“Fire & Brimstone & Fort McMurray: Considering the Implications of Apocalyptic Rhetoric in Climate Change Communication”

Tuesday, June 18th, 2019

Follow this link to watch Don Haas's presentation on YouTube.

Last month, the TR Site had the pleasure of welcoming environmental educator Dr. Don Haas from the Paleontological Research Institution to its ongoing Speaker Nite series. His talk, “Fire & Brimstone & Fort McMurray: Considering the Implications of Apocalyptic Rhetoric in Climate Change Communication,” discussed the scale of the problem and explored the way that language used to discuss climate change impacts people’s perceptions.  The topic of climate change is one that Dr. Haas thinks would have interested Theodore Roosevelt.  He pointed out that wildfires, like the one that devastated Fort McMurray, were an issue during TR's time as well; he recommended Timothy Egan's book, The Big Burn: The Wildfire That Saved America, which highlights a fire that devastated large swaths of Washington, Idaho, and Montana in 1910.

Dr. Haas's talk began with a quote from pundit Chris Hayes: “...talking about climate change without talking about energy is like talking about lung cancer without talking about smoking.” Quite simply, the climate change scientists are worried about is mostly due to our energy use. For that reason, Dr. Haas dedicated the first half of his talk to the issue of energy use.

One of the largest culprits of energy use is gasoline. Americans burn 391 million gallons of gasoline on the average day, which works out to more than a gallon per person per day. That begs the question: what happens when all that gasoline is burned? Dr. Haas pointed out that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form, which means those 391 million gallons are converted to carbon dioxide. In fact, each gallon, which is approximately 6 pounds of gasoline, yields 19 pounds of CO2. That 19 pounds is multiplied by 391 million each day to make 7 billion pounds of CO2, every single day in America alone.

One way that the amount of carbon in the air can be reduced is by trees. Trees absorb CO2 and convert it to oxygen which benefits the environment. However, if 7 billion pounds of CO2 is produced every day, how many trees would be required to offset America’s carbon footprint? Dr. Haas explained that it takes 11 pounds of wood to sequester the CO2 produced from each gallon of gasoline burned. At 391 million gallons of gas burned per day, it would take 4.3 billion pounds of wood to offset the carbon output. At a minimum, we would need to double the amount of forest in the United States.

Unfortunately, gasoline is just one of the types of energy we rely upon. The U.S. also burns 75,000 million cubic feet of natural gas on the average day. While it produces less CO2 per unit of energy when compared to other fossil fuels, it still yields about 8 million pounds of CO2 on an average day. It also releases methane, another greenhouse gas that accumulates in the atmosphere.

At this point, Dr. Haas pointed out the most obvious solution to this growing problem: collectively using less energy. A lot of the current conversation about energy use is about the types of energy used and not so much the quantity. It’s important to start considering how the scale of energy use is impacting climate change. There are a number of simple solutions that would begin to curb this problem, however, the opposition is more sociological than technological.

Presently, there is not enough being done to combat climate change. Americans are not talking about this issue nearly enough and when they are talking about it, the language used complicates people’s understanding of the issue. A lot of people have this “fire and brimstone” understanding of climate change. That in some way it will bring about the end of the world and for that reason will not accept the severity of the issue without proof. While scientists can predict to some extent what the impact of climate change will be, it is a general trend, which makes it difficult to point to specific events as proof. However, as the trend increases, weather patterns become more severe and the earth’s temperature is rising.

The fires of Fort McMurray are a good example of this. It would be difficult to say directly that the fire was the result of climate change, but the period of severe droughts that preceded the fire reflect extreme changes to the normal weather pattern. That’s not to say that the area had never experienced periods of drought before -- of course, weather fluctuates. However, with climate change, it is the extremity to which the weather is beginning to fluctuate.

After explaining the bleak reality of the situation, Dr. Haas explained that not all hope is lost. While it may seem like the problems posed by climate change are bigger than we can handle, we as a people have a tendency of rising to the occasion. Dr. Haas shared his own family’s story and explored the issues that each generation faced. Every time there was something that threatened to end the world as they knew it, people found solutions. If we accept the severity of climate change as an issue and begin to make significant changes, we can rise to the occasion and find the solutions that will save our planet.

-- Lindsey Evans, Public Programming Assistant

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