What an awful list. Only numbers 2, 3 (partial), 8, 9 and 18 (partial) are actually concrete actions you can take. The rest are either extremely abstract (thoughts you can think rather than actions you can do) or are impossible for one person acting alone (or indeed for 100,000 people acting together).
Off to a stellar start, article. I’ll get on that.
You all can thank me later.
Wow, that was an epically bad list. Are we sure it’s not a parody?
Unbelievable, what a list. How can one publish that and think they help people with it?
Yeah I was kind of thinking along the lines of:
- compact your trash
- ride a bike to work
etc. Not, redistribute the wealth. yeah.
Also, it’s not clear to me how that will help with climate change. I’m not saying it won’t, but given what the list is about, I’d have thought it would come with some justification.
Well, there is also
19.Truly addressing the crisis will require building people power on a scale that the world has never seen before.
20.Build that power. I wish you so much more than luck.
Which makes me think the writer recognizes the … difficulty … in some of the previous items.
I mean, seriously, #1? It’s only been a few years since Das Kapital was published, can’t we just be patient a bit longer?
“Hilarious” doesn’t begin to describe this. I expect some conservative websites to link to the original very shortly with a title “Green activism inaction” or the like.
I don’t think that makes any difference to the author. If the goal is to Finally Get Socialism Right This Time, and opposing climate change is the front for that goal, then whether or not the climate actually improves is only tangentially important.
What makes this list different from most others I see, is he doesn’t trivialize the problem down to something we can bookmark for later.
As I’ve heard it said, If each of us do just a little bit for the environment, it will all add up to… not nearly enough.
Nothing on this list looks unrealistic to me, when I consider the nonzero possibility that we’re looking at an extinction level event. The stakes are really that high. So the question becomes, how hard are you willing to work to stay alive? (As a citizen, not an individual prepper stockpiling gold and ammo)
The hard truth is, we can do nothing about climate change without an effective political apparatus. Once we build that tool, though, it will be just as useful for solving other real problems as well.
Let’s put it to a vote. How many of us are in favor of a runaway greenhouse effect? Your ballot is not a ticky box on a page, it’s embodied in the choices you make once you decide to take this threat seriously.
I’m not in favor of a runaway greenhouse effect. But I am in favor of only those solutions which are evidence-based.
In the context of this article, the evidence I’d like to see relates to whether countries which have centrally planned and managed economies are better at avoiding (or remedying) environmental damage than are countries with market-based economies.
The problem is that the sorts of people who would take this list at face value are exactly the sorts who DO NOT HAVE political clout at any level, and with the way our (U.S.) political system works will not have that clout any time in the near future.
I have a relative who is doing more than 99% of the population to solve the problem, by meeting with policy makers behind closed doors to teach them how they can make the right policy decisions without losing clout, funding, or votes. It’s a long-term process, and very subtle. He does not look or act like Occupy Anything…that’s how he gets in the door. And he’s not trying to upend the political system or the “free market” either. Pie-in-the-sky ideals don’t get you past the reception desk. He’s working with what we have, because that’s the baseline we’ve got to work from.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
I am. Can I get that with a 1,000 year flood and maybe some locusts, too? I’m feeling a lot like this guy re: climate change:
[quote]“4. Lay off the policeman, the commodities trader, the real estate agent and the speculator in your head.”[/quote]Yeah this article is just nonsense that is supposed to prove a point with the not-clever-whatsoever bullshit last four bullets. This list is the type of thing the people ignoring climate change point to and laugh at all the dumb hippies trying to scare everyone, because this is the type of thing that deserves to be mocked openly.
It doesn’t promote discussion, it doesn’t promote cooperation, and it offers nothing except affirming stereotypes of protesters.
Hmm. Perhaps it was written by the devious minions of the Koch Brothers? False flag! False flag!
The problem with lists like that is that they make you feel better while really doing very, very little. Even if we could get 25% of the US and European population to do those things, it would have very little impact on the actual amount of CO2 being pumped into the air.
Of course, the original list, as everyone says, is just a ridiculous waste of time.
I wish there were a resource for what actually to do about climate change, instead of this crap. For example, getting politicians elected who takes climate change seriously will be many, many times more impactful than biking to work for a year.
With that in mind, I just started a thread to crown-source a real list: List of actually-meaningful things we can do about climate change
From the article:
14. Don’t blame the poor — (blahblahblah)
15. Again — don’t blame the poor. Seriously.
Of course, few things are better for lifting societies out of abject poverty than cheap, abundant energy. It goes hand in hand with better health, sanitation, education, reduced overpopulation, you name it.
But is it breaking the rules of climate activism to mention this??
From what I know of the Kochs, they don’t have one-fifth the sense of humor needed to write a delicious self-parody like this one.
I suspect the author is part of the “anti-growth” movement, Their idea is that capitalism is responsible for climate change because it encourages non-essential consumption as part of the profit motive. While they have a point, it’s not like countries like the USSR that tried (not very successfully) to reorganize production more fairly really had such a great environmental record – in many ways theirs was worse than the West’s.
