What’s key, and you can incorporate data into this, is trying to build a narrative for people which is positive in terms of its future outlook. It’s: “This is the world we can build. We can address climate change alongside other issues. It’s not going to cost you a ton of money. It might save you money. We’ll have cleaner air. We’ll have more energy security.” Which is more appealing than “We’re all going to die from climate change.”
That certainly sounds more persuasive to me.
It’s a good article about how advocating for the non-climate benefits of climate solutions might get one further than using the climate argument again.
I like, but also chuckled at this passage.:
What is the appropriate response from the scientific community? To cede the political discussion to nonscientists?
What scientists are often not that good at is explaining to the layman what this actually means for them. You have temperature targets of 1.5 degrees or two degrees. We need to explain in clear language what that means for the average person.
What does a world at two degrees of warming look like?
It is a hard question to answer
Just show the people who don’t care the study that says the pollution is making their dicks smaller. They may not care about the environment, but they certainly care about their tiny dicks.
I haven’t read the author’s book, but I think her position in the article still misses the mark and is naively dangerous, having us all just look at the flowers and embrace market solutions while we collapse the biosphere at stunning pace.
Honestly I’m not seeing any ‘solutions’ that are on a timeline relevant to the crisis. But I think any first step will have us coming to terms with climate change not being the problem, but a symptom of our economic system and our relationship to the environment. We’re going to have to reorient away from growth, because that growth is literally consuming the biophysical basis of our own existence.
Large-scale solutions aside, I think we’re going to start seeing a growing desire in people to somehow ‘exit’ this system. I know I feel it in myself, deep in my bones, and it pisses me off to no end that I’m forced into destructive behavior because of the system I’m trapped in. All this waste, plastic and destruction just to exist each day, and I’m not even having a good time! If anyone has made some progress in this area I would love to hear about it. I imagine it must start with some rejection of what the market ‘values’, choosing not to participate in this whole game that is making us miserable, and somehow trade material wealth for greater awareness and connection to our humanity. If Elon and Jeff want it all, they can fucking have it, I just want out of this nightmare and to find peace with nature somehow.
