Unless someone is breaking a hundred dollar bill or receiving change from a purchase, people do not like change, especially when it comes to the fact that they are being told they need to change their habits or their way of thinking.
Harvard and Yale students disrupted the football game between the schools on Saturday to protest the lack of leadership on global warming by both administrations. How dare they think for themselves?
This week, Greta Thunberg, the well known empowered climate activist from Northern Europe, continued her net-zero-emissions journey by returning home. Greta is working to educate the world. She spreads hope and addresses concerns. Avoiding the use of fossil fuels, she once again took to the seas rather than flying in order to reach Europe with her father.
What strategies are you using to persuade the climate deniers in your life to accept the reality around them?
When Greta Thunberg decided to visit a climate activist friend in Iowa City last week, 3,000 people showed up to greet her.
Water goes everywhere. It reaches places and distances that other things can’t with such flexibility and ingenuity. To attach pollutants to that ingenious reach is counter to intelligence and consciousness.
One of the very interesting things about Greta’s climate activism is that she walks the walk. She doesn’t do air travel, even for trips that cross oceans. Most recently, she made headlines for a speech at the United Nations in New York, but despite being from Europe, she didn’t get there by plane. People helped her get across the ocean by sailboat to help her keep her climate impacts as low as possible.
At the moment, many right-wing ideologues are sticking to abject climate change denial, crazy ideas like — it is not happening, it is good for us, it is not caused by humans, it is a left-wing conspiracy, it’s designed to steal your money, and so on. Notice how many are contradictory — not happening and good for us are mutually exclusive. The idea is to throw out as many rationalizations as possible to provide a “plausible” excuse for each of their supporters via varying reality-denying views.
We’ve had 120 years of scientists and experts telling us calmly that climate change was occurring and that it would be bad, and 70 years of global peace since WWII to do a lot about it. But instead, we massively increased greenhouse gas emissions.
We have to do better. And we can’t let the fossil fuel industry continue to get in the way of progress, as they clearly did on Friday at the Vancouver, BC climate solutions conference.
