Why Do We Keep Putting Climate Change Last?

Damage from Hurricane Helene has been estimated to exceed $225 billion. Photo by Jobin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images. Courtesy grist.org

The 2024 election campaign has challenged several denials — denial of who won the 2020 election, denial of ‘we are better off than in 2020,’ denial of a woman’s reproductive freedom, and denial of climate change.

How much did we hear about ‘denial of climate change?’

One of the challenges of advocating for saving the climate is the dialectic of what we do risks exacerbating what’s been done. Such is the intractability of our interventions.

And our extractions.

Take assessing damage caused by the effects of climate intervention. This is not a ‘tide raises all boats moment.’ Some will be victimized by our intervention; some will not. From medieval times, wealth was able to secure the higher ground, removed from the spring floods, the mold, the stench. Consider for a moment that not only did wealth secure higher ground, but poverty was relegated to the ravines, the tidal marshes, the caverns. Where you lived mattered. Leaving home was leaving poverty.

Some could. Others couldn’t.

Greta Thunberg (b. 2003), an advocate for future children, who will be growing up in a world they did not alter, takes her pitch to politicians and political venues. She doesn’t care what your title is, nor your majority party, nor even your length of tenure — you are a…