The Climate Countdown

Stop the dithering and give our kids a chance.

Kids courtesy of Monika and Clara (and Bob and Chris)

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IF YOU DON’T Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog” was the headline of a famous 1973 issue of National Lampoon. The cover, with its mutt worriedly glancing at the gun pointed at its head, has itself been lampooned many times. (Texas Monthly recently paired an image of a shotgun-wielding former VP with the line “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, Dick Cheney Will Shoot You in the Face.”) But the inside joke still holds: When inspiration fails or sales are slow, magazine editors default to grabbing heartstrings. Entire publishing houses survive on this gimmick—can MoJo get in on the action?

Actually, our decision to print four different covers featuring four cute kids was prompted neither by lack of inspiration nor the need to goose newsstand sales (though we’ll take them!). Rather, it’s our way of distilling the most important story of our time to its essence: Fix the climate, or the kid gets it.

No one outside the loony fringe (paging Sen. James Inhofe) disputes that the CO2 we’re pumping into the atmosphere is radically altering the planet. What hasn’t sunk into the public consciousness is that this means not just melting ski slopes and drowning polar bears, but death and dislocation for millions of people and catastrophic upheaval for industry and agriculture worldwide. And yet, absent “death panels” demagoguery, it’s hard to get worked up about a problem whose worst effects are decades away. That’s true even when you’ve been obsessing over the issue for years: We edit story after story on climate change, yet it’s only when we stop to consider the specifics that the reality fully sinks in. Without drastic action, by the time our kids reach their 40s, the Southwest will have become a dust bowl; 30 percent of the planet’s species will be extinct; 200 million people will have become climate refugees. Confronting the future that awaits them leaves us with a profound sense of dread—and guilt.

No one enjoys dread and guilt, which doubtless is part of the reason why climate change shows up at No. 20 on Americans’ list of issues to worry about. Only 30 percent consider it a “top priority,” compared with 38 percent in 2007; “protecting the environment” has fallen even more precipitously, from 57 percent to 41. Those aren’t good numbers, especially when world leaders are poised to meet in Copenhagen in December to hammer out the most important climate treaty ever.

Now the obvious excuse (and the refuge of spineless pols—paging Sen. Harry Reid) is, Look, you can’t really expect people to care about green issues in the middle of a global recession. Voters worry more about keeping a roof over their kids’ heads than about how fast some glacier is melting.

Except for two things: One, if that were true, it would apply globally—but in fact, only Americans are so unconcerned about climate change. We give it a priority of 4.7 on a scale of 1 to 10, while Mexicans rank it 9, Chinese 8.9, Brits 8.2, Nigerians 7.8, and Russians 7.4. Only Iraqis (5.1) and Palestinians (4.9) come close to our nonchalance (and they have pretty compelling excuses for being distracted).

And two, climate change isn’t chiefly an environmental issue. It’s a massive social and technological challenge that will, whether we like it or not, force the wholesale transformation of our economy. We can work with that change or against it, but it’s happening no matter what. Put it this way: If you knew that the industrial revolution was coming, would you invest in hand looms? That’s why, in September, a group of mega-investors managing some $13 trillion in assets, the equivalent of one-fifth of the world’s entire annual economic output, put out a statement urging the Copenhagen negotiators to maintain a “stable investment climate“—by passing a strong treaty.

So on the matter of whether we should worry more about the economy or the future of the planet, the answer is: Wrong question. We may not know which cities will get hit by hurricanes, which agricultural regions will dry up and blow away, which economies will crater as energy innovation shifts overseas, but we know the foreclosure crisis will look tame by comparison.

So what can anyone do? What can we do? Journalists make lousy organizers—and there are plenty of activist groups out there. But what, at this critical juncture, is our profession’s task? If climate change is the most important story of our time, why is it being covered piecemeal: horse-race politics over here, green activism over there, science and tech breakthroughs, business, urban planning all in their various corners? It’s journalism’s job to bring these elements together, to synthesize disparate data points and let the public and policymakers find the big patterns, bigger pitfalls, and biggest opportunities.

To that end, we’re forging a collaboration with a range of news organizations—magazines, online news sites, nonprofit reporting shops, multimedia operations—because we each have different strengths, but working together we can cover this story better than any of us could on our own. This issue, which features the work of five separate outfits, shows a glimpse of what is possible. We’re also part of a team reporting effort focused on the critical Copenhagen talks; visit MotherJones.com for details. And while you’re there, create your own climate message: You can make a Mother Jones cover featuring a picture of your child (or grandkid/nephew/cat), add a note, and send it to your friends, your members of Congress, and your president. We’ll feature them on our site. (Those are our kids at the top of this end note.)

Not that we think putting another picture on your Facebook page will cause Congress to grow a spine. But it’s one way to make the point that we still have the power to shape our children’s future. Just for perspective: The entire sum required to buy off Third World opposition to carbon caps is around what we spent to bail out Fannie, Freddie, and AIG. And hey, Europe’s on the hook for at least half.

So yes, this is the worst time for an international climate treaty—except for any other time. Our kids will measure us by how long we tarried. What will we tell them?

Update: Read an interview with Clara on the climate collaboration in Ad Age here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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