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The Reckoning: Democracy vs. Climate Change
We can’t address climate change as individuals. Effective solutions will go nowhere without broad public support.
For the most part, we’re really good at understanding how dangerous the threat from climate change is. We understand that it’s making weather more extreme; the colds more cold, the hots more hot, the storms… stormier. The floods are going from scary to biblical. Biodiversity is threatened, extinctions are accelerating, desertification is advancing, and the land mass of certain countries is flat-out disappearing. Climate refugees are officially a thing now. The resource scarcity is already leading to war in certain parts of the world. For those of us who “believe” in climate change, the threats to our political systems, food, water, air, quality of life, and perhaps even the ability to live at all on this planet, are more or less self evident.
However, I’ve noticed something interesting.
Despite our mental grasp of the size of the challenge, we’re not very good at appreciating the size of the necessary solutions. And I find myself wondering if this lack of appreciation is genuine; I’ve talked before about the difficulty we all have in distinguishing the difference between two really big numbers. Or… if we’re intentionally deluding ourselves out of fear and despair that, because of corporate-driven…
