Last night’s episode of Full Frontal With Samantha Bee was dedicated to a single issue: climate change. Bee decided to take a break from covering the people and constitutional rights being attacked by Donald Trump and talk about all the ways in which the earth is attacking us. Because lately, that’s a lot.
As Bee says multiple times, no one is suggesting that climate change is causing the hurricanes in the southeast or the fires in California. But scientific evidence does indicate that global warming makes those disasters dramatically more devastating. Maybe people would be more willing to talk about these things and take them seriously if they were more cut and dry, more tactile. As it stands, the reality of climate change’s impact on the world is complicated, with such far-reaching effects that it can feel abstract. And that makes it really easy for politicians to convince their constituents that these issues aren’t worth talking about. (Something I’m sure lobbyists are over-the-moon about.) When the head of the EPA feels justified in refusing to talk about global warming because it’s “insensitive” to the victims of natural disasters (which he did!), that should probably be taken as a sign that we need to regroup.
People don’t want to talk about climate change because it’s complicated and potentially not as immediate an issue as say, lost jobs and healthcare. Republicans don’t want to talk about climate change because then they’d lose those sweet lobbyist donations. If no one wants to talk about these issues, is there any chance they might, I don’t know, sing about them?
Okay, realistically, no. Of course not. But we can still appreciate Sam Bee and Ingrid Michaelson for the awesome song at the end of the above clip, complete with accompanying cardboard cutout visuals. If our planet is drowning and burning all around us, we should at least have some cute props.
The rest of the episode is absolutely worth a watch, and it’s all up on YouTube. There’s more on the moldy armpit destroying the EPA from the inside, Scott Pruitt, and Bee also takes a page out of the Christian Hell House handbook to try to scare people into taking climate change seriously.
(image: screencap)
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