The Last Climate Denier
So pretty much everybody has by now heard that my country of birth and residence Australia, is on fire. It will likely continue to burn for four more months or so. My family (including myself) was evacuated on the second day of our holiday. On our way to Eastern Victoria we saw a cavalcade of CFA fire trucks heading to the front - our holiday destination.
Just as some countries of the world have their 'Wet' and 'Dry' seasons, Australia has its 'Fire' season. Bush fires are not unusual, and we've had very bad ones in the past, what is unusual is to have bad ones start so early in summer, keep burning for months and occur all at once. They also traditionally have affected city folk less than say Tropical Cyclones that can make landfall in our northern cities, but also take out banana crops, causing prices to spike in urban supermarkets. But this time clouds of ash are blowing in with the breeze and giving the residents of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra a taste of what it is like to live in Beijing, and other mega cities powered by Australia's brown coal.
So that's the situation.
I got taught the four broad ways in which people avoid responsibility. Buckets if you will, that any time you have a problem or complaint and it wasn't resolved, you'll find it dropped into one of these four buckets.
1. Denial 'There is no problem'
2. Excuses 'We can't address it because...'
3. Blaming 'Joe did that not me.'
4. Diversion 'Your story reminds me of the time...'
I worked in a call center for the better half of the last decade conducting surveys, which gave me probably 10,000 hours to practice recognizing which buckets people use. Let's say I called up to ask people to do a survey about exercise:
1. 'I don't exercise.'
2. 'I'm having dinner.' 'I'm at work.' 'The kids are in the bath.'
3. 'The government is supposed to stop these calls'
4. (Very rare) 'I'll ask you a question what do you think about these Muslims?'
What might be missed is what people aren't taking responsibility for. Because there's two equally valid ways to resolve a market research cold call: A. Do the survey. B. Decline to do the survey.
The four tactics listed above, are not ways to avoid surveys, but ways to avoid taking responsibility.
So.
Climate deniers. The first question to ask is: 'what constitutes denial?' By analogy consider the following statement:
I'm not an alcoholic, I can quit whenever I want, but I don't want to.
Our social situation is such, that on a subject like alcoholism there's really only a binary. Once you admit you are an alcoholic, it tends to come with it a social expectation that you not be consuming alcohol.
Climate deniers though may style themselves as 'Climate Skeptics' and if one feels inclined to examine the magnitude of this fancy SBS ran an episode of their flagship show 'Insight' where one Climate Scientist took on an entire studio of Climate Skeptics.
Climate deniers are those people who opt for the simplest and most elegant way to abrogate responsibility for human-caused climate change. Those who deny it is taking place, and really we are now in it so it might carry the additional burden of denying it has taken place.
We don't however tend to think of 'denial' as an attenuated process. Consider:
A) Climate change is a hoax.
B) Climate change is real.
C) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now.
D) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now, and it's the most pressing issue of our time.
E) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now; and it's the most pressing issue of our time and I need to start making sacrifices.
F) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now; and it's the most pressing issue of our time and I need to start making meaningful sacrifices.
Now in Australia it is still more or less true that we are a classic two-party democracy. Voting is compulsory, voting is on a preferential system, yadda yadda... we follow a global trend of two-party democracies where our country is divided roughly in half and the right-wing party tends to have a narrow edge. Furthermore, our right-wing party tends to follow the American model of being the party of climate denial.
This would suggest that somewhere between 40~51% of Australians believe climate change to be a hoax. My suspicion is though that if one was to attempt to produce this via survey polling with any statistically significant and representative sample, it would be hard to find anything near 40% agreeing with the statement 'Climate change is a hoax.' option A.
Which would suggest something else is going on, and running from option A-F from above I would posit only option F is actually a state of complete non-climate denial. I'm not sure I'm in that category, (which is to say I'm possibly still in denial), because 'meaningful' sacrifices is a tricky concept.
For some people, the meaningful sacrifice may be not voting for the party they have voted for all their lives. To accept a bundle of policy issues they mostly object to in order to have climate change meaningfully addressed at a policy level. It may mean for them, that while they agree climate change is real and the most pressing issue of their times, they will have to sacrifice Negative Gearing, Water Allocations, Subsidies, Tax Benefits on Retirement Funds etc.
What I'm suggesting in other words, is that there are a bunch of Australians who want something done about climate change, but the chips have fallen such that they wind up voting in lockstep with the full blown climate deniers (A) because of what they perceive as more pressing or more immediate issues. (C)
Here then, I suspect the full-on Climate-Change-is-a-hoax people may provide a valuable service to the less visible majority of people in denial about climate change. Because remember that denial is but the simplest way to avoid responsibility. The larger group in denial don't resort to denial of the problem in the first place, but perhaps first and foremost; to blaming. Which is to say, we blame the inaction on climate change, on the climate deniers, not our own feet dragging.
There will, like any good dodge, be some truth to it. Electoral seats with high unemployment that have pinned their hopes on Coal to provide high salaries for unskilled and semi-skilled labor market etc. Lobbyists from offending industries basically paying to continue to externalize their true costs. The question, to explain the title of this post though, is: is it really the case that we need every last person to migrate from (A) to (B), or is it more the case that we need to move people from (B) to (F) or perhaps there's enough people in (E) that if we moved only them to (F) that would be the tipping point?
I don't know. Because I suspect by and large we don't have this data. The denial that shows up in political leadership though, tends to strike me as more motivated than sincere. The difference between the two is kind of moot to me, because it's just clear that there are incentives for politicians to take a position of climate change denial or skepticism. (And of the skeptics I tend to get a far greater impression that the skeptical political leaders aren't free to consult the data, read the reports and question the methodology. eg. behave like a skeptic, rather than willfully ignorant).
In which case, it may come the time that we need to look at their supporter base and interrogate that package deal. Are there a bunch of voters for example, that want something done about climate change, but are hoping to cash in on their property portfolio and take the retirement vacation of a lifetime before climate change is addressed? Are there voters, that want something done about climate change but balk at the idea of parents consenting to pre-pubescent children medically transitioning gender?
That would describe shifting people from (C) to (D) on climate change, not from (A) to (B).
But wait, it gets more....
"Après Vous" I'm told is what the French say... although we say it too because it's fairly straightforward translation which is 'after you'. Which I'm sure you'll agree we English speakers say facetiously all the time.
While there's evidently roughly half the population that could make an emotional sacrifice and vote for a party that will tax Greenhouse Gases or... basically address climate change in any way whatsoever, there's another half of the country including me, that I can't quite let off the hook with a simple 'you've done your part.'
What I suggest is this. Imagine someone knocking on your door and saying 'You've seen Italy for the last time. I hope you made the most of your last visit, because you'll never see it again.' And if Italy has no particular meaning to you, insert France, England, the United States, Brazil, Japan whatever floats your boat (or lifts your airplane). Imagine being done basically, with air travel. Imagine some official knocking on your door and saying 'You've eaten your last steak.' or knocking on your door and saying 'The window has closed for building your dream home.'
Add another detail to this though. You take it on the chin, the sacrifice the nation, the world is asking of you, and out of curiosity you ask the official. 'So you have many more doors to knock on this street?' by way of polite conversation and they say 'No. Just you.'
Maybe.
Maybe you are the kind of noble soul that could take it all for the team; would take it all for the team if you could. In my experience of posing hypotheticals to humans though, it is very common to see people try and weasel out of the scenario. Avoid responsibility. Robert Schiller in his book 'Animal Spirits' for example asserted that wage negotiations rarely have anything to do with supply of and demand for labor, but far more often to do with a sense of fairness. You'd really care if at 28 years of age you were told your travelling days were over, then watched your parents plan a holiday to Morocco because they were tired of Spain and wanted to do something different.
If we entertain (because I can't prove) that full blown climate deniers tend to be older rather than younger, have lower levels of educational achievement, and work and live in areas where the local industries are big greenhouse gas emitters. Industries like mining, agriculture, tourism and construction... that's the vast majority of the Australian Economy. Furthermore another big export: Education, results in much air-travel bringing students in and out of the country and they often are driving inner city apartment construction booms. The potential economic contraction that may follow from properly costing Climate Change may not have us scratching our head as to why climate skepticism is so prevelent, but instead why it's so rare.
I could only suggest it's probably because most people do have a naive intuition as to economies being segregated, discrete, isolated rather than appreciating how completely integrated they are. Everything you purchased this week, probably had fossil fuel burning for the next century factored into its price. I suspect the number of people that truly intuitively understand that the price of survival is fair up to and including everything you have is low, and here's why:
I recall reading some ten to fifteen years ago a Vox Pop segment in a paper that interviewed a Latrobe Valley Coal worker about climate change/carbon tax etc. and it made an impression because his response contained the words [paraphrasing from recollection] "At the end of the day we all need to turn on the air conditioner." Now there's loads of problems with that assertion, including the necessity, the source of electricity etc. but I also see an invitation to empathise, that is too often declined.
People who believe in climate change, as a man-made existential threat to organized human lives, lead their own lives all too often in fear of getting fired. Of being passed over for promotion or career opportunities. Of not paying their debts. And of trying to consume their way into happiness or at least esteem by their peers.
One might feel outrage at the suggestion that Air-conditioning is a sacred human right for which the planet may be destroyed. But as Freud so beautifully said "He does not believe, who does not live in accordance with their beliefs." People all over are living as if not just air-conditioning is a human right, but air-travel, international holidays, 80-20 grinds of chuck, pouring concrete and having no interruption to their supply of electricity is a human right.
If it were the case that somehow through some strange physics what we really needed to address climate change, was to close our Educational sector, rather than Agriculture, Mining, Construction etc. you could bet the demographics of climate skepticism would shift roughly in line with who was being asked to sacrifice the most.
Yeah, personally I believe in top-down rather than bottom up. There's a reality that many people who have gone vegan and will only visit Italy by sailing around the Horn of Africa, are extremely disadvantaged by our economy, which is to say our society is set up to drive these people to extinction and promote people with the largest ecological footprints. But if that's the case and the real change has to happen at a policy/economic incentives level, then the move from E to F (make sacrifices vs make meaningful sacrifices) places an onus on us to change our own politics. Which is to say, to stop demanding the policy platforms from our representatives that have kept our potential allies voting right-wing that want something done on climate change.
As we speak, the Democratic party in America is going through the arduous task of determining who will run against Trump. One of the flaws of this primary process I've noticed, is that the Primaries may be determined by the outcomes of 'Blue' States, large electorates like New York and California, whereas the Presidential race will be determined by Battleground states like Wisconsin, Florida etc. this would pose no problem, if the interests of the safe Blue states and the Battleground states converged. But I'm guessing Silicon Valley and the Rust Belt, don't quite have the same priorities.
Because the Coal miner, or Coal-fired power station worker has a much better vantage point to see the hypocrisy of the Tertiary educated millennial demanding - they give up the only career they've ever known, write down the value of their home, in the town that's lost it's biggest employer and completely reinvent the story of their lives - jumping on the latest Jetstar sale of $70 flights to Tokyo.
Just so, the politicians that stand in the way of climate action can freely observe how hollow a student 'climate strike' is in February so far from the VCE exams they will not be skipping, because there's no way they are giving up on their dream career.
I don't have hard and fast answers. But because I can never unsee those tactics people use to dodge personal responsibility, I see in the discourse of people that accept man-made climate change a lot of denial, a lot of blaming, a lot of excuses and yes, even diversionary tactics. (Lest we forget that a few weeks before bush fires broke out in Eastern Victoria the latest Disney Star Wars installment was for many people a more pressing catastrophe for debate than the fires burning in the state to the north of us.)
Credit where credit's due, a lot of people have donated money, raised awareness of the best fundraisers, volunteered their time and efforts. But these laudable efforts I suspect would be the same dealing with a non-climate change disaster fall out, like a Tsunami for example, and it's entirely possible that in relief efforts climate activists and climate deniers alike mobilize for a common cause.
What gives me hope is that living so close to the front, living in the ash cloud of these catastrophic bushfires while unlikely to budge the dyed-in-the-wool deniers (A), may be moving, myself included Australians from (E) to (F). Or any migration along that spectrum of denial from (B) to (F). People starting to process that the house they are trying to pay off may be devalued by the climate sooner than the tax policy. Or that 2020 is the year to give up red meat, not 2021. That gives me hope.
Just as I feel nobody is more likely to be the undoing of Trump than Trump himself, I am fairly confident no agent will be so persuasive that the climate is changing than the climate itself. Sol the mighty Sun God has returned to voice his wrath, and there's something to be noticed about this God in particular in that he won't spare the true believers either.
It would be helpful if the outright denial would stop and responsibility would be taken, but many people might be surprised at how reluctant they find themselves to take responsibility when the last Climate Denier concedes.
Among those that profess our belief that human activity has altered the climate, the onus is on us to come up with a better conception of our opposition than cartoonish stereotypes that merit no falsification, and keep uttering political messages that only ring true on our ears. We do not want Generals that cannot conceive of defeat, nor soldiers that cannot conceive of anyone rallying to any other banner. We do not want to limit ourselves to simply putting more resources into strategies that continue to prove ineffective. We have an obligation to change our own conversations, to check the map against the ground, and inventory the degree to which we are complicit in our own defeat.
Just as some countries of the world have their 'Wet' and 'Dry' seasons, Australia has its 'Fire' season. Bush fires are not unusual, and we've had very bad ones in the past, what is unusual is to have bad ones start so early in summer, keep burning for months and occur all at once. They also traditionally have affected city folk less than say Tropical Cyclones that can make landfall in our northern cities, but also take out banana crops, causing prices to spike in urban supermarkets. But this time clouds of ash are blowing in with the breeze and giving the residents of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra a taste of what it is like to live in Beijing, and other mega cities powered by Australia's brown coal.
So that's the situation.
I got taught the four broad ways in which people avoid responsibility. Buckets if you will, that any time you have a problem or complaint and it wasn't resolved, you'll find it dropped into one of these four buckets.
1. Denial 'There is no problem'
2. Excuses 'We can't address it because...'
3. Blaming 'Joe did that not me.'
4. Diversion 'Your story reminds me of the time...'
I worked in a call center for the better half of the last decade conducting surveys, which gave me probably 10,000 hours to practice recognizing which buckets people use. Let's say I called up to ask people to do a survey about exercise:
1. 'I don't exercise.'
2. 'I'm having dinner.' 'I'm at work.' 'The kids are in the bath.'
3. 'The government is supposed to stop these calls'
4. (Very rare) 'I'll ask you a question what do you think about these Muslims?'
What might be missed is what people aren't taking responsibility for. Because there's two equally valid ways to resolve a market research cold call: A. Do the survey. B. Decline to do the survey.
The four tactics listed above, are not ways to avoid surveys, but ways to avoid taking responsibility.
So.
Climate deniers. The first question to ask is: 'what constitutes denial?' By analogy consider the following statement:
I'm not an alcoholic, I can quit whenever I want, but I don't want to.
Our social situation is such, that on a subject like alcoholism there's really only a binary. Once you admit you are an alcoholic, it tends to come with it a social expectation that you not be consuming alcohol.
Climate deniers though may style themselves as 'Climate Skeptics' and if one feels inclined to examine the magnitude of this fancy SBS ran an episode of their flagship show 'Insight' where one Climate Scientist took on an entire studio of Climate Skeptics.
Climate deniers are those people who opt for the simplest and most elegant way to abrogate responsibility for human-caused climate change. Those who deny it is taking place, and really we are now in it so it might carry the additional burden of denying it has taken place.
We don't however tend to think of 'denial' as an attenuated process. Consider:
A) Climate change is a hoax.
B) Climate change is real.
C) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now.
D) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now, and it's the most pressing issue of our time.
E) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now; and it's the most pressing issue of our time and I need to start making sacrifices.
F) Climate change is real and it needs to be addressed now; and it's the most pressing issue of our time and I need to start making meaningful sacrifices.
Now in Australia it is still more or less true that we are a classic two-party democracy. Voting is compulsory, voting is on a preferential system, yadda yadda... we follow a global trend of two-party democracies where our country is divided roughly in half and the right-wing party tends to have a narrow edge. Furthermore, our right-wing party tends to follow the American model of being the party of climate denial.
This would suggest that somewhere between 40~51% of Australians believe climate change to be a hoax. My suspicion is though that if one was to attempt to produce this via survey polling with any statistically significant and representative sample, it would be hard to find anything near 40% agreeing with the statement 'Climate change is a hoax.' option A.
Which would suggest something else is going on, and running from option A-F from above I would posit only option F is actually a state of complete non-climate denial. I'm not sure I'm in that category, (which is to say I'm possibly still in denial), because 'meaningful' sacrifices is a tricky concept.
For some people, the meaningful sacrifice may be not voting for the party they have voted for all their lives. To accept a bundle of policy issues they mostly object to in order to have climate change meaningfully addressed at a policy level. It may mean for them, that while they agree climate change is real and the most pressing issue of their times, they will have to sacrifice Negative Gearing, Water Allocations, Subsidies, Tax Benefits on Retirement Funds etc.
What I'm suggesting in other words, is that there are a bunch of Australians who want something done about climate change, but the chips have fallen such that they wind up voting in lockstep with the full blown climate deniers (A) because of what they perceive as more pressing or more immediate issues. (C)
Here then, I suspect the full-on Climate-Change-is-a-hoax people may provide a valuable service to the less visible majority of people in denial about climate change. Because remember that denial is but the simplest way to avoid responsibility. The larger group in denial don't resort to denial of the problem in the first place, but perhaps first and foremost; to blaming. Which is to say, we blame the inaction on climate change, on the climate deniers, not our own feet dragging.
There will, like any good dodge, be some truth to it. Electoral seats with high unemployment that have pinned their hopes on Coal to provide high salaries for unskilled and semi-skilled labor market etc. Lobbyists from offending industries basically paying to continue to externalize their true costs. The question, to explain the title of this post though, is: is it really the case that we need every last person to migrate from (A) to (B), or is it more the case that we need to move people from (B) to (F) or perhaps there's enough people in (E) that if we moved only them to (F) that would be the tipping point?
I don't know. Because I suspect by and large we don't have this data. The denial that shows up in political leadership though, tends to strike me as more motivated than sincere. The difference between the two is kind of moot to me, because it's just clear that there are incentives for politicians to take a position of climate change denial or skepticism. (And of the skeptics I tend to get a far greater impression that the skeptical political leaders aren't free to consult the data, read the reports and question the methodology. eg. behave like a skeptic, rather than willfully ignorant).
In which case, it may come the time that we need to look at their supporter base and interrogate that package deal. Are there a bunch of voters for example, that want something done about climate change, but are hoping to cash in on their property portfolio and take the retirement vacation of a lifetime before climate change is addressed? Are there voters, that want something done about climate change but balk at the idea of parents consenting to pre-pubescent children medically transitioning gender?
That would describe shifting people from (C) to (D) on climate change, not from (A) to (B).
But wait, it gets more....
"Après Vous" I'm told is what the French say... although we say it too because it's fairly straightforward translation which is 'after you'. Which I'm sure you'll agree we English speakers say facetiously all the time.
While there's evidently roughly half the population that could make an emotional sacrifice and vote for a party that will tax Greenhouse Gases or... basically address climate change in any way whatsoever, there's another half of the country including me, that I can't quite let off the hook with a simple 'you've done your part.'
What I suggest is this. Imagine someone knocking on your door and saying 'You've seen Italy for the last time. I hope you made the most of your last visit, because you'll never see it again.' And if Italy has no particular meaning to you, insert France, England, the United States, Brazil, Japan whatever floats your boat (or lifts your airplane). Imagine being done basically, with air travel. Imagine some official knocking on your door and saying 'You've eaten your last steak.' or knocking on your door and saying 'The window has closed for building your dream home.'
Add another detail to this though. You take it on the chin, the sacrifice the nation, the world is asking of you, and out of curiosity you ask the official. 'So you have many more doors to knock on this street?' by way of polite conversation and they say 'No. Just you.'
Maybe.
Maybe you are the kind of noble soul that could take it all for the team; would take it all for the team if you could. In my experience of posing hypotheticals to humans though, it is very common to see people try and weasel out of the scenario. Avoid responsibility. Robert Schiller in his book 'Animal Spirits' for example asserted that wage negotiations rarely have anything to do with supply of and demand for labor, but far more often to do with a sense of fairness. You'd really care if at 28 years of age you were told your travelling days were over, then watched your parents plan a holiday to Morocco because they were tired of Spain and wanted to do something different.
If we entertain (because I can't prove) that full blown climate deniers tend to be older rather than younger, have lower levels of educational achievement, and work and live in areas where the local industries are big greenhouse gas emitters. Industries like mining, agriculture, tourism and construction... that's the vast majority of the Australian Economy. Furthermore another big export: Education, results in much air-travel bringing students in and out of the country and they often are driving inner city apartment construction booms. The potential economic contraction that may follow from properly costing Climate Change may not have us scratching our head as to why climate skepticism is so prevelent, but instead why it's so rare.
I could only suggest it's probably because most people do have a naive intuition as to economies being segregated, discrete, isolated rather than appreciating how completely integrated they are. Everything you purchased this week, probably had fossil fuel burning for the next century factored into its price. I suspect the number of people that truly intuitively understand that the price of survival is fair up to and including everything you have is low, and here's why:
I recall reading some ten to fifteen years ago a Vox Pop segment in a paper that interviewed a Latrobe Valley Coal worker about climate change/carbon tax etc. and it made an impression because his response contained the words [paraphrasing from recollection] "At the end of the day we all need to turn on the air conditioner." Now there's loads of problems with that assertion, including the necessity, the source of electricity etc. but I also see an invitation to empathise, that is too often declined.
People who believe in climate change, as a man-made existential threat to organized human lives, lead their own lives all too often in fear of getting fired. Of being passed over for promotion or career opportunities. Of not paying their debts. And of trying to consume their way into happiness or at least esteem by their peers.
One might feel outrage at the suggestion that Air-conditioning is a sacred human right for which the planet may be destroyed. But as Freud so beautifully said "He does not believe, who does not live in accordance with their beliefs." People all over are living as if not just air-conditioning is a human right, but air-travel, international holidays, 80-20 grinds of chuck, pouring concrete and having no interruption to their supply of electricity is a human right.
If it were the case that somehow through some strange physics what we really needed to address climate change, was to close our Educational sector, rather than Agriculture, Mining, Construction etc. you could bet the demographics of climate skepticism would shift roughly in line with who was being asked to sacrifice the most.
Yeah, personally I believe in top-down rather than bottom up. There's a reality that many people who have gone vegan and will only visit Italy by sailing around the Horn of Africa, are extremely disadvantaged by our economy, which is to say our society is set up to drive these people to extinction and promote people with the largest ecological footprints. But if that's the case and the real change has to happen at a policy/economic incentives level, then the move from E to F (make sacrifices vs make meaningful sacrifices) places an onus on us to change our own politics. Which is to say, to stop demanding the policy platforms from our representatives that have kept our potential allies voting right-wing that want something done on climate change.
As we speak, the Democratic party in America is going through the arduous task of determining who will run against Trump. One of the flaws of this primary process I've noticed, is that the Primaries may be determined by the outcomes of 'Blue' States, large electorates like New York and California, whereas the Presidential race will be determined by Battleground states like Wisconsin, Florida etc. this would pose no problem, if the interests of the safe Blue states and the Battleground states converged. But I'm guessing Silicon Valley and the Rust Belt, don't quite have the same priorities.
Because the Coal miner, or Coal-fired power station worker has a much better vantage point to see the hypocrisy of the Tertiary educated millennial demanding - they give up the only career they've ever known, write down the value of their home, in the town that's lost it's biggest employer and completely reinvent the story of their lives - jumping on the latest Jetstar sale of $70 flights to Tokyo.
Just so, the politicians that stand in the way of climate action can freely observe how hollow a student 'climate strike' is in February so far from the VCE exams they will not be skipping, because there's no way they are giving up on their dream career.
I don't have hard and fast answers. But because I can never unsee those tactics people use to dodge personal responsibility, I see in the discourse of people that accept man-made climate change a lot of denial, a lot of blaming, a lot of excuses and yes, even diversionary tactics. (Lest we forget that a few weeks before bush fires broke out in Eastern Victoria the latest Disney Star Wars installment was for many people a more pressing catastrophe for debate than the fires burning in the state to the north of us.)
Credit where credit's due, a lot of people have donated money, raised awareness of the best fundraisers, volunteered their time and efforts. But these laudable efforts I suspect would be the same dealing with a non-climate change disaster fall out, like a Tsunami for example, and it's entirely possible that in relief efforts climate activists and climate deniers alike mobilize for a common cause.
What gives me hope is that living so close to the front, living in the ash cloud of these catastrophic bushfires while unlikely to budge the dyed-in-the-wool deniers (A), may be moving, myself included Australians from (E) to (F). Or any migration along that spectrum of denial from (B) to (F). People starting to process that the house they are trying to pay off may be devalued by the climate sooner than the tax policy. Or that 2020 is the year to give up red meat, not 2021. That gives me hope.
Just as I feel nobody is more likely to be the undoing of Trump than Trump himself, I am fairly confident no agent will be so persuasive that the climate is changing than the climate itself. Sol the mighty Sun God has returned to voice his wrath, and there's something to be noticed about this God in particular in that he won't spare the true believers either.
It would be helpful if the outright denial would stop and responsibility would be taken, but many people might be surprised at how reluctant they find themselves to take responsibility when the last Climate Denier concedes.
Among those that profess our belief that human activity has altered the climate, the onus is on us to come up with a better conception of our opposition than cartoonish stereotypes that merit no falsification, and keep uttering political messages that only ring true on our ears. We do not want Generals that cannot conceive of defeat, nor soldiers that cannot conceive of anyone rallying to any other banner. We do not want to limit ourselves to simply putting more resources into strategies that continue to prove ineffective. We have an obligation to change our own conversations, to check the map against the ground, and inventory the degree to which we are complicit in our own defeat.
No comments:
Post a Comment