In short, we aren’t on track to an apocalyptic extinction, and the new head is concerned that rhetoric that we are is making people apathetic and paralyzes them from making beneficial actions.
He makes it clear too that this doesn’t mean things are perfectly fine. The world is becoming and will be more dangerous with respect to climate. We’re going to still have serious problems to deal with. The problems just aren’t insurmountable and extinction level.
Honestly I think we should stop trying to stop climate change and start adapting to it.
Because at individual scale all actions to limit climate change are almost meaningless, whatever we do we will not see the consequences of it. On the other hand we can adapt to climate change at individual and community level.
Start planting trees in our community, build a way of life that does not require fossil fuel since we are running out of them, installing solar panels and improving home insulation to help during externe weather events, buy less products and focus on repairing them instead …
All of that can directly improve our life, present and future, without relying on everyone doing their share
AND, as a side effect, all the action we do to prepare yourself to live in a post growth world are also great to reduce our CO2 emissions.
You can only adapt so much before you just fucking die though, corporations are not going to stop pumping out carbon and if things don’t change, we won’t be able to survive as a people.
I’d love to install solar panels, I have a flat rubber roof with no tree coverage that’s perfect for it. A $35,000 upfront cost is an absolute nonstarter for me. I have it, but that’s basically my entire emergency fund. If someone would pay me to have them installed, hell yeah, let’s do it.
I agree. Colorado Springs has adopted a system where the company installs the Solar panels free and you just pay the solar company for wattage which ends up being less.
Because adapting is the same situation. Yes, you can make changes personally, but there are overwhelming societal issues that you can’t begin to touch, that require huge investments, but is from politicians and corporations. Most importantly, adapting is more expensive than prevention
That’s a good and healthy way to approach this. Nicely put.
Bettering the world’s situation is a legislative/political issue. Bettering you and your immediate community is something you can help with, even if it’s only at the margins.
The problem with all this, however, is that there are a lot of the things that you can do to help your personal situation that are definitely not helping the overall situation. For example installing air conditioning, watering your lawn, etc. They might make things more comfortable for you, but they’re by no means better for the world. We still need to incentivize the right things through the right tax breaks and financial/industry incentives, which lead us back to politics being the actual thing that we need to make meaningful personal and global change possible.