This is one of my longer posts because I think about climate change and human behavior’s connection to it a lot.
I’ve been reading a lot of commentary from people since Nathaniel Rich’s The New York Times report on how mankind missed its chance to confront climate change back in the 70s and 80s and the Vox article about how dire the situation is…and it’s sobering to see how the conversations have moved from solutions-based (“We need to cut down our meat consumption;” “We need to green our energy infrastructure;” We need to reduce deforestation;” “there’s still a shot if we do this,”) to resignation (“We are screwed;” “There’s no hope for mankind;” “I can’t imagine having kids in the near future;” “We will be extinct in 10 years.”). Even climate scientists have expressed concern and an increasing resignation that society has missed its chance and all it can do is adapt to the coming major effects.
The IPCC Report seems to put a fine point on that resignation, and with many of the world’s most powerful countries and highest polluters being led by people with authoritarian tendencies that are deferential to industries that are contributing to greenhouse emissions, the challenge to decarbonize is even more daunting…some say impossible.
The challenge is also engaging the regular citizen who does not follow the graphs and charts as closely as the scholars do. How about the mother with 3 kids who needs to take them to school and to activities after school? Or the retired couple who saved enough so they can travel the rest of their lives? Or the young professional who decides to move farther away from the city (and drive in a long commute) so he/she can live in a bigger home? And let’s not forget the billions of people around the world who live in impoverished conditions. Everyone is contributing to climate change in their basic ways of living – changing the individual’s normal ways of doing things in order to combat climate change is going to be a major challenge.
It doesn’t help that even if we stopped all emissions today, greenhouse gases would continue to increase (according to a recent article from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology). Technology is needed to actualy take out carbon dioxide and methane from the air.
So what to be done? The solutions are daunting. But there was a big idea from a 17-year old brillant young boy to remove all the plastic trash from the Pacific Ocean in 5 years – and he is actively doing it. So if we think big – if we take this serious, we have a chance. We have to stay positive. It’s all we got.
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