Climate Change is a paint color
Oddly, the beige bands in the stretch between 1940 and 1980, between 0.25 and 0.50 degrees above preindustrial levels, are almost the exact color of a BEHR paint swatch I saw a few years ago at a hardware store. It was a tannish color with olive undertones called “Climate Change.” I remain baffled by it. Was this an autogenerated fluke? An attempt to raise awareness? A kind of dopey irony? Besides, if climate change were a color, shouldn’t it be a deep red? Or even the periwinkle on the left-hand edge of the infographic; that receding dream of a deep, alpine breath? A coal-black or coral-white would be fitting but heavy-handed. It might be better to go with the color of sand or a cnidarian gray. Or BP’s neon green.
Then again, the idea that there are living rooms and bathrooms throughout America walled in a beige called “Climate Change,” that expecting couples could have paint-rollered nurseries in a color named for the greatest calamity of their future child’s existence, feels most fitting. Awareness often translates crisis not into urgency but ubiquity. Climate change itself starts to feel like BEHR’s drab “Climate Change,” like wallpaper. We are intensely aware of it, we know it’s not great. But we are bored by it, we don’t really like it, we don’t really know what to say.
Neither does anyone, it can seem. When pressed about the Biden Administration’s recent approval of a massive Alaskan oil project on The Late Show, the Vice President said that “The concerns are based on what we should all be concerned about but the solutions have to be and include what we are doing in terms of going forward, in terms of investments.” When she isn’t beaming with a medicated goofiness, the Vice President often speaks with pained puzzlement, like she has a list of words she isn’t allowed to say or she’ll get zapped via remote control. Lacking the cynicism of Rumsfeld or the misanthropy of Veep or the consulting-firm jargon of the Transportation Secretary, her Glomarizations are almost pitiable. She moves her hands as she speaks, like she’s moving around fridge magnets to scramble sentences rather than build them.
Even advocates of climate action speak strangely, in a weird pastiche of other language. To announce the release of the synthesis report, António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, tweeted out a photograph of himself on a rugged shore, looking like Stellan Skarsgård on location for some Star Wars show, with the caption: “We have never been better equipped to solve the climate challenge, but our world needs #ClimateAction on all fronts - now. Everything. Everywhere. All at once.”
Maybe Greta Thunberg has already maxed out the usefulness of humorlessness, and surely a nod to the Best Picture winner is good SEO strategy, but can’t people be more serious about this stuff? The link in Guterres’ tweet is a LinkedIn post entitled “A how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” like a WikiHow article about sewing a button or the latest New York Times life-hack. Maybe the only things people take seriously anymore are television shows and their own careers, so even life-obliterating crises have to be couched in the familiar languages of mass entertainment and professional networking.
The same day as the IPCC report release, Jason Sudeikis, who used to play Joe Biden on SNL, gave a White House press briefing as Ted Lasso, the titular star of the AppleTV show. Ostensibly about raising mental health awareness, this was a PR stunt disguised as social responsibility, something Hollywood and corporate America have been doing forever. The point, of course, is not to do anything about mental health, but to make people feel better and get them to tune in for the third season. Ted Lasso says from the podium, “So, like, no matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter who you voted for, we all—probably, I assume—we all know someone who has—or have been that someone ourselves, actually—that’s struggled, that’s felt isolated, that’s felt anxious, that has felt alone. Right?” What Ted Lasso does not say is that the suicide rate in the US has risen by thirty percent in the last twenty years. If he said that, he might get zapped.
Like climate change, “mental health” is a vague, bad thing that everyone needs to talk about more but that no one is supposed to be sad about. The talk takes on a wistful universalism that obscures complexity and pain. More wallpaper. There should be a BEHR color called “Mental Health.” A light lilac, perhaps, the color of bath salts.
Meanwhile, Jen Psaki, the former White House Press Secretary, interviewed Eric Adams on her new MSNBC show. They take the subway to Adams’ house to watch him make a smoothie. On the train, Adams compares the United States to a frog in water, telling her that “I think that our country, we are boiling ourselves to death, and that the root of that is our failure to embrace our spirituality.” Well, at least he got the first half right. For Adams, bullshit comes in the form, not of awareness or jargon but an odd marriage of New Age and no-nonsense. “Is that pineapple?” Psaki asks, peering into Adams’ Magic Bullet. “That is ginger,” corrects the mayor, as he spoons dark powders out of resealable bags.
At the end of the day, I am standing in line at a grocery store in Brooklyn. The radio blares: “Today is a gift from God, which is why we call it The Present.” Ha. Awareness, spirituality, and corporatese—these are all diversions. Sometimes well-meaning, they work to inoculate action and concern. They are the pillars of the Biden Era’s unconvincing optimism, a dissonance far more demoralizing than despair. At least the latter has meaning.
The concerns are based on what we should all be concerned about. Tautologies are for killing time. The present may be a gift, but does it even exist? On the IPCC infographic, today is just an indeterminate line on a darkening gradient of orange. It’s easy to be corny and carefree, to call the present a gift, when you know you won’t even be alive to see it become the future. To see the beige turn orange, then red, then redder.
ben tapeworm