Climate advocates won’t be silenced

Marietta Times

Jan 31, 2022

Aaron Dunbar

A few days ago, I learned that an acquaintance of mine, a whip-smart environmental scientist and educator, would no longer be publishing her long-standing weekly column in a small-town Ohio newspaper. To quote her directly on the matter: “I was told advertisers and management were not pleased with my columns.”

The topic of so many of her controversial pieces, which she cites as “the most important issue of our lives,” is climate change.

A few days before this, another friend of mine said he was asked to resign from the board of an environmental organization he’d been on for four years, for writing publicly about the fossil fuel corruption of a powerful political figure. This figure allegedly had a “major problem” with the individual’s involvement with the organization in question, thus leading to his involuntary resignation.

Bear in mind, neither of these two said they were penalized for saying anything whatsoever that was false or misleading in any way, shape or form. In fact, I have the utmost confidence that neither of them would have lost their respective positions had they simply been lying their backsides off every week, as long as what they were saying was pleasing to the ear of those in positions of power.

Their mistake, you see, was daring to speak the truth about the climate crisis. About how the overwhelming consensus among scientists is that we now have fewer than ten years before the damages of industrial greenhouse gas emissions to our biosphere become irreversible. About how we are witnessing a mass extinction event in real-time — and not only witnessing it, but actively driving it — leading to the eventual collapse of our civilization.

And their biggest mistake of all? Daring to accuse those merchants of death most responsible for this catastrophe right to their faces. For having the audacity to say an unkind word about the politicians raking in millions of dollars from fossil fuel lobbyists while shooting down climate legislation, the oil executives lying for decades about global warming while raking in billions or the fracking PR goons paid to spew lies about the natural gas industry.

To all those poor, sensitive powers-that-be who would prefer us to keep our mouths shut about their mass destruction of life on this planet, I have one thing to say to you: Too bad.

You can censor us, de-platform us and do everything in your power to try and shut us up, and it’s only going to make us louder. We refuse to be silent about what is perhaps the greatest threat ever faced by our species, about how we got to this point and about who is directly responsible for getting us here.

We are going to keep speaking out, and you are going to be held accountable. Live with it, the way we’re forced to live with the desecrated shambles of a planet you’ve created for us.

Lowell