LEFT WONDERING: Time To Rebrand Climate Change?

We are excited to re-introduce Left Wondering, our advice column on how to lead an ethical life in an increasingly unethical world. And we are thrilled to welcome our new advice columnist: Joel Stein. Despite his self-effacing introduction below, Stein is a celebrated columnist, journalist, and author, and he’s eager to answer your existential questions — and make you laugh along the way.

Have a question about how to make a personal decision related to climate change, corporatization, politics, wealth inequality, globalization, or other matters that you’d like Joel to answer? Send it to LeftWondering@levernews.com.

Rock the boat.

Aftermath of the deadly wildfires in Maui earlier this summer (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer).

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I want to do my part to address the world’s most pressing issues. The problem is that I don’t have a lot of skills. I can’t build a machine that removes carbon from the atmosphere or give all my non-existent employees a raise. 

The thing I’m good at is giving unwanted advice. And typing. And calling experts who will say things in a smart way that I can translate into a dumb way. I’ve been doing this for three decades as a columnist and reporter. And now I’m going to do it for you. I mean that literally. If you write to me. And I like your letter. 

I have spent hours arguing with my wife about whether to recycle plastic with a triangle with a number 4 on it. I spend even more time telling people I drive an electric car and hoping they don’t ask if it’s a Tesla. 

I’m frustrated at how much I’m bumbling around guessing as to what the most ethical thing to do is. And I’m hoping we can find out together. 

Have a question you’d like me to answer? Send it to LeftWondering@levernews.com.

Dear Left Wondering,

It amazes me that since forever, humans have known that pollution destroys us and nature, yet we continue to use the planet as a sewer. Will we ever make big oil and the rest of the companies internalize these costs? Calling it “climate change” is greenwashing. Do you have a better name for it? I have asked many of the eco orgs and writers and never get a response.

Mahalo,

Harvey Arkin

Dear Harvey Arkin,

Before I come up with a better name for “climate change,” I think it’s more important that we come up with a better name than “Harvey Arkin.” I like “Fletcher Maverick.”

Dear Fletcher Maverick,

I don’t know if you’re using the phrase “greenwashing” correctly. That’s when a company advertises that it’s improving the environment to hide the damage it’s doing. Like when Keurig says its disposable canisters are recyclable or when water companies put pictures of deer frolicking in pastures on their plastic bottle labels. I assume you don’t buy bottles of Dasani or K-cups, Fletcher. 

Unlike those lazy eco orgs, I’m taking on your challenge. I turn to Aaron Hall, a professional namer, who wrote a piece for Ad Age suggesting the following options to replace “climate change”:

• Global Meltdown
• Climate Collapse
• Climate Chaos
• Boiling Point
• Scorched Earth

I don’t know if you know a lot of professional namers, Fletcher (certainly your parents didn’t), but they always pitch their best suggestion last. So I was going to suggest “scorched earth.” But then I saw that the British newspaper The Guardian had, back in 2019, changed its preferred style from “climate change” to either “climate emergency, crisis, or breakdown.”

Those seemed like serious, attention-grabbing phrases. Then I realized that this is America. Words that are horrifying to British newspaper readers are things our five-year olds scream at their parents. We’re a people who name our female babies Fanny.

Luckily, SPARK Neuro, a neuroscience startup so American that it shouts in ALL CAPS, has researched this very question. They hooked brain-activity monitors to people as they listened to alternatives to “climate change.” The ones that most freaked people out were “climate crisis” and “environmental destruction.” But “environmental destruction” was especially scary to Republicans. 

SPARK Neuro concluded that “climate crisis” was the winner because it “could strike a bipartisan chord.”

I like a bipartisan chord as much as the next guy in a bipartisan prog-rock band, but I am all for freaking the hell out of the third of Americans who don’t consider climate change a serious problem — or, better yet, who don’t consider environmental destruction to be a serious problem.

But just as important as a scary name, Fletcher Maverick, you need to engage others to help solve our problems. And the tone of your email isn’t quite right, according to the “10 Research-Backed Tips” on climate communication put out by Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment. 

To broadly summarize, their advice is not to be a dick. Focus on the positive outcomes of avoiding fossil fuels, such as saving money and  breathing cleaner air. Make them feel like part of a large movement that their friends are part of; talk about how many people are cutting down their meat consumption and enjoying it. The tips don’t specifically suggest you avoid using phrases like “use the planet as a sewer,” but it’s pretty strongly implied.

This is the attitude we need to save the planet from environmental destruction.

Sincerely,

Left Wondering

Dear Left Wondering,

My parents first bought a timeshare in Cancún in the 1980s. They took my sister and myself for years until we grew out of traveling with parents. When I had children of my own, we all accompanied them and had wonderful experiences. Now my parents are too infirm to travel and have passed that timeshare onto us.

Thinking about U.S. imperialism and the role it’s played and continues to play in Mexico (not to mention the rest of Latin America), is it conscionable or hypocritical to continue to use this timeshare? And if not conscionable, what is the best way to dispose of it, hoping to avoid passing it on to even worse Americans?

Dear Person Who Couldn’t Think of One of Those Clever Sign-Offs Such as “Cancún I Stay or Should I Go” or “#TimeShare’sUp”,

Before bothering me, I’m sure you read Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico, by University of Minnesota American History professor Bianet Castellanos. In it, you learned that the city of Cancún was built  by Mexican bankers in the late 1960s who were looking to score tourism money in a hard-to-reach jungle. They came up with the name “Cancún” in much the same way the Beach Boys titled their song Kokomo. 

As the Mexican secretary of tourism said in the 1980s: “Cancún is a Mexican development, conceived, planned, constructed, and administered by Mexicans. This is important because it is the world’s first tourism development from a base of zero… Cancún is a Mexican triumph.”

Their plan worked on your parents, much like Cabbage Patch Kids did. Yes, I was in the VH1 show I Love the 80s. 

So, while you are quick to self-flagellate as an American, Cancún is less about colonialism than gentrification.

Still, there were indigenous people living in the jungle near where Cancún was built in the 1960s. As Castellanos writes, “This plan neither acknowledged nor incorporated Maya fishermen and campesinos (peasants) who were recruited to form a veritable army of labor necessary to transform the landscape and to service tourists.” About a third of the locals are Mayan. Their story is told at the Museo Maya de Cancún which opened in 2012, and which I’m sure you’ve been to many, many times. 

Before the 1980s (which I know less about since VH1 was not interested), Spanish colonizers spent the 16^th and 17^th centuries taking the Mayans’ land— which your timeshare sits on top of. 

Castellanos again: “The city of Cancún operates on the backs of Indigenous labor and is built upon land that was dispossessed from Indigenous people.”

Not to make things more difficult for you, but wait until you hear how the land you’re living on here in America wound up in your hands. It’s a way scarier horror movie than what happened to the people living in Quintana Roo in the 1960s.  

But there’s a different, better reason to get rid of the timeshare than colonialist guilt: Cancún sucks. As Eater says in its introduction to “The 13 Essential Cancún Restaurants”: “Cancún, along with the rest of the Riviera Maya, has perhaps become more commonly known for its all-inclusive resorts, raucous parties, and tourist-trap restaurants.” Sell the timeshare and take your family somewhere in Mexico with some actual culture.

If you insist on keeping the timeshare, get to know the local community and help them; there are serious housing needs. And if you want to help save the Mayan culture and language, check out what’s going on at the Intercultural University Maya de Quintana Roo. Sure, it’s a four-hour drive from your timeshare, but at least it will get you out of the tourist hellhole of Cancún.  

But if you do want to sell the timeshare to people who aren’t “even worse Americans” (a category I’m not entirely sure exists), there’s only one way to do it. Rent out a conference room in a hotel in your town. Make sure it has a swimming pool with a bar next to it. Take out an ad offering people a free weekend at said hotel if they’ll sit through your four-hour PowerPoint presentation. Spend more time on the snorkeling in Cancún than on the imperialism stuff. Serve lots of cocktails. Then gently start asking questions about their politics. 

Sincerely,

Left Wondering

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