As with most things I look to the rational and reasonable middle for solutions and hope. Doomerism isn't helpful but neither is denial or dismissal, i.e. It's not real or it's caused by man or it's not that serious. Without hope we end up at defeatism or despair. When it comes to climate change, we must never give up or surrender.
4. In 2022, "renewables met 90% of last year’s global growth in electricity generation. Solar PV and wind generation each increased by around 275 TWh, a new annual record." , https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022# .
6. Young adults are more likely to believe that climate change is real and caused by man and willing to take action and vote based on those beliefs, i.e., Time is not on our side but things will get better/easier as deniers and contrarians age out.
We need to be optimistic but realistic about changes that we can make at a personal, local and national level. Maybe 1.5 C is out of reach but as Zeke Hausfather says "Every tenth of degree matters" and we should do what we can to make a difference.
The biggest negative, and probably least useful, emotion I feel is that which I feel towards seemingly intelligent people who make one or more of the incoherent claims along the lines of "hoax", "it's real, but not nearly as bad as the doomers think", "how can changing my lifestyle change anything, anyway?", etc.
Most of us reading this live in democracies and we have to take those opinions into account for the policies that are adopted, but there's a real fear that there's two minutes left in the game and we're a goal down and we're being forced to get the ball to the player that doesn't have a chance to score because their parents own the stadium.
9/11: two "planes", yet the third tower (WTC7) imploded like in a controlled demolition. It was out of reach and all 7 World Trade Center towers destroyed, not the closer towers not belonging to World Trade Center... and the owner, with his 2 grown up siblings, failed to show up for work (never skipped work before)… by the way, he first took an insurance policy for the WTC against terrorism, just months before, when no one was taking them. The inside information about the FUTURE 9/11 event helped masons make trillions by shorting the stock exchange: the records were deleted by the SEC so they wouldn't be prosecuted !!!:
Why is 9/11 called a Pearl Harbor event? Both Churchill and Roosevelt were masons and plotted to get the reluctant USA into the war by provoking the Japs and letting Pearl Harbor (left the whole fleet defenseless and concentrated there as an easy candy to be taken from a kid, no radar warning from outer islands, etc.) and MUCH MORE:
Please read and watch all of this! Your life depends on it, because there's a plan to murder 95% of the global population by 2050… written on the masonic Georgia guide-stones: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 … ”
- J6: The fake riot was mason-planned, incited and guided by FBI agents, who broke into the Capitol !!! The same mason-plot was copy-pasted to disband the insurrection against the stolen elections in Brazil! All intel agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA) were founded by masons and are run by them for their own nefarious goals.
- At least since the 90s, vaccines are weaponized to reduce the population, for example:
1. Adding hCG to infertilize women: lab detected in 30 countries
2. Overpassing the FDA 10 ng limit to human DNA “contamination” by 2000%, thus causing neuro-damage (autism, asperger, tics, dyslexia in 29% of kids, etc.) and childhood cancer epidemic (n.b. leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas)
- It’s the masons, who create counterfeited currencies (trillions of dollars and EUROS) and bought the listed corporations, media, healthcare, universities, parties and political careers:
Pllllleeeeease, on my knees, don’t believe me, just do your own homework by searching the following in yandex.com, mojeek.com (includes crawl date filter and substack search), gigablast.com, startpage.com, duckduckgo.com (not Google, Bing, Yahoo censors). The key terms to test them? Child Satanic Ritual Abuse, Child Satanic Ritual Murder.
If you are a mason or know a mason, ask him to ask his 33° master to put in writing and sign it, who is "the great architect" and that he is not Lucifer. If he refuses, then he’ll know who he is really serving, Satan: tell him to get out of masonry NOW. Sooner or later he’ll be required to trample on a cross to get to a higher degree.
President John Quincy Adams: “Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good.”
Confessions of a former mason (Serge Abad-Gallardo):
The best way to have a real dialogue about vaccines being weaponized to handicap, infertilize and murder the “over-population” is to start with vaccine contamination: nobody could be in favor of contaminated pharmaceuticals.
1. Carcinogen SV40 in Oral Polio Vaccine: they knew it since the 60s but kept distributing it even until 2016 !!!
2. hCG in vaccines to infertilize women detected since the 90s: still going on
3. Thimerosal, aluminum, Mono-sodium Glutamate (MSG) and other NEUROTOXINS
4. Heavy metals
5. Human DNA 2000% in excess of FDA 10 ng limit (main driver towards brain damage like autism/asperger/ticks, leukemia and non-Hodgkin cancer), probably related to point 7 below.
6. Graphene oxide in Flu and COVID shots but now with anything injectable (even dentist anesthesia, hospital IV, etc.).
7. Carcinogenic SV40 genomic sequences and double-stranded DNA in mRNA COVID shots: the hacked DNA in the cell doesn’t stop producing the poison when the cell dies, but its descent continue the poisoning until the haccinated casualty dies.
8. Bluetooth nano-routers injected with COVID vaccines and inserted with swabs (which explains why they rejected the cheaper non-invasive saliva test).
Proof of criminal intent:
Points 7 and 8
Censoring and blocking 30+ COVID cures
Labeling the most lethal batches with a lethal code (howbad.info)
Blocking the real knowledge of effectiveness v. "adverse event" rate
That proves:
A. There's zero Government control
B. There's zero Manufacturer liability
C. There's zero Media coverage
D. All that, during decades and still going on, not only with vaccines but also with medicines, food&beverage additives, etc. Everything, even institutions have been weaponized!
E. There's zero political action to stop that (except RFK2 in the USA)
A school buddy told me "I know you make sense but if I recognize it's true, I won't be able to enjoy life anymore".
Change goes in hand with the number of awakened! Thank you for sharing this to save lives!
PS I'm sorry I'm linking to my own substack. It’s not self-promotion: I couldn’t find better links but if you find anything better, I'd be glad to replace.
Climate change has already tipped the natural world into a series of cascading changes we humans are incapable of grasping...where numbers from the past to predict a future become increasingly suspect.
I agree we should use hope to avoid despair, but we can't hope for things to be like they were. Let's instead use hope to imagine a world where political and economic ideas deviate from the ideologies that accelerated the change toward theories and practice that help repair the damage.
There are two seeming gaps in your argument that it would be great to hear how you address:
1. You use "We" in multiple ways. When you say "think of what can be done if we commit to changing things" are you referring to humanity, tech innovators, 'policymakers, governments, and industry,' or civilians like most of your readers? Your readers can "commit" all we want, but that's not the same as making government policies fundamentally change, and even the limited advances of the recent U.S. IRA legislation are far too little and still vulnerable to political backsliding and outright opposition.
2. When you say "there is something we can do about it," you don't state what that means in practice. It's great that you "try to focus on solutions" but what does that actually mean for readers here, who are far too intelligent and well-informed to believe that their individual behavior buying a Tesla, doing Meatless Monday, or taking one or two fewer plane flights a year are meaningfully bending the curve of global carbon emissions.
Very good. In my experience, the stages/aspects of grief are a fair and helpful model through which to observe, identify and “process” what’s happening as we begin to get this crisis “in our bones.” It’s hard to make a paradigm shift like this, and anyone who’s sincerely looking and learning will move through them all, and more, as that transformation progresses. “Stages” isn’t right, because we do repeatedly cycle through them all, punctuated also by active agency and hope and joy at a beautiful sunset…yes, you’re right, we’re complex beings and this situation is the mother of all complexity. ☮️♻️🌍🧡
Great piece Hannah! I actually wrote a Substack article about the intersection of feelings and climate change for the publication I oversee as well (Proven Sustainable). Beyond your key points, I addressed the societal / economic systems we're a part of that influence our emotions and efforts to be sustainable. Would love to hear your thoughts (or anyone else who finds this interesting) https://provensustainable.substack.com/p/what-do-feelings-have-to-do-with
My main emotion for years now has been anger at the way in which "climate change" is being used as an excuse to increase inequality.
For example, instead of the government doing a crash, emergency, full-scale programme of insulating the housing of lower-decile people, it's taking the VAT that the poor pay, and handing it to the well-off in the form of subsidies for new electric vehicles, or for PV feed-in tariffs for roof-top PV installations, or any of the other "incentive schemes".
Nor are things like upgrading public transport, urban densification and removal of green belts, basing taxation on unimproved land value with real penalty surcharges for unnoccupied housing, or proper taxes on air travel being undertaken.
Poor people don't buy new cars or rooftop PV systems. These "incentive schemes", handouts to the wealthy, are the least effective and most socially harmful of the things governments could actually do about climate change. They are just handouts to the groups most likely to vote.
From where I sit, it looks like politicians are using "climate change" as cover to bribe voters. Neither politicians nor grey voters actually want to do anything effective.
You hit on an important point. Protest is not change. Its understandable and it may lead to change but protesting is not doing something about the problem. I am not convinced that concern, fear, guilt etc will carry us very far either. All logical reactions to the climate crisis but at a population level these things don't drive change.
I don't have the answer to what does. But its some combination of defending what you have and desire for a better future. Almost everything in the climate debate misses the second half of that. Instead of just "how do we stop this happening" we need more of "why the future world will be better"
Whilst it seems like it is up to the voting public to make the issue(s) a high priority rather than expect those in positions of high trust to act like they have a duty of care all on their own I do think we need economy wide change as a priority - building an abundance of zero emissions energy so everyone's primary energy is low emissions - rather than expect concerned people to somehow fix the problem through personal lifestyle choices.
If invaders were rolling down our streets we wouldn't fob off people's calls for a coordinated nationwide response because they haven't being sacrificing themselves sufficiently in (ineffective) personal actions, let alone claim that therefore the invaders are imaginary - especially as those in government and business already know, with much better resources to make sense of the science based advice than any ordinary citizen.
Well, it is possible to achieve a sense of normalcy even with having to adapt to climate change so that an emotional response or loss aversion does not happen. But society has to start further upstream and allow for more time to make the transition, which so far it has been reluctant to do. It would rather pretend that it is unnecessary. The thing that must happen further upstream is a universal, mandated education program called Human Ecology. It starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through college, every year, in every school - 3 hours/week. It is the study of the relationships each person has with the human ecosystem, all the skills needed, the complex social systems, the psycho-social abilities. Climate and the natural world is one of the sectors in our ecosystem. So, by the time a young person has matriculated and transitioned to adulthood, they are more mature, have realistic concept of living in the climate that is the new natural, and understand how the pie should be divided fairly. Our dream will have become their normal, willingly. This kind of education is what can guarantee democracy and real equality. Start early and teach the whole ecosystem.
I think you’re right about hope. We all need hope or what’s the point.
I’d say we need to take action that will make a difference but also set the right example.
For a developed country such as the UK or the US this needs to be about creating the technology that the rest of the world can use to develop sustainably and affordably.
Poor countries will not voluntarily stay poor to save the world. Why should they?
An optimistic summary for worried people. Peak oil and coal, and soon peak population has been achieved. As sustainable methods of generation and consumption of electricity get cheaper and more ubiquitous, CO2 emissions will reduce hugely. Mammals evolved when the global temperature was 12 degrees higher than now so humankind will survive.
As with most things I look to the rational and reasonable middle for solutions and hope. Doomerism isn't helpful but neither is denial or dismissal, i.e. It's not real or it's caused by man or it's not that serious. Without hope we end up at defeatism or despair. When it comes to climate change, we must never give up or surrender.
Here are things that give me hope.
1. Most climate scientists no longer believe we are headed towards an IPCC worse-case emissions scenario, e.g. Zeke Hausfather, https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/emissions-are-no-longer-following and "The case for cautious climate hope." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgosvsTWC-k
2. Experts are projecting that we will reach peak global emissions sometime in this decade, https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/oil-and-gas/our-insights/charting-the-global-energy-landscape-to-2050-emissions .
3. The U.S. has reduced it's electrical sector emissions by 40% between 2000 and 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2023/clean-energy-electricity-sources/?itid=sf_climate_climate-lab_article_list .
4. In 2022, "renewables met 90% of last year’s global growth in electricity generation. Solar PV and wind generation each increased by around 275 TWh, a new annual record." , https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022# .
5. The U.S. Senate recently passed a bipartisan bill in support of the development of advanced nuclear energy, https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases-republican?ID=A9A2059C-DC4A-4716-BFB1-FF5A384B4BB0 .
6. Young adults are more likely to believe that climate change is real and caused by man and willing to take action and vote based on those beliefs, i.e., Time is not on our side but things will get better/easier as deniers and contrarians age out.
We need to be optimistic but realistic about changes that we can make at a personal, local and national level. Maybe 1.5 C is out of reach but as Zeke Hausfather says "Every tenth of degree matters" and we should do what we can to make a difference.
The biggest negative, and probably least useful, emotion I feel is that which I feel towards seemingly intelligent people who make one or more of the incoherent claims along the lines of "hoax", "it's real, but not nearly as bad as the doomers think", "how can changing my lifestyle change anything, anyway?", etc.
Most of us reading this live in democracies and we have to take those opinions into account for the policies that are adopted, but there's a real fear that there's two minutes left in the game and we're a goal down and we're being forced to get the ball to the player that doesn't have a chance to score because their parents own the stadium.
‘Researchers do not know what emotion is ‘most effective’ in driving climate action. Good studies on this are lacking.’
Activists fixation on doom appears pretty counterproductive, and fueling the inability to find compromises that transcend tribal politics.
Read the science! There is no human carbon climate change! No carbon climate action is effective.
Green communism sucked 200 trillion from taxpayers:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/best-scientific-sources-to-debunk
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/killing-me-softly-with-green-songs
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/carbon-reparations
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/climate-deaths
Carbon Climate Change is an anti-scientific psy-op:
What’s your best way to wake-up those who don’t want to open their eyes?
Please share your most effective wake-up strategies.
The more the awakened, the sooner this nightmare will be over!
For example, I start with this video (2 minutes):
https://odysee.com/@ImpossiblyWackedOutWorld:f/WTC-7-Free-Falling:8
(caveat: pot destroys your brain…)
9/11: two "planes", yet the third tower (WTC7) imploded like in a controlled demolition. It was out of reach and all 7 World Trade Center towers destroyed, not the closer towers not belonging to World Trade Center... and the owner, with his 2 grown up siblings, failed to show up for work (never skipped work before)… by the way, he first took an insurance policy for the WTC against terrorism, just months before, when no one was taking them. The inside information about the FUTURE 9/11 event helped masons make trillions by shorting the stock exchange: the records were deleted by the SEC so they wouldn't be prosecuted !!!:
4 min. (0.75 speed):
https://rumble.com/v1jpdwl-a-911-conspiracy-theory-explained-in-5-minutes-by-james-corbett-classic.html
Where’s the plane for the 2nd Tower (WTC1)?
https://odysee.com/@N%C3%A9mesis2030:8/11WTC:3
Controlled demolition?
https://odysee.com/@covid2020:d/9-11-World-Trade-Center-..-Demolition-Control%C3%A9e-1:2
Why is 9/11 called a Pearl Harbor event? Both Churchill and Roosevelt were masons and plotted to get the reluctant USA into the war by provoking the Japs and letting Pearl Harbor (left the whole fleet defenseless and concentrated there as an easy candy to be taken from a kid, no radar warning from outer islands, etc.) and MUCH MORE:
Please read and watch all of this! Your life depends on it, because there's a plan to murder 95% of the global population by 2050… written on the masonic Georgia guide-stones: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 … ”
- J6: The fake riot was mason-planned, incited and guided by FBI agents, who broke into the Capitol !!! The same mason-plot was copy-pasted to disband the insurrection against the stolen elections in Brazil! All intel agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA) were founded by masons and are run by them for their own nefarious goals.
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/j6-what-you-need-to-know
It's such a mason manual that they organized the same J6 play in Brazil when it was proven that the voting machines owned by mason Soros, were rigged:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-2020-american-coup
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/dominion-over-us
- At least since the 90s, vaccines are weaponized to reduce the population, for example:
1. Adding hCG to infertilize women: lab detected in 30 countries
2. Overpassing the FDA 10 ng limit to human DNA “contamination” by 2000%, thus causing neuro-damage (autism, asperger, tics, dyslexia in 29% of kids, etc.) and childhood cancer epidemic (n.b. leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas)
Check soundchoice.org or videos at bottom after this page:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/wake-up-videos
- COVID was designed as a primer for even more lethal COVID haccines:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-real-covid-timeline
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/not-vaccine-not-gene-therapy-just
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/what-do-bioweapons-have-to-do-with
- Wake up videos:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/wake-up-videos
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/2050-youll-go-nowhere-and-youll-be
- It's genocide for depopulation:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/depop-vaccines-no-myth
- It’s the masons, who create counterfeited currencies (trillions of dollars and EUROS) and bought the listed corporations, media, healthcare, universities, parties and political careers:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/david-rockefeller-illuminati
Confessions of ex-illuminati Ronald Bernard (all lodges obey the same master, Satan):
http://youtu.be/JAhnCdXqPww
Now, are you really ready for this?:
The full PLAN exposed:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-plan-revealed
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
Pllllleeeeease, on my knees, don’t believe me, just do your own homework by searching the following in yandex.com, mojeek.com (includes crawl date filter and substack search), gigablast.com, startpage.com, duckduckgo.com (not Google, Bing, Yahoo censors). The key terms to test them? Child Satanic Ritual Abuse, Child Satanic Ritual Murder.
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/rpn5aj/i_have_found_the_perfect_uncensored_search_engines/
https://www.deepwebsiteslinks.com/uncensored-search-engines-for-anonymous-searching/
If you are a mason or know a mason, ask him to ask his 33° master to put in writing and sign it, who is "the great architect" and that he is not Lucifer. If he refuses, then he’ll know who he is really serving, Satan: tell him to get out of masonry NOW. Sooner or later he’ll be required to trample on a cross to get to a higher degree.
President John Quincy Adams: “Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good.”
Confessions of a former mason (Serge Abad-Gallardo):
https://www.ncregister.com/interview/confessions-of-a-former-freemason-officer-converted-to-catholicism
Confessions of ex-illuminati Ronald Bernard (all lodges obey the same master, Satan):
http://youtu.be/JAhnCdXqPww
Confession of 33rd degree master mason - Masons worship deities/demons
https://rumble.com/v294ksc-words-from-33rd-degree-master-mason-rare-video-masons-worship-all-sorts-of-.html
Masonry's Satanic Connection
https://odysee.com/@HiddenTruths:c/Masonry's-Satanic-Connection:4
Masonry's Satanic Doctrine | From Their Own Books
https://rumble.com/v2wg24a-masonrys-satanic-doctrine-from-their-own-books.html
Do Freemasons Worship Lucifer？ Evidence They Don't Want You To See
https://odysee.com/@John_4-14:a/Do-Freemasons-Worship-Lucifer%EF%BC%9F-Evidence-They-Don't-Want-You-To-See-%EF%BD%9C-Hidden-Agendas---Walter-Veith:0
Satanic Ritual Abuse and Secret Societies [1995] [VHS]
https://odysee.com/@thisworldworks:1/satanic-ritual-abuse-and-secret-societies-1995:3
Satanic Pedophilia Torture and Blood - Dark Satanic Secrets Revealed
https://odysee.com/@Gmail.com:52/822821884_Satanic-Pedophilia-Torture-and-Blood---Dark-Satanic-Secrets-Revealed:4
UNITED NATIONS LUCIFER AND THE LUCIFER TRUST
https://odysee.com/@dynosarus:c/UNITED-NATIONS-LUCIFER-AND-THE-LUCIFER-TRUST:4
The best way to have a real dialogue about vaccines being weaponized to handicap, infertilize and murder the “over-population” is to start with vaccine contamination: nobody could be in favor of contaminated pharmaceuticals.
1. Carcinogen SV40 in Oral Polio Vaccine: they knew it since the 60s but kept distributing it even until 2016 !!!
2. hCG in vaccines to infertilize women detected since the 90s: still going on
3. Thimerosal, aluminum, Mono-sodium Glutamate (MSG) and other NEUROTOXINS
4. Heavy metals
5. Human DNA 2000% in excess of FDA 10 ng limit (main driver towards brain damage like autism/asperger/ticks, leukemia and non-Hodgkin cancer), probably related to point 7 below.
6. Graphene oxide in Flu and COVID shots but now with anything injectable (even dentist anesthesia, hospital IV, etc.).
7. Carcinogenic SV40 genomic sequences and double-stranded DNA in mRNA COVID shots: the hacked DNA in the cell doesn’t stop producing the poison when the cell dies, but its descent continue the poisoning until the haccinated casualty dies.
8. Bluetooth nano-routers injected with COVID vaccines and inserted with swabs (which explains why they rejected the cheaper non-invasive saliva test).
Proof of criminal intent:
Points 7 and 8
Censoring and blocking 30+ COVID cures
Labeling the most lethal batches with a lethal code (howbad.info)
Blocking the real knowledge of effectiveness v. "adverse event" rate
That proves:
A. There's zero Government control
B. There's zero Manufacturer liability
C. There's zero Media coverage
D. All that, during decades and still going on, not only with vaccines but also with medicines, food&beverage additives, etc. Everything, even institutions have been weaponized!
E. There's zero political action to stop that (except RFK2 in the USA)
A school buddy told me "I know you make sense but if I recognize it's true, I won't be able to enjoy life anymore".
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
If we don’t succeed, they’ll succeed with their 6-sword lethal plan fully exposed here:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-plan-revealed
Change goes in hand with the number of awakened! Thank you for sharing this to save lives!
PS I'm sorry I'm linking to my own substack. It’s not self-promotion: I couldn’t find better links but if you find anything better, I'd be glad to replace.
Climate change has already tipped the natural world into a series of cascading changes we humans are incapable of grasping...where numbers from the past to predict a future become increasingly suspect.
I agree we should use hope to avoid despair, but we can't hope for things to be like they were. Let's instead use hope to imagine a world where political and economic ideas deviate from the ideologies that accelerated the change toward theories and practice that help repair the damage.
There are two seeming gaps in your argument that it would be great to hear how you address:
1. You use "We" in multiple ways. When you say "think of what can be done if we commit to changing things" are you referring to humanity, tech innovators, 'policymakers, governments, and industry,' or civilians like most of your readers? Your readers can "commit" all we want, but that's not the same as making government policies fundamentally change, and even the limited advances of the recent U.S. IRA legislation are far too little and still vulnerable to political backsliding and outright opposition.
2. When you say "there is something we can do about it," you don't state what that means in practice. It's great that you "try to focus on solutions" but what does that actually mean for readers here, who are far too intelligent and well-informed to believe that their individual behavior buying a Tesla, doing Meatless Monday, or taking one or two fewer plane flights a year are meaningfully bending the curve of global carbon emissions.
I honestly believe that climate doom is causing more suffering than climate change, at least at the moment.
But climate change is worse than it needs to be, because of many people who claim to be concerned.
https://www.mattball.org/2023/08/net-zero-in-practice-is-war-on-poor.html
Very good. In my experience, the stages/aspects of grief are a fair and helpful model through which to observe, identify and “process” what’s happening as we begin to get this crisis “in our bones.” It’s hard to make a paradigm shift like this, and anyone who’s sincerely looking and learning will move through them all, and more, as that transformation progresses. “Stages” isn’t right, because we do repeatedly cycle through them all, punctuated also by active agency and hope and joy at a beautiful sunset…yes, you’re right, we’re complex beings and this situation is the mother of all complexity. ☮️♻️🌍🧡
Great piece Hannah! I actually wrote a Substack article about the intersection of feelings and climate change for the publication I oversee as well (Proven Sustainable). Beyond your key points, I addressed the societal / economic systems we're a part of that influence our emotions and efforts to be sustainable. Would love to hear your thoughts (or anyone else who finds this interesting) https://provensustainable.substack.com/p/what-do-feelings-have-to-do-with
My main emotion for years now has been anger at the way in which "climate change" is being used as an excuse to increase inequality.
For example, instead of the government doing a crash, emergency, full-scale programme of insulating the housing of lower-decile people, it's taking the VAT that the poor pay, and handing it to the well-off in the form of subsidies for new electric vehicles, or for PV feed-in tariffs for roof-top PV installations, or any of the other "incentive schemes".
Nor are things like upgrading public transport, urban densification and removal of green belts, basing taxation on unimproved land value with real penalty surcharges for unnoccupied housing, or proper taxes on air travel being undertaken.
Poor people don't buy new cars or rooftop PV systems. These "incentive schemes", handouts to the wealthy, are the least effective and most socially harmful of the things governments could actually do about climate change. They are just handouts to the groups most likely to vote.
From where I sit, it looks like politicians are using "climate change" as cover to bribe voters. Neither politicians nor grey voters actually want to do anything effective.
You hit on an important point. Protest is not change. Its understandable and it may lead to change but protesting is not doing something about the problem. I am not convinced that concern, fear, guilt etc will carry us very far either. All logical reactions to the climate crisis but at a population level these things don't drive change.
I don't have the answer to what does. But its some combination of defending what you have and desire for a better future. Almost everything in the climate debate misses the second half of that. Instead of just "how do we stop this happening" we need more of "why the future world will be better"
Well worth the reading. Thanks.
Whilst it seems like it is up to the voting public to make the issue(s) a high priority rather than expect those in positions of high trust to act like they have a duty of care all on their own I do think we need economy wide change as a priority - building an abundance of zero emissions energy so everyone's primary energy is low emissions - rather than expect concerned people to somehow fix the problem through personal lifestyle choices.
If invaders were rolling down our streets we wouldn't fob off people's calls for a coordinated nationwide response because they haven't being sacrificing themselves sufficiently in (ineffective) personal actions, let alone claim that therefore the invaders are imaginary - especially as those in government and business already know, with much better resources to make sense of the science based advice than any ordinary citizen.
Well, it is possible to achieve a sense of normalcy even with having to adapt to climate change so that an emotional response or loss aversion does not happen. But society has to start further upstream and allow for more time to make the transition, which so far it has been reluctant to do. It would rather pretend that it is unnecessary. The thing that must happen further upstream is a universal, mandated education program called Human Ecology. It starts in kindergarten and goes all the way through college, every year, in every school - 3 hours/week. It is the study of the relationships each person has with the human ecosystem, all the skills needed, the complex social systems, the psycho-social abilities. Climate and the natural world is one of the sectors in our ecosystem. So, by the time a young person has matriculated and transitioned to adulthood, they are more mature, have realistic concept of living in the climate that is the new natural, and understand how the pie should be divided fairly. Our dream will have become their normal, willingly. This kind of education is what can guarantee democracy and real equality. Start early and teach the whole ecosystem.
Well said.
I think you’re right about hope. We all need hope or what’s the point.
I’d say we need to take action that will make a difference but also set the right example.
For a developed country such as the UK or the US this needs to be about creating the technology that the rest of the world can use to develop sustainably and affordably.
Poor countries will not voluntarily stay poor to save the world. Why should they?
An optimistic summary for worried people. Peak oil and coal, and soon peak population has been achieved. As sustainable methods of generation and consumption of electricity get cheaper and more ubiquitous, CO2 emissions will reduce hugely. Mammals evolved when the global temperature was 12 degrees higher than now so humankind will survive.