The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — There are lots of people who deserve to be slapped these days.

Maybe not so much Chris Rock on television at the Academy Awards.

As a recent Photoshopped meme going around on Facebook depicts, Vladimir Putin deserves to be slapped by Volodymyr Zelensky for Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Zelensky slaps Putin: A photoshopped meme on Google and Facebook

Zelensky’s military is slapping Putin’s army, now in retreat. Pundits said a Russian takeover of Ukraine was inevitable and would happen in a few days. It didn’t happen because the people of Ukraine rose up. Let that be a lesson to us all.

Putin’s biggest fan Donald Trump deserves to be slapped for all his crimes, including inciting an insurrection, by President Joe Biden.

There are others, including any Republicans who align themselves with Trump to get elected. Without even trying, we know they have black hearts with no respect for American democracy, the law or nature’s laws.

But we can’t just be partisan about it to make Democrats feel good.

If I was in a position to slap someone, I would use words, not the back of my hand. And I would start with any talking head celebrity television news commentator who claims either that the human race is doomed on planet Earth, or that the Democrats are “destined” to lose the midterm elections in November.

Surely they have heard of such a thing as a “self-fulling prophesy.” Unlike other prophesies, self-fulfilling prophesies do tend to come true.

Nothing is inevitable here, or “destined” to be anything. What happens will be what we make of it by our actions.

Remember in 2016, when these pundits on TV said Hillary Clinton was going to win the election and beat Trump?

Remember, “We’ve got this?”

People clearly don’t trust survey research and polls anymore because of it. But Trump’s win was not the fault of the pollsters. The polls were largely accurate.

The problem was, most of the polls and even the aggregation of all the polls were still within the margin of error on the eve of the election. The only responsible thing for the press, media and pundits to report in this situation is to say: “This election is too close to call. Anything can happen.”

By saying the election was a done deal, that had a ripple effect on the behavior of people. Some decided not to vote. Why bother if “she’s” going to win? Some on the left wrote in Bernie Sanders or voted for third-party candidates.

So Trump won after all. The pundits were wrong.

Midterm Elections

If Democrats think there is no chance to win key races and hold the House and Senate in 2022, they won’t work for candidates or donate money to candidates. It will become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

What if people had written off Joe Biden in 2020 and said a Trump reelection was “inevitable?”

The Democrats would not have worked together altruistically and marshaled the votes to beat him.

The midterm election is seven months away on November 8. There is still time to influence the outcome. Get to work if you are interested in making a difference.

See how: Project Protect Democracy

Climate Change

I’ve been getting comments on Facebook lately when running stories about the Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change to the effect that it is “too little too late.”

Related: NAJ: Biden Administration Announces New Vehicle Fuel Economy Standards to Require 49 MPG by 2026

“It may very well be,” I say.

But I also say, “But we must still try, right?”

So it was interesting that the Sunday New York Times email included a segment called “Against despair.”

“Among the headline-grabbing wildfires, droughts and floods, it is easy to feel disheartened about climate change,” the author, German Lopez, says.

I don’t know this writer and I’m not familiar with his work, but I’ve been writing about global warming since 1989.

But he says he felt this way when a United Nations panel released the latest major report on global warming. It said that humanity was running out of time to avert some of the worst effects of a warming planet.

Related: NAJ: Deep Cuts in Greenhouse Gas Emissions Required or Humanity Faces Hellish Future

So he called a few experts to find out whether his sense of doom was warranted.

To his relief, they pushed back against the notion of despair.

The world, they argued, has made real progress on climate change and still has time to act.

They said that any declaration of inevitable doom would be a barrier to action, alongside the denialism that Republican lawmakers have historically used to stall climate legislation.

Such pushback is part of a budding movement: Activists who challenge climate dread recently took off on TikTok.

“Fear is useful to wake us up and make us pay attention,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, told him. “But if we don’t know what to do, it paralyzes us.”

In a climate change-focused survey of young people in 10 countries last year, 75 percent of respondents said the future was “frightening.” Some people now use therapy to calm their climate anxieties. Some have drastically changed their lives out of fear of a warming planet — even deciding not to have kids.

“Climate change of course presents a huge challenge, threatening the world with more of the extreme weather we have seen over the past few years,” he writes.

And the situation is urgent: To meet President Biden’s climate goals, experts argue, Congress must pass the climate provisions of the Build Back Better Act this year.

But rather than seeing the climate challenge as overwhelming or hopeless, experts said, we should treat it as a call to action.

Reasons for Hope

The world has made genuine progress in slowing climate change in recent years, he reports. In much of the world, solar and wind power are now cheaper than coal and gas. The cost of batteries has plummeted over the past few decades, making electric vehicles much more accessible. Governments and businesses are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy.

Before 2015, the world was expected to warm by about four degrees Celsius by 2100. Today, the world is on track for three degrees Celsius. And if the world’s leaders meet their current commitments, the planet would warm by around two degrees Celsius.

“That is not enough to declare victory,” he wrote.

The standard goal world leaders have embraced to avoid the worst consequences of climate change is to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. Unfortunately, that does look increasingly unreachable, experts said.

But every drop in degrees matters. One-tenth of a degree may sound like very little, but it could save lives — by preventing more wildfires, droughts, floods and conflicts over dwindling resources.

And while the best outcome now seems doubtful, so does the worst.

Scientists have long worried about runaway warming that generates out-of-control weather, leaves regions uninhabitable and wrecks ecosystems. But projections right now suggest that scenario is unlikely, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State.

Channeling Despair

Experts and advocates want to capture legitimate concerns and funnel them into action. The world’s governments and biggest businesses have set goals to reduce greenhouse emissions in the coming decades, but they will need the public’s help and support.

One model for this is road safety. Drivers can reduce their chances of crashes by driving carefully, but even the safest can be hit. The U.S. reduced car-crash deaths over several decades by passing sweeping laws and rules that required seatbelts, airbags and collapsible steering wheels; punished drunken driving; built safer roads and more — a collective approach.

The same type of path can work for climate change, experts said. Cutting individual carbon footprints is less important than systemic changes that governments and companies enact to help people live more sustainably. While individual action helps, it is no match for the impact of entire civilizations that have built their economies around burning carbon sources for energy.

The need for a sweeping solution can make the problem feel too big and individuals too small, again feeding into despair.

But experts said that individuals could still make a difference, by playing into a collective approach. You can convince friends and family to take the issue seriously, changing what politicians and policies they support. You can become involved in politics (including at the local level, where many climate policies are carried out). You can actively post about global warming on social media. You can donate money to climate causes.

The bottom line, experts repeatedly told him: Don’t give up on the future. Look for productive ways to prevent impending doom.

My Conclusion

So slap yourself it you think things are hopeless. That attitude helps nothing and could result in a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The Democrats could lose — if you do nothing.

The planet’s climate system could collapse — if we do nothing.

What do you say? Let’s do something.

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