Climate Change has been a hot button issue for decades. What started as a movement made fun of for being ran by hippies now is one of the most important and vital movements in the world. After years and years of fighting, you would think there would be change, you would think elitists and denyers would wake up and face the very real problems at hand, yet they continue to ignore them.
At this point, I do not think the people who call climate change “fake news” don’t believe it’s real, I think they are too scared to lose their current way of life. Which is ironic in itself because if the world listened to those crazy tree huggers and radical scientists many moons ago, our world would be in a very different place. What was and is so scary about doing things to better our planet?
In the 2021 disaster comedy “Don’t Look Up” we get a glimpse into a dystopian society that seems bizarre, but not too far from the current state of our world. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play fearful scientists begging the government to face the climate crisis after they discover a meteor hurtling toward earth. After fighting for people to listen and pay attention, the president (Meryl Streep) and the government ultimately ignore the situation which results in the world ending. This movie solicited a variety of reviews, some praising it for calling out the possible problems and scenarios of our world, and some talking down on how blatantly it was mocking our society. Isn’t that ironic? A disaster movie painting the picture of our current society still doesn’t make people wake up to the real issues at hand?
Recently, our society is starting to effortlessly mirror the plot of “Don’t Look Up.” At the beginning of April 2022, a NASA scientist, Peter Kalmus, joined by others, chained himself to a Chase Bank office building. JPMorgan Chase & Co invested the most money into fossil fuels out of any other bank in 2020. This protest was to get people to wake up. Kalmus said, “we’ve been trying to warn you guys for so many decades that we’re heading towards a f*cking catastrophe, and we’ve been being ignored. The scientists of the world are being ignored, and it’s got to stop. We’re not joking. We’re not lying. We’re not exaggerating.”
With no surprise, this protest ended in heavy police presence as Kalmus and his peers were ripped from the building. Many people on social media have been saying we are past the point of no return in our climate crisis, and that we are doomed. This is false, and the reason people have been so loud and so diligent in their environmental fight is that we aren’t past that point yet, but we are very close. We need people, most importantly big corporations, to wake up and make changes because we have one last chance before we have an ending like “Don’t Look Up.”
Fear is something that makes humans respond in fight or flight, people usually don’t listen unless they are scared, or unless they are presented with a tangible consequence. So, 50 years ago if a scientist went screaming in the streets saying our world will end in 60 years if we don’t stop using plastic, without further research, their ignorance is somewhat understandable. But now, with very tangible consequences, some of which we are already living through, people should not get free passes for their blatant ignorance. The world is not ending tomorrow, but tomorrow if some people don’t make a few environmentally smarter choices, we are closer to catastrophe.
We are at the last call. A very last chance to convince big corporations to make the important changes. Civilians can thrift all they want, go vegan, use no plastic, grow their own food, ride bikes and walk instead of drive, but unless the top one percent of corporations make environmentally conscious changes, it will all be for nothing. The only reason the world has not ended, and the reason we even have had so many chances to make changes is because of all of the people who have been fighting and begging others to do the same. We have the power to change the way the movie ends which is society as we know it, and I would prefer we all come together in making clean solutions, instead of arguing and succumbing to the results of our own ignorance.