The Ethics of Climate Change Activism: Fear vs. Reality

Image via NASA


By: Chelsea Zantay








The oil and gas industry is “the most powerful industry on Earth,” says McKibben.  Indeed, this industry not only decides what energy we use, but how it will be extracted and transported, what countries it is sold to, and how expensive it will be.  Oil and gas companies have huge sway in Congress and our government at large.  President Obama has said that we have enough energy to last us one hundred years, yet the industry spends “$100,000,000 a day looking for more sources of fuel.” Thus, McKibben calls them a “rogue industry” because they are now defying the laws of chemistry and physics, and are consciously altering the chemical makeup of our planet.  Moreover, when this industry makes a mistake, the world suffers.  On April 20th, 2010, a seal on a B.P. operated oil well in the Gulf of Mexico failed, and commenced “the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history,” as well as the worst marine environmental disaster in human history.  “For 87 straight days, oil and methane spewed” into the Gulf.  By the end of the ordeal, “an estimated 4.2 million barrels of oil” were released into the Gulf waters.  This disaster had serious and long-lasting consequences for the tourism and fishing industry of the Gulf.  One would think that after such disasters the human race would come together in a concerted effort to stop such atrocities against humans and nature, but apparently we do not learn from our mistakes. 

The time has come to act on climate because we can no longer afford not to.  We know what consequences are in store for us if we continue on our current trajectory.  Although there are many movements aimed at stopping individual projects, such as the opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, we now need a comprehensive plan that curbs, and eventually stops, carbon emissions.  Bill McKibben suggests imposing a carbon tax on the energy industry.  This is probably the only way that will subdue the energy industry’s power. 

Not everyone is cut out for activism and certainly only a small portion of the population has the desire and ability to become a scientist.  However, if we are to leave a habitable planet to our successors, if we are to protect the non-human species living on our planet (some of which have lifesaving potential for humans), and if we are to sleep soundly at night knowing that we did everything that we could, then we must act now.  The human race now has an opportunity to come together to protect our planet, and really, what do we have to lose?  Best case scenario: we save our world.  Worst case scenario: we foster a culture of fraternity and brotherhood– the scope of which humanity has never seen before.

Chelsea Zantay is completing her M.A. in Ethics & Society at Fordham University.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s