Vigil
by George Saunders.
Random House, 174 pp., $28.00
Climate change is a strange kind of crime. In some sense we are all guilty of it, and all still in the process of committing it. Our car rides and plane trips, coffees and burgers, heating and cooling and clothing and everything else are paid for in blood—contributing, every moment, to the suffering and destruction global warming brings. “The onus,” as the New York Times editorial board admonished its readers a few years ago, “is on society as a whole.”
In another sense, though, a few of us are far, far guiltier than the rest. Most of us, for instance, are not the oil company executives who were told about the effects of CO2emissions back in the 1970s and decided that the threat to their business outweighed the threat to the planet. Most of us are not the politicians they funded to vote against emissions regulations, or the scientists who helped them by toning down the conclusions of federal climate commissions, or the PR consultants they hired to sow doubt about the subject. (As the climate litigation scholar Benjamin Franta has written, a central part of their strategy has been “shifting the blame” for pollution “onto consumers and society as a whole.”1)
Most of us are not, say, Lee Raymond, the chairman and CEO of Exxon from 1993 to 2005, who called manmade climate change an “unproved theory” years after the company’s own research had confirmed it, who declared—in what Bill McKibben has called “the single most audacious speech of the era”—that trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “defies common sense and lacks foundation in our current understanding of the climate system,” and who oversaw an elaborate campaign of misinformation and denial to prevent action from being taken. Most of us are not Duane LeVine, who in the late 1980s, as Exxon’s manager of strategy and science development, helped develop the “Exxon Position,” a plan to emphasize uncertainty and the “socio-political realities” around climate change in order to prevent a “crisis mentality” from taking hold. Most of us are not James Inhofe, the longest-serving senator in the history of Oklahoma (1994–2023), who chaired the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, received millions of dollars in donations from the fossil fuel industry, and called global warming a “hoax” and a “conspiracy” in speeches and books throughout his career.
In this sense, the destruction of our climate is an increasingly familiar sort of crime: one that has gone unpunished. The only people who have been sent to prison are those who have protested against it… NYRB
