, developers, corporations, fuel companies, governments and manufacturers agree with him.

Thus we continue to follow our normal bent — comfort and profit. That’s the way our nation and our lives are organized and we’re not likely to change without a cataclysm. After all, even the Department of Energy doesn’t use setback thermostats.

This obsession with personal comfort and profit is also mimicked abroad. Those nations with sufficient wherewithal do their best to imitate us, especially in their use of energy. Worldwide the bike is now giving way to the scooter, the scooter to the motorcycle, and the motorcycle to the car. If you think our highways are crowded, try India.

A similar obsession is in play for meat — we Americans love it, and others are following suit. Thus methane multiplies. It’s not as lasting, since it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long as CO2, but it’s much more potent.

Further, our animal feed requirements lead to an insatiable appetite for soybeans, which in turn leads to the clearing of forests and small farms for plantations and huge pastures.

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That’s just the way humans work. We’ll sacrifice in a crisis as long as everyone else does too, but we tend to ignore the leak in the pipe until the water is up around our ankles. And we don’t really care whether it’s up around someone else’s ankles, Al Gore notwithstanding.

We already sacrificed a lot of freedom after 9/11 and we’re not likely to do that again for something as intangible as global warming.

Want to try a simple experiment? Ask your supermarket or movie house or office building to back off on the AC for the sake of the world. See how far that gets you.

Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.