If unified national and international commitment could achieve monumental progress during crises like the world wars, a similar level of coordinated mobilization is required today. A wartime economic restructuring transitions society at emergency speed off fossil fuels through massive investments, just transition programs, and an enduring rationing of carbon pollution. Government mandates modernize infrastructure, transportation, manufacturing and agriculture along renewable lines while stimulating sustainable jobs and industries.
International cooperation leverages strengths and resources, from research collaborations to emissions pacts holding all nations accountable. Wealthy emitters aid economic transition of frontline nations suffering first from weather extremes. A progressive carbon fee program funds mitigation efforts while incentivizing structural economic changes. Grants assist vulnerable communities relocating from rising seas and intensifying natural disasters.
Prioritizing collectivity and justice transforms sacrifices into liberating progress for all humankind. With science as the commanding general, nonviolent civil disobedience compels stubborn political systems to catalyze transformations long stalled by obstructionism and misinformation. But societal will aligned behind solutions offers hope where bleakness once prevailed.
The problem being, of course, that conservatives and capitalism are ruining everything. Just look at how we fared at COVID. If we can’t get the entire population to stay at home and wear masks to protect themselves against a global pandemic, how the heck are we supposed to get them to stay at home and wear masks to protect themselves against climate change?
It seems that certain groups would rather literally see the world burn than admit they were wrong and have to do something about it.
If we can’t get the entire population to stay at home and wear masks to protect themselves against a global pandemic, how the heck are we supposed to get them to stay at home and wear masks to protect themselves against climate change?
Good question. I know people who never had any problems trusting medication and vaccines, but then with COVID they suddenly parroted the idea that masks and vaccines don’t work. A few days ago a friend said the famous line that “Ukraine was invented in the 20th century to damage Russia, they’re actually Russians”. I tried to tell him the story of how Kievan Rus’ came to be from a Norse people to a primarily Slavic state, and how modern Russia isn’t the same thing as medieval Rus’, but he cut me off mid sentence and said that he knows that story and doesn’t believe it.
You literally can’t say anything to that. With every conspiracy theory, you can say, show and prove whatever you want, but you will always be defeated by the answer: “I don’t believe that”, and you can’t argue belief away with facts. Also the same people who said that the Earth isn’t getting warmer are now saying that it’s due to natural cycles where the Earth is closer to the Sun.
What I’m trying to say is that a lot of people take these things (global warming, covid, war in Ukraine, the EU, NATO…) personally and emotionally, not on a factual basis. Hell, some people deny that we had an air pollution problem in Serbia when you could literally see and smell the disguisting air yourself.
How to get through to these people before it’s too too late is beyond me, but an information campaign wouldn’t do much because you could give me the biggest and best scientific report about human effects on the climate, signed by every scientist on the planet, and I could just say “I don’t believe that” and that’s it. The question we need to answer is: “Why do people get so angry about man made climate change?”
My dad is a boomer and up until the last year or so, he was one of those classic “the earth is just going through cycles” climate change deniers. The weather we’ve had in the last year has changed him, we’ve had multiple huge storms where he would say he’s never seen that in his life, and he’s lived in the same area for over 60 years. He’s now convinced that we as humans are completely screwed and the climate is fucked. And he’s right.
That’s just the denial to doomer pipeline which is part of the same propaganda machine.
The truth is we can stop it getting worse, and even reverse some of the damage. The costs to do so are miniscule compared to the average oil war. The people telling him what to think don’t want that though.
I wish I had your experience. We also had unprecedented storms these last few months (I was caught once in the thick of it when I was outside, I almost drowned in the rain since it poured so hard, never have I seen such storms), and people started blaming HAARP. Funnily enough, I started reading Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” after writing that comment and literally in the first chapter he says:
[12] Nevertheless, Rhetoric is useful, because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible. Further, in dealing with certain persons, even if we possessed the most accurate scientific knowledge, we should not find it easy to persuade them by the employment of such knowledge. For scientific discourse is concerned with instruction [demonstration, logical proof], but in the case of such persons instruction is impossible; our proofs and arguments must rest on generally accepted principles, as we said in the Topics when speaking of converse with the multitude.
Another translation says that instructing “masses of people” is impossible, but in any case, the point stands: demonstrating the truth with facts is not the same as convincing someone that something is true, and as Nathan J. Robinson said in his excellent article The Intellectual We Deserve:
Another part of it, though, is that academics have been cloistered and unhelpful, and the left has failed to offer people a coherent political alternative. Jordan Peterson is right that people are adrift and in need of meaning. Many of them lap up his lectures because he offers something resembling insight, and promises the secrets to a good life. It’s not actually insight, of course; it’s stuff everybody already knows, dressed up in gobbledegook. But it feels like something. Tabatha Southey was cruel to call Jordan Peterson “the stupid man’s smart person.” He is the desperate man’s smart person, he feeds on angst and confusion. Who else has a serious alternative? Where are the other professors with accessible and compelling YouTube channels, with books of helpful advice and long Q&A sessions with the public? No wonder Peterson is so popular: he comes along and offers rules and guidance in a world of, well, chaos. Just leave it to Dad, everything will be alright.
Yeah I was impressed he actually did change his opinion. He’s weird like that though, like he’s definitely a bit of the old school boomer racist when he talks about black people, Asians, Arabs etc. but, his last job before he retired he worked with a bunch of people of all different races. And he would come home saying like “Oh yeah I worked with a bunch of Koreans today, they are all such great guys!” Or he’d tell me about how helpful and nice some Indian guy was to him, or how some black guy was so nice and such a hard worker.
But then he would go right back to blaming immigrants for everything, or thinking that black people are coming to torch their neighbourhood. He’s not actually racist to the people he meets in real life, just the theoretical shit he hears on the news.
Tabatha wasn’t being cruel, she was being observant. Because that’s exactly what Jordan Peterson is: a failed psychologist who became a book writer and pseudo intellectual. He has no original thought and his ideas don’t hold any weight.
Well, that’s exactly what the quote says. The fact that so many people turn to people like him, despite them having nothing to do with reality, shows us that real scientists and thinkers are evidently not reaching out to people in a receptive way. Thus, getting people to realize the dangers of man made climate change cannot be done solely with information and scienetific clout, because those who deny it are not in denial due to factual reasons.
Peterson is just a great example of that: if millions of people are more inclined to listen to a confused man (to put it mildly) ramble incoherently about everything and anything, rather than people who are specialized and know what they’re talking about, we’re going about it the wrong way. If we’re ever going to get the vast majority to realize what climate change is, we need a new approach, and the discovery of that approach could stem from understanding why someone who has nothing of value to say can become so influential.
Whether these people that follow them are desperate, stupid, confused, angry or something else is worth asking only insofar as we can derermine why they feel that their problems are addressed by clowns like Peterson. Because, at least in my experience, people who deny climate change get outright angry when you try to convince them otherwise. Even if you mind your own business, some people get triggered by the fact that I carry empty plastic bottles to a recycling container rather than throwing them in the general garbadge bin. It’s obviousy not a factual disagreement, but an emotional one. That’s why they were addressed as “desperate”, and not “stupid”.
Speaking of people’s attitudes and older generations, I’m hopeful that general desire to act will really increase over time:
- As more people experience new weather extremes, there will be more pressure on those in power to act.
- Old voters too stubborn to change their beliefs and too selfish to care about something that will only affect their tombstone will die off.
- Misinformation campaigns from fossil fuel corporations will decrease as renewables cut into their funding.
For that to happen we’ll need a Pearl Harbor level climate event. That means thousands of people dying at once and in one place in the continental US. The spread out Covid deaths just don’t have enough psychological impact.
While on the magnitude of hundreds rather than thousands, we literally just had one whole town burning down, and in the same state as Pearl Harbor, no less. If that’s not enough “psychological impact” to wake the masses up, I don’t even wish to imagine what will.
I completely agree with you but it seems like it wasn’t big enough for some.
Without 24/7 news screaming about something, it’s not regarded as a problem.
Honestly there are three players, which need to change. That is the US, China and the EU. That is about half of global emissions and more then half of global GDP. So if all three would work together the rest would easily be forced to follow.
The US has a massive climate change denying party. Even thou it is not in office right now, they still control multiple states. The Democrats are a bit better, but hardly convinced to stop climate change and only want to do things, which do not hurt, so no emissions trading scheme with hard caps or the like. At least a strong investment into green technology is going on and some states run some good policies, which slowly move things in the right direction.
China is building a lot of green technology, but is also consuming half the worlds coal and is by far the largest emitter of green house gases. Really hard to pretend they are serious about climate change, but the population is shrinking and the economy is growing slower, which means maybe the green technologies slow down emissions growth a bit more in the coming years. A full recession would however really help a lot. However the party hardly cares about the climate.
The EU has an actual plan and the lowest per capita emissions of the lot. However it is also in a position were change is becoming painfull and politicans hate pain. However a lot of pain is going to come as one of the few emissions trading system is in the EU and that caps emissions towards actually going below global average emissions. Also some foreign policy is helpfull, but even that is changing as gas is needed to replace Russian needs. However propably the best of the lot.
The rest is mostly poor or to weak to do something alone. Japan does not seem to care about much, the UK is working on degrowth for the stupidest reason ever, but Brexit is reducing emissions. India is building a lot of solar and seems to be a bit aware of the issues with coal, but developing the c ountry is more important. Brazil is actually in a really good position in many ways, but still is slowly cutting down the Amazon rainforest. Russia actually wants climate change. SA and the other OPEC countries are dependent on fossil fuel sales, they hate the idea of it.
In other words the best the lot could come up with to date is the Paris Climate Agreement. Great stuff, but yeah hardly international cooperation in a war like alliance. Best we can hope for is some country bullying others into reducing emissions.
I also think it’s foolhardy to naively assume that once the older generations start dying off due to old age, things are just automatically going to become better and more progressive without us having to lift a finger. Wrong! I’ve observed conservative brain rot already starting to infect my peers. And while I’m fortunate and privileged enough to live in a progressive blue state that (relatively speaking) cares about the Earth, unfortunately, very few communities around the globe have such luxury.
I think better trust in government is what we need. But the way things stand, we are so not ready for this. And if democracy doesn’t work in getting people to accept and comply with climate regulations that are bound to follow - and at this point that’s much more of a “when” than an “if” - leaders maybe shouldn’t be afraid to use force.
Hopefully at that point, we can keep a lid on things better than we did during COVID. But who am I kidding.
We need an alliance of progressive countries willing to lower their own emissions and using their influence to get other on board. Right now the EU is doing some of that, by including climate goals in trade deals, enforcing high enviromental standards, which causes the Brussels Effect, setting up emissions based import tariffs and the like. That kind of works, as the EU is rich and only has a bit higher then average emissions, but they are generally falling.
So there are good things happening, but a global alliance with all countries agreeing on a hard strategy is just not going to happen. Some countries will lead and others will follow freely or unfortunatly partly by force.
People need to be educated. Each advertisement should be replaced by communications related to raising awareness of climate, ecological and environmental causes. Who knows maybe some people (and other species) would benefit from it.
But the merchants will never let it be…
Maybe we should start naming ecological disasters, such as forest fires, after conservative politicians.
Is there a death counter yet?
We need an incredibly heavy emissions tax that will bankrupt companies if they don’t comply. There’s no negotiation because not complying will literally kill the planet we all share for their personal profit. They are putting profit above humanity as a whole.
This is not war. Not yet.
Why? Because there’s is no consensus. Until that is achieved nothing really will happen.
So first thousands (in a short time span) must die. After that the consensus will come and the war footing will follow.
You really aren’t going to like how much fossil fuel is burned in an actual war…
OP is talking about how the mentality of war can be utilized against climate change, and you’re just responding with irrelevant whataboutism
