What Can We Do to Combat Climate Change?: One Simple Possible Thing
The Global Risk Report of 2019 by the World Economic Forum last year termed climate change the risk of greatest concern to all humanity. That is a recognition by an official institutional body of the magnitude of what the problem being faced at this moment in time is. At the current rates of reduction of emission pledges by signatory countries, we are on a direct trajectory to three degrees of warming over pre-industrial levels, and the situation can get even worse.
The challenge facing us is vast because of a confluence of two things. At the same time as business organizations whose interests lead them to deny the reality of climate change even as they most affect climate change have been able to be extremely organized in unethical decision making such as purchasing legislation on climate change or spending far more funds on public relations exercises than environmental organizations, the response is scattered and in disarray.
It is not necessarily the case that the majority of the world is part of a kind of worldwide populist conservative agenda. Some people, a deal of people in fact, might be got to care. But a time and generation fed by the rushing zing of swiftly uploading Twitter feeds or quick mass entertainment does not particularly really have the time for things like scientific reports, which for the major part are the means by which information has been attempted to be got out to the community. Again, Greta Thunberg’s valiant efforts with the School Strike for Climate are also something that the public can potentially get distracted from. The ready availability of things to distract aids a significant lack of awareness about the reality of the situation by the public at large, even though mostly everyone broadly knows that there exists such an issue as ‘climate change’.
This is a terrible problem, because it is only the public that can be an effective force in the long run. This is not only because it is the public that exercises the tools of direct democratic procedure through their voting in a great many countries, but also because they can wield a power that is indirect but nonetheless real power for that in voicing their opinion and in attempting to bring pressure upon their elected representatives.
It is a self evident fact that people wanting to affect a pulling back of the world from certain directions that it is heading into cannot financially hold the same might as those on the other side. To put this in perspective, large conglomerates outspent NGOs that had an agenda of trying to raise environmental consciousness by a factor of ten in the period 2000–2016. This is a disturbing development, but it does not signal the end of all possible hope.
The possible solution is to be getting the information out anyhow. This means talking about the problem anywhere, using any means possible. The formats and forums need to move from the traditional and conventional, where clearly certain lobbies hold the economic power, to more creative and ingenious ones.
If Pope Francis can do it in the form of an encyclical (as he did with Laudato si’ shortly before the Paris climate summit of 2015), then we as lesser privileged actors can equally do it through a scribbled blog post on Medium or a non connected comment on YouTube’s community or a vlog just got out there; anything we can do that is an attempt to get the information out and get a conversation going is a positive step to help. And if there is to be a hope, this needs to be a continuous process, one that in the mode of speech attributed to Churchill, necessarily must involve never giving up, never giving up, never giving up.
