Got a problem? Doing nothing will not solve it. That’s a stone cold fact. That’s not to say you can’t get lucky — and time resolves what your inaction didn’t. But that wasn’t you solving your problem, that was you hiding from it until a solution presented itself. Not the same thing.
One of the roadblocks Big Business regularly threw up early in the Climate Change conversation was the cost of cutting down our carbon output. Big Business was going to have to see its profits go down so it could help maintain the planet’s long-term health. That would be the long term health of Big Business’s marketplace.
Saving the planet for all the living creatures in it (it’s not just humans who get profoundly impacted by the mess we’ve made of the planet) won’t be cheap. But if you consider the alternative — from a cost-benefit analysis — doing nothing, it turns out, is a thousand times more expensive. Doing nothing about the climate already has resulted in appreciable sea rise.
Seen photos of Venice? Seen the mess Hurricane Dorian made of the Bahamas? Right now, those are the cost of doing nothing. Doing nothing isn’t “free”. Cleaning up and rebuilding is expensive as hell — if you can clean up (ask Puerto Rico what that’s like). Resources used for rebuilding can’t be used for other things. Same goes for the money. There’s a bigger hidden cost staring at us all. What if places like Venice simply can’t “be” anymore — because they’re under water? Imagine that THAT costs.
Doing nothing on the climate will produce tens of millions of refugees fleeing the coasts for safer refuge inland. The costs will be incalculable. Where are those people going to live? How are they going to feed themselves? More to the point, who is going to feed and shelter them — and where is that money going to come from (while we’re also paying for the cost of the destruction itself?)
Doing nothing in the face of climate change is a terrible idea.
Doing nothing in the face of what Donald Trump and the Republican Party are doing to America is equally terrible (and not unconnected). Yet that’s what plenty of people — politicians and pundits — still want us to do: nothing. They want us to wait for the next election — so the American People can have their say.
Lovely thought but fatally naive. The American People did not get their say LAST presidential election. 2016 was stolen from the American People — certainly from the majority. HRC won the popular vote by upwards of 3 million votes (lots more, I bet, if all the suppressed votes were counted). If we take Russia out of the equation — they’ve never even heard of Donald Trump — he doesn’t enter the race and he certainly doesn’t make it through the primaries.
Without Russia, Trump wouldn ‘t be POTUS. I have to wonder now (with retrospect and a year of meaningful oversight now under our belts) what Mitch McConnell knew about Russia’s efforts on Trump’s behalf when, at the September 2016 Gang Of Eight meeting at the White House, Moscow Mitch McConnell told President Obama that he’d accuse Obama of politicizing the intelligence if Obama told the American People the TRUTH — that Russia was actively engaged in trying to make Trump president. Was THAT why Mitch insisted again and again that “the American people” deserved to name Scalia’s SCOTUS replacement? Because Mitch knew the American People would have limited say in that election’s outcome?
Russia is engaged in a cyber war with us. It doesn’t matter if we accept it or even know it. It’s happening. We’re exactly like the residents of Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941 — in the minutes BEFORE the Japanese attacked. They have no idea a state of war exists — it absolutely does; they’re about to be attacked ffs! But war does exist — and it is coming for them whether they like it or not, whether they KNOW it or not.
Donald Trump isn’t just a corrupt POTUS, he’s a traitor. He’s been the most devastating active measure in the whole history of espionage. He and everyone around him are betraying us each and every day. How can we possibly let that stand for another moment — never mind till the next election which the republicans fully expect to steal just as they did election 2016.?
The cost of doing nothing is we lose our Republic.
Sorry. Not acceptable.
We are compelled not just to do “something” but to do EVERYTHING in our power to stop what the republicans are doing. We may survive the republicans decimating the greatest experiment in human self-government ever, but we won’t like what the republicans replace it with.
Doing nothing, ironically, will absolutely positively cost us everything.