Good morning John. So at this point, it’s pretty easy to
not know what to think. And maybe there’s a little bit of internet
sociology mechanics to that, like people say “here’s a good idea!”
and then very soon afterwards there will be a movement of
“no that’s a bad idea.” Followed of course by me and the rest of the
world saying “I guess we’ll never know.” There’s also something really
normal about this because of course we won’t ever know.
Like when it comes to big hard problems, even if we solve them really
successfully we won’t have solved them in the best possible way.
There’s just too many ways to do it. But the thing that grinds my gears
about all this is how devoid of data and analysis these conversations
tend to be. They tend to focus mostly on how the arguments make people feel,
which I get, this is how rhetoric works. But it’s nice to have data to
support what you’re saying. I’m being too abstract here and
I don’t need to be. So we have known for the entire 41 years of my
existence that climate change is going
to impose some pretty devastating instability on our world. And yes there
are still people who through greed or bias or ignorance don’t think
that that’s a thing. But we know they’re wrong. What we don’t know
is what exactly to do about it. On a personal level I don’t know what
I should do about it. More complicatedly, I don’t know what you should
do about it. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, none of us know
what we would do if we were the only person in the world with power
to decrease the impacts of climate change in such a way that it would
have the least amount of negative impacts on existing people and
have the most positive impact on people of the future. But let’s
just stick to ourselves, there have been some conversations about what
people should do individually to interface with the climate crisis.
And we’ve probably all seen that thing going around that’s like,
“It doesn’t matter what individuals do because 90% of the emissions
are done by 50 companies” or something like that. Which is a nonsense
thought right, because if those companies closed up shop and none of them
ever did anything again, billions of people would die. Like you do still
have to put gasoline into the truck that brings food to the store.
Like at least that, and also the tractors, and also the energy
used to heat and cool homes so that you don’t die. But you get it,
you get this. So that’s a fun, sticky idea that resolves anyone of their
personal responsibility. It feels good, it resonates with people. It doesn’t
make any sense. But there is a more compelling version of this
idea that goes something like, “look we’ve got to give up on
this personal responsibility stuff because this needs to not be
individual solutions, it needs to be system wide solutions.
And focusing on individuals is distracting us from putting pressure on governments
and corporations to make the actual changes that have actual impacts.
And that idea, I would guess, really resonates with you, it really resonates
with me. It’s logical, it makes a lot of sense. I have no idea if it’s true though,
and research shows that it’s not. It turns out that one of the most important
ways that we show that something is an emergency is by acting like
it’s an emergency. If we aren’t actually acting like there’s a problem,
our brains have a hard time remembering that there is a problem.
And also the people around us have fewer opportunities to see that
there are people acting as if there is a crisis. Social scientists have
studied this and they’ve found that people taking individual action
leads to more pushes for policy change, not less. The original
idea is that if you focus more on individual action there will be
less push for policy change, it turns out to be the opposite
of that. Leor Hackel and Gregg Sparkman said in their 2018 article,
“People don’t spring into action just because they see smoke; they
spring into action because they see others rushing in with water.”
So taking action has effects on people around you, it also has
effects on you. It emphasizes within an individual that these
things matter. What science is showing is that taking individual
action never results in people being more lenient on systems.
It does the opposite. It empowers the people taking the action and
their neighbors to push for more systemic change. So the good news is,
we do have hardworking people doing research to tell us whether
the things we read on the internet are wrong. The bad news is that
if the tweet makes us feel good we don’t tend to spend a lot of time doing
a bunch of research to tell us whether or not it actually
is good. John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.