What story to tell about climate ?
# 3011
An important issue is whether should we tell it (climate future) as we see it, or make the story worse for self-aggrandizement or to scare others into action ? Or to focus on positive lines of action to encourage their participation? Part of the more negatively inclined cite the observation that many seize on positive paths in order to say”See, it’s all gonna be alright” and act not. We need the philosophers, poets, novelists, and historians to advise us. But where are they? As it is both the positive inclined and the negative folks are basically being accused of bad faith, and are demotivating on both sides. It may be that both negative views and positive ones are de-motivating.
.Psychology can be suggestive about what motivates people to work harder, but climate conversations are hard since we in fact don’t know what is possible. Strong thinking for many (I doubt the existence 100% mentioned above) led to the view that we cannot make it. Part of their argument is “ But how many would it take, who mines the iron and high-grade silicon now needed and transportation costs?” No good answers, and so on with example after example of plans that are not vetted as to cost, scale, co2 production in the manufacturing.
Julie, isnt religion, like science, a mixed bag? Religion gave us humanism along with witches, and science gave us penicillin along with the atomic bomb and thalidomide. There is a Chinese saying i like -
everything has two handles, beware of the wrong one.
I fear that religious thinking has doomed us. The threat of flood meant nothing to Noah's neighbors. Such warning did not work then and they are not working now. At one end of the spectrum we have people who think they believe in "god" but can't discern his/her voice. At the other end of the spectrum we have the faithful who believe all this chaos is the will of "god" and will usher in a glorious afterlife. They cannot discern the beauty of this existence and have been corrupted into seeing nothing but sin and ugliness here, preferring to abandon what we have for an imaginary future - either among the angels or among the stars on another planet. To riff on Adrianne Maree Brown, we are trapped by the (flawed) imaginations of other people.