Do you rock yourself to sleep at night with soothing thoughts of climate mitigation? We don’t have to switch to solar power. We can stick with beautiful coal, and mitigate! Maybe houses on stilts wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe a dike here and there. We can move our houses, if need be, or have the tornadoes move them for us! Munchkinland had lots of flowers, and one street was paved with gold!
Great. So, okay, mitigate this. Strap on your scuba tanks, and fix the Great Barrier Reef, much of which is now dying or dead. Or maybe you would prefer to move it someplace where it will be happier. Maybe off the coast of Munchkinland.
Or maybe your idea of mitigation is simply getting used to doing without. Although it must be said, you can’t seem to get used to the idea of doing without coal. So okay, we keep the coal. Who needs coral reefs, anyway, or their stupid fish? The forest that just burned down? Charcoal isn’t so bad. Sort of like coal! The community that just flooded out? Didn’t you ever hear of building an ark? Maybe we can’t get ALL the species on one boat the way Noah did, but who needs all those species, anyway? Canaries in the coal mine? We can do without those. A sixth mass extinction will clear some needed space for the endless mass migrations of people whose nations have collapsed due to drought and crop failure, or pounding, incessant rains and flooding. Why, look at Puerto Rico! It has recovered to the point where it even has electricity some days!
Mitigation is the equivalent of living with plywood sheets screwed over your windows, water dripping into buckets, no, you’re mopping up the water, no, you’re wading through the water on your way up to sit on the roof to look for rescuers. Except the rescuers moved inland some time ago to forage for non-extinct species. The idea of mitigation is the idea of surrender. To sacrifice one reef, another species, an ecosystem, a nation, and the best and most beautiful sustaining parts of our home planet. Permanently.
If this is your idea of how to handle the problem of climate change, all I can say is that you are probably a member of Congress. In other words, a Munchkin.