Man-made climate change is a major global problem that has been on the news for many years. The issue is notoriously difficult to solve, as humanity has tried to do so since it has been first discovered and hasn’t managed to get it done. But it doesn’t have to be so difficult. What if I told you that there is a simple way of solving climate crisis?
The biggest hurdle to any solutions to the climate change problem is the resistance from the people who don’t like the proposed solutions. But there is actually a way of solving climate crisis that wouldn’t generate much resistance at all. And once the biggest hurdle is eliminated, the rest is easy.
So, I have compiled a list of eight very simple principles that, if applied, are almost guaranteed to solve the climate stalemate. Of course, nobody is saying that those are easy principles to apply. The concepts are simple to grasp, but they are not necessarily easy to implement.
Nothing that is worthwhile is easy. But this set of rules is bound to provide a solution to climate crisis that almost everyone would be happy with. And, in any case, these principles are much easier to apply than any other solution to the problem that was tries so far.
So, let’s begin.
1. Don’t demonize the people who don’t agree with you
Pretty much everybody is familiar with Greta Thunberg’s “How dare you!” speech at United Nations. If you aren’t, you can watch it here. In her speech, she demonizes the entire generations of people who came before her and holds them responsible for all the climate problems she is trying to inspire people to solve.
But speeches like this never produce the intended results. At best, they are nothing more than an act of preaching to the chore. People who already agree with the message will say how great the speech was, while the ones who don’t agree with it will not suddenly change their mind.
However, one really negative unintended consequence of such messages is that people who are on the fence about the issue of climate change may get repelled by the message and start seeing the activists in a very negative light. This is why there are many people who strongly criticize Greta Thunberg and her message. And those who criticize her may follow the line of though like this:
Yes, there are some environmental problems that need to be solved. But I don’t see why this 16 year old who looks like 12 year old should be taken seriously when she mentions them.
How dare she say bad things about myself or my generation? She doesn’t even has any significant life experience, yet she believes that it’s OK for her to tell us, those who do have life experience, what to do.
And she is obviously trying to bypass the logic and play with people’s emotions. How is it even possible for her to be knowledgeable about climate science at such a young age?
So, even though I do care about the environment, I will never be part of this “green” movement. And why should I be, when prominent figures from that movement openly tell the world that they hate people like me, while not even presenting any rational arguments for their cause?
And how can you blame people who think this way? Ego is something that everyone of us has and is invested in. If the ego of a particular person is attacked, the most natural reaction for that person would be to defend it.
Yet, Greta is far from being the only person who demonizes entire groups of people for allegedly being responsible for man-made climate change. This kind of rhetoric can be heard in environmentalist movement all the time. Meat eaters are evil. So are the car owners. And the list goes on.
And yes, the people in your circle might applaud you when you make such statements, but nobody outside your tribe will. You will just repel people who you disagree with on some minor issues who could otherwise be supportive of your greater cause.
So, the best thing you can do for your cause is to seek to understand the people you disagree with rather than voice a blanket disapproval of them. Or just talk about the climate change without pointing a finger at anyone.
2. Create as little nuisance to the public as possible
This principle follows on from the previous one. Getting in people’s way and creating obstructions may feel like a right thing to do, but it certainly won’t win those people over.
Yes, if you block the roads on a major scale, your actions will be on the news. And yes, more people will be made aware of your cause. But the same principle will apply as before – those who already agree with you will support your actions, while those who disagree with you will disagree even more.
But, perhaps, the worst outcome would be that the people who are directly affected by the disruptions you have caused will turn away from you, even if they were your enthusiastic supporters prior to this.
Imagine that someone worked hard for several years so he could finally afford to go on holiday. He has already paid a chunky sum of hard-earned money for the flight. But, as the long awaited day arrives, he is prevented from going on a holiday, because the airport is blocked.
Imagine that someone urgently needed an ambulance, but the roads are blocked by the climate change protesters. Ambulance can’t get to there on time, so that person dies. What if this was your close friend or relative?
Or you can simply imagine not being able to get home for several hours, because massive gridlocks appeared all over the city. If this happened to you, what would you think your opinion of the protesters be?
And things like these happen all the time during environmentalist protests. For example, a man could not get on time to see his dying father because roads around Bristol were blocked by the Extinction Rebellion. When such stories get into the news, it’s not the publicity that environmental activists would want.
So, by all means, organize protest and make the public aware of climate crisis. Make yourself visible. But once you’re start getting into people’s way and causing nuisance, you won’t win any people over and you will probably loose a good number of your existing supporters.
3. Assume that your opponents have good intentions unless proven otherwise
But why do environmental activists often feel justified to demonize certain categories of people and get into people’s ways? It appears that this happens because the activists often view the people who disagree with them as stupid at best or evil at worst. And such people, apparently, deserve to be schooled and inconvenienced.
But the situation is way more complex than this. What you’ll probably find is that the vast majority of people have good intentions when it comes to the environment. They just don’t see things from the same perspective as environmental activists do.
When someone doesn’t agree with certain policies that were proposed to tackle climate change, it doesn’t always mean that they don’t see climate change as an issue and don’t want it addressed. Perhaps they just don’t see those policies as effective.
For example, Bjorn Lonborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book that every environmental activist must read, explain in his blog posts why many of the popular solutions to global warming are unlikely to produce any meaningful result, despite costing huge sums of money. And he is someone who identifies as an environmentalist and cares deeply about the environment.
A CEO of a company in the oil industry might be fully aware of climate change and be concerned about it. Yes, he may still not support certain actions to address the problem. But the reason for this is not necessarily a hypocrisy. Perhaps, he just believes that the consequences of stopping the usage of fossil fuels would be way more severe than the consequences of climate change.
Many people wouldn’t support the actions to tackle climate change because they simply don’t know much about climate change, while the actions seem to be highly intrusive. And these people can’t be blamed for their opinion either. Nobody knows everything and if someone doesn’t know how greenhouse gasses work, it doesn’t mean that they are stupid. And it appears that shouting “How dare you!” is not the best way to educate this people. People won’t just start to believe that whole ecosystems are collapsing because this is what a 16 year old girl said.
And the list goes on. If someone doesn’t support the actions of the Extinction Rebellion, it doesn’t mean that the person doesn’t care about the environment. If someone doesn’t support certain actions on climate change, it doesn’t mean that their are brainwashed and have their own agenda. And if someone doesn’t support one particular solution, it doesn’t mean that they will not support a different solution.
Of course, there are people out there who place gratification of their desires above the environment. For example, there are some sociopathic company directors that are willingly destroying the environment, because it’s profitable. But such people are in minority. Sociopaths make up just about 4% of the general population.
So indeed, there are some people who are genuinely malicious when it comes to the environment. But you can’t just automatically assume that every person who doesn’t agree with you on how climate crisis should be tackled and how severe of a problem it is is malicious. Assume that their are not, unless they prove otherwise.
4. Appeal to people’s self interests
True altruism is very rare, if it even exists at all. Most people belong to one of the two categories – they are either selfish or they pretend that they aren’t. And there is nothing wrong with looking after your best interests, as long as you don’t harm other people.
This is precisely the reason why most of proposed actions designed to address climate change have failed. When people are asked to make sacrifices while seemingly not being offered anything in return that would make their individual lives better, people will not support such proposals.
With technological progress, people are used to getting better and better things. In the long term, the actions designed to address climate change are supposed to improve people’s lives. But an average person will not think long term. This is why, to gain public support for environmental actions, you would need to appeal to people’s self interests here and now.
And it’s not a hard thing to do. To make a start, the existing proposed ideas can be reframed while being presented to the public. For example, rather than telling people to drive less and cycle more to save the planet, you can tell them of all the personal benefits that cycling will give them. These may include not having to spend money on petrol, not having to endure gridlocks, being more healthy and feeling a lot better.
The same can be said about how people heat their houses. If you tell them that it’s better for the environment to keep the temperature lower than what they are accustomed to, they may verbally agree with you in order to appear virtuous, but when they’ll get back home, the majority of them will still set the temperature to what’s comfortable for them. However, if there is a repeated campaign that vividly tells people how much other things they will be able to afford to buy and how much their immune system will improve if they’ll keep the temperature down, a good number of them will listen and comply.
As well as presenting the existing ideas to address climate change as something that would improve people’s lives rather than make them harder, some new ideas can be introduced to make people willingly change their behavior. For example, with the combination of incentives and technological innovations, electric cars can be made a lot easier to purchase. Elon Musk has already been successful in achieving this with Tesla.
There is also one workplace change that will substantially reduce the production of greenhouse gasses while benefiting everyone involved. This is known as remote working.
A lot of office-based jobs, such as a software developer, don’t really require anything other than a computer with the internet access. So, in theory, any person in such a profession can work remotely, unless they have to meet clients or cannot take the equipment home due to various restrictions, such as a requirement to have a special security clearance.
For the employees, it saves a lot of time and commuting costs, while reduced commuting is beneficial for the environment. For the employer, it eliminates the requirement to have a large office and it reduces utility bills. There is no constrained on which areas prospective employees can be hired from. Everybody wins in this situation, so the benefits of remote working is something that companies need to be informed about.
Finally, an area where climate science lacks is access to the best talent with science or engineering degrees. Low salaries is the key reason why the field tends to only attract either those people who are genuinely passionate about the environment or those scientists and engineers who aren’t good enough to establish a career in the fields that pay more.
The latter is the reason why certain intelligent and rational people are skeptical about the quality of outputs that comes from climate science. More on it later. However, the field can be completely revamped by increasing the salaries. This will then attract the best talent.
The main reasons why the salaries in climate science are low is, once again, due to perceived low utility of climate science to the public. Other than producing scary predictions about the future, climate scientists don’t tend to produce anything that would improve people’s lives here and now. But this is something that can be changed.
Quite a lot of things that climate scientists do can indeed benefit the public and can be easily monetized. For example, climate models are built by supercomputers and use some other advanced technologies, but very often scientists who build them have only rudimentary programming or data science skills.
But climate modelling is an example of a great problem that can be used for developing a powerful artificial intelligence on. The problem is sufficiently complex to make it useful, while huge swaths of real data from the past can be used to validate the models. So, if the whole climate modelling business was reframed as a research to build a powerful AI, while having good quality climate models as a byproduct of it, climate scientists that would be involved in building such models would be paid very well, as data scientists are.
After all, climate models can’t be monetized and purely rely on grants with very limited budget. A powerful AI, however, can be monetized very easily and there is a huge demand for it.
And that is only one way of attracting top talent to the field of climate research. There are many other ways, but the principle would be similar – make climate research a byproduct of a monetizable commercial activity.
There are many examples of public goods coming out as a byproduct of the commercial process. For example, while internet came to be as a by-product of military research, private IT corporations are jointly working on improving it, as the shared worldwide information infrastructure benefits them all. IT industry produced organizations such as IETF that come up with standards that everyone communicating over the internet is aught to use.
So, if IT industry can develop internet into a high-speed information highway we know today, there is no reason why climate science can’t come up with a system of tackling climate change, while producing many other useful things while such system is being developed. The only difference between IT industry and climate science is that everyone wants to work in the IT industry, while hardly anyone is currently interested in climate science. And money is probably the key.
5. Focus on solving non-controversial issues related to climate change
Once big problem with the theory of anthropogenic climate change is that there are lot of people who either don’t believe in it at all, or don’t believe that it’s a major problem. And not all of such people are irrational “climate change deniers”. There are many intelligent people who hold these believes because this is a rational conclusion they came to.
There are many reasons why some intelligent people don’t see climate change as a big problem. One of them was mentioned above – some people mistrust the quality of output from a field of science where the pay is low, which, therefore, is unlikely to attract top talent. But this is far from being the only reason.
For example, many of those who do believe that climate change is a serious problem claim that 97% of scientists believe so. To which, informed skeptics would reply that it still leaves 3% of well qualified scientists that don’t believe it is a problem. This means that the theory has some significant gaps in it.
Other skeptics dig deeper to find out where the figure of 97% came from. And it appears that it came from a paper written by John Cook and others in 2013 that analyzed 11,944 climate abstracts from 1991 to 2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’. 66% of such papers were completely neutral on the cause of Global Warming, while of those that weren’t neutral, 97% believed that humans were a cause of Global Warming.
Some skeptics have criticized the research methodology that produced these figures. However, even the ones that accept the figure would argue that accepting man-made climate change as a scientific fact is not the same thing as believing that climate change is a major problem.
And there are many other reasons why people are skeptical about the severity of climate change. Some remember countless other predictions about impending environmental catastrophes that never came true. Some are aware of Climategate that exposed private emails from climate scientists that appear to contain evidence of unethical and potentially fraudulent behavior.
Debating whether Cook’s research on scientific consensus was valid and whether emails from Climategate do indeed show fraudulent behavior is beyond the scope of our discussion. What is important to know is that there are many people who are skeptical about the idea that climate change is a serious problem. And these people aren’t just denying reality because it doesn’t correspond to their values or because they are too scared. And it happens that shouting “How dare you!” will not make them change their mind.
People will never agree to do any sacrifices that are necessary to solve a problem that they don’t see as a problem. The good news is, however, that there are many non-controversial environmental problems out there that can be solved by taking exactly the same actions as tackling climate change would.
Air pollution is the best example of this. It is something that can be clearly seen and smelled. It’s impossible to be skeptical about it. And if the car exhaust fumes smell bad, it would not be difficult to convince the population about their dangers to human health.
So, if air pollution is what environmental activists would focus on instead of climate change, cities and industrial sites would be cleared of pollutants in no time. There probably are people who don’t care about air pollution, just like there are people who willingly smoke despite being aware of all the dangers of the habit. But, unlike it is with climate change, there won’t be anyone who would be actively resisting the actions to tackle air pollution.
And the actions would include removing the cars with internal combustion engines from the roads and replacing coal-powered power plants with cleaner options. Those are exactly the same actions environmental activists were promoting for decades to tackle climate change with virtually no success.
Another visible and non-controversial environmental problem is plastic waste. We have all seen how unsightly it makes the countryside and how much hazard it presents to the wildlife. So, it will be unlikely to find anyone who would say that it isn’t an issue.
And because plastic is made from the same fossil fuels as the combustible substances that release greenhouse gasses, finding ways to replace plastic products with alternatives will reduce demand for fossil fuels.
So, if environmental activists can put their focus on air pollution and plastic waste instead of climate change, the solutions to these two problems alone would result in substantially less greenhouse gasses being produced. So, indirectly, tackling these problems will probably do more to address climate change than would focusing on climate change as the main issue.
And if, by any chance, climate skeptics are right and climate change isn’t really a huge problem, then no effort will be wasted anyway. Real non-controversial environmental problems would be solved.
6. Embrace technological solutions
So far, technological progress objectively improved lives of people in the society. And there is no reason why it can’t find the solution to climate change as well.
Technological solutions are very different from other solutions. They will not force people to make any sacrifices. On the contrary, they will improve people’s lives and will make it easier for people to act in ways that is better for the environment.
With the success of Tesla, Elon Musk has already done quite a lot for the environment. He has turned electric car from something that used to cost a lot of money and looked like a shopping trolley to something that looks really elegant, is affordable and people actually want to buy.
And the success of Tesla forced competitors to do the same. These days, even car makers that were always known for large engine sizes and excessive fuel consumption have started producing fully electric cars. E Class Mercedes is a great example.
Of course, while getting more electric cars on the road will certainly tackle the issue of air pollution, their full benefits to the environment will only be uncovered when the electricity that powers them is produced by sources that don’t generate any greenhouse gasses.
Unfortunately wind and solar are far from being the best options to replace coal and gas power plants with. While they don’t produce any pollutants, they cause whole range of other environmental issues. First of all, powering even a moderately sized town will require a huge area to be covered in either wind turbines or photovoltaic cells. Secondly, both of these options are highly dependent on the weather, so neither of them will be able to provide reliable electric supply at all times.
Fortunately, a technology already exists that requires only a small area, is highly reliable and doesn’t produce any greenhouse gasses. This technology is nuclear power. And as well as having all the benefits above, it can generate as much energy from an amount of fuel that can fit on a finger tip as would otherwise require thousands of barrels of oil.
Many environmentalists object to nuclear power and see it as an unsafe option, as it has previously created some major ecological disasters in Chernobyl and Fukushima. However, those two disasters are extremely unlikely to ever happen again.
Chernobyl disaster has happened because Soviet authorities wanted to save on costs and made some dangerous shortcuts during the construction of the nuclear plant. Fukushima disaster has happened because the plant was not insufficiently protected from tsunamis, which ended up damaging one of its reactors. However, both of these incidents have resulted in more rigorous safety standards being applied to nuclear power plants worldwide. Existing power plants were retrofitted to comply with the new standards. So, it is very likely that disasters like these are well in the past.
There is also an issue with nuclear waste. However, as the technology develops, it becomes possible to recycle more and more of it. France, for example, is already recycling a lot of it’s nuclear waste and producing only small quantities of waste that is currently unrecyclable.
Another benefit of wider acceptance of nuclear power is that it is the technology that will, one day, lead us to a completely safe and efficient way of powering our societies – nuclear fusion.
Conventional power plants apply the process of nuclear fission, which, despite being efficient, does produce radioactive waste that needs to be disposed in a safe manner. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, does not produce any dangerous waste at all. So, even if a tsunami would have destroyed a reactor, there would be absolutely no damage to the local environment.
While the science behind nuclear fusion is solid, the technology is still not at the stage where it can be used commercially on a large scale. However, as a concept that comes from nuclear physics, the same field that has developer nuclear fission, there is a way to make it commercially viable faster.
When nuclear power becomes more widely accepted and nuclear power plants become more widespread, it increases the demand for nuclear physicists. And as more and more people will be choosing this profession, there will be more heads available to improve the process of nuclear fusion. And there will also be more people to figure out what to do with the existing nuclear waste.
So, building more nuclear power plants will reduce greenhouse gasses and will help us to develop technologies that will make the process of electricity production efficient, safe and environmentally-friendly.
7. Be mindful of the big picture
What many proponents of various environmental policies fail to see is that the things that those policies would affect don’t work in isolation. As well as reducing the amount of greenhouse gassed that goes into the atmosphere, applying those policies can often have detrimental effect on other areas that environmentalists are often unaware of.
An example of this has already been mentioned. Closing down existing coal-powered power plants and producing the same amount of energy from renewable sources would require huge areas of land that won’t be usable for anything else. And it would swap a reliable source of energy for a highly intermittent one. Therefore such move may actually create more problems than it solves.
But there are many other examples too. Closing down existing roads will not stop people from driving. Instead, it will increase gridlocks and will increase average travel times for everyone. Closing down certain industries would result in many people loosing their jobs, which will have much more detrimental effect on their lives than global warming even would in the worst-case scenario. And making a large number of people poor is likely to increase crime, which will make life worse for everyone.
Seeing the bigger picture is what environmentalists often fail to do. But no big policy change is possible unless it’s impact is fully assessed. This doesn’t apply to all environmentalists though. There are some sensible environmentalists who do consider the bigger picture.
Bjorn Lomborg, who we have mentioned already, used to be an environmental activists for whom environment was the main concern. And after he sat down with an economist and was made aware of the negative consequences of certain environmental policies, he has change his opinion on many things. He is still a committed environmentalist, but he conducts cost-benefit analysis of environmental policies instead of just blindly accepting them. His personal blog can be found here.
Patrick Moore was one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, the organization that was born to resist nuclear weapons tests and later moved to tackle other environmental issues. He had more real scientific credentials than any other Greenpeace founders. However, he ended up leaving the organization, as he saw it becoming more ideological and less rational. He is very active on Twitter, where he writes commentary about various environmental topics.
In software development, you can’t just fix any random bug that pops up. You need to be fully aware about how the specific part of the system where the bug appeared affects other parts of the system. Only then you will be able to fix the existing bug without causing several others to appear.
Exactly the same principles apply to any other big systems. Environment inter-operates with economics, industries, infrastructure, etc.. Therefore, only those actions should be taken that are unlikely to cause even bigger problems in the other parts of the system.
8. Make it easy for major corporations
One of the reasons why our fossil fuel consumption isn’t going down by much is because some large multinational corporations specialize in fossil fuels. And it is in the best interests of these corporations to make sure that the demand for fossil fuels remains high. So, as long as those companies exist, they will do everything they can to ensure that the world still relies on fossil fuels.
But this doesn’t mean that those companies need to be destroyed. In any case, this would be a futile task, as you cannot simply destroy an organisation of such size. And it would not be a good thing to do even if it was possible. If any of such corporations ceased to exist, a huge number of people would lose their livelihood. Therefore any good CEO would do everything in his power to ensure that this doesn’t happen.
The companies do what they do simply because this is the business niche they happen to occupy and not because their CEOs are sociopathic and want to destroy the Earth for profits. The only way to prevent the fossil fuel companies from maintaining the global fossil fuel demand is to help them to shift into different market niches.
Changing market niche is not something that is unheard of. For example, Nokia, a mobile phone manufacturer, used to run paper mills when it was first founded. And for the company’s directors, transition into a new market niche is relatively easy. The jobs of directors is to steer the corporate ship and they are qualified to do it regardless of what kind of “ship” it is. For other employees, however, it may not be so easy.
Within the tech industry, moving into different niches is trivial. Even if the company starts working on a completely new tech, all fundamental components and processes will still be the same. All types of electronics use software and circuit boards, so all the software developers and electronics specialist will be able to keep their jobs when the transition happens.
With fossil fuels, however, it is a bit different. A petrochemical engineer would probably not be equipped to work in a business that doesn’t deal with petrochemicals. So, perhaps, retraining programs would be essential in order for existing staff to keep their jobs.
Of course, retraining staff is a costly process for a corporation, so it wouldn’t just volunteer to do it. Therefore, some incentives need to be provided to motivate the corporation. Perhaps, some conditional tax break can be granted to it. But the best incentive for any company to make radical changes is market competition.
Just like Tesla caught well established car manufacturers off guard and forced them to play catch-up in the electric car market, innovative companies can be established that would invent ways of replacing fossil fuels with something much better and cheaper. If at least one of such company manages to become a global success, this will guarantee to reduce the demand for fossil fuels and will force well-established global corporate giants to pay attention. And this is, in turn, will trigger fossil fuel companies to start transitioning into the same technology.
This is something that is already happening, although on a small scale. BP, for example, already manages wind farms and manufactures biofuel.
Stone age didn’t end because stoned were banned. So, if you are unhappy with the industries that hinder the progress on addressing climate change, you won’t achieve much by fighting those companies. Environmental groups have been climbing on top of oil rigs and blockading offices of oil manufacturers for decades and they haven’t achieved anything substantial. The best thing you can do instead is give your support to initiatives that would insentify those companies to shift into a different market niches.
How to know if someone doesn’t really want to save the planet
Not all people who say that they wants to save the planet really want to do it. Sometimes, they have their own hidden agenda. And there is a really easy way to determine if that is the case. If somebody expresses strong disagreement with any of the above rules without being able to back their opinion up with rational arguments, saving the planet is definitely not this person’s priority.
For example, if someone has a big problem with not demonizing their opponents, not causing nuisance to the public, assuming that their opponents have good intentions or accepting that the subject of climate change is somewhat controversial, the main priorities of such a person are probably to win the argument and to be proven right at all cost. Saving the planet is just an excuse to fulfill these needs. Perhaps, such person is a narcissist and cannot tolerate any opposing opinion. To them, any kind of disagreement with them is perceived as a narcissistic injury.
Or maybe such people are just fulfilling the need to be a part of a large tribe by participating in the environmental movements. In this case, they would care more about their tribe being in the right than they would about actually doing something positive for the environment.
When someone expresses a strong resistance against the ideas of appealing to people’s self interests or working with corporations rather than fighting them, this person probably wants the world to become socialist, while disguising this ideology as a concern for the environment. This is quite common. Many environmental activists fall under this category and openly express their socialist views.
Socialism and other Marxist ideas have not gained much popularity in the Western world, because almost anyone who has some in-demand skills has a decent quality of life under free market economy. It’s usually only those who don’t have much in terms of marketable skills who want free market to be replaced with Socialism. For example, many students express socialist ideas. This is almost universally because they simply don’t have any marketable skills yet.
Society’s unwillingness to swallow socialist ideas is why socialists have turned to various environmental issues to build an argument for their ideology. And the argument states that it doesn’t matter if you have a great life under the current economic system. The system is apparently destroying the environment, so unless we replace it with a different system, nobody would be able to have a decent quality of life in the near future.
Finally, when someone is against technological solutions or sees a problem with being mindful of the bigger picture, they probably belong to the nature cult that sees technology as evil. The cult doesn’t have an official name and it’s not an official organization, but it certainly exists. Many environmental activists think just like any other cult members and would frequently express anti-technology views without being able to justify them rationally. Usually, those people also consume hallucinogenic drugs in large quantities and express New Age believes.
You may actually belong to one of such groups and still insist that environment is your main concern. And yes, I would believe that you are sincere. However, in this case, I would suggest that you should examine your real motives. You may have conscious believe that you are concerned about the environment, but at subconscious level, you are probably fulfilling some other need by being part of this movement.
If you are sincerely concerned about the environment and want to do your part, you would be open-minded about the solutions. And yes, I don’t claim that the above principles are perfect and shouldn’t be criticized. However, the only valid criticism is rational criticism backed up by good quality arguments. This way, these principles can be refined and turned into even easier solution to the climate change problem.
These principles are simple to conceptualize, but aren’t necessarily easy to implement. But all of them work together to eliminate the biggest hurdle to solving climate change problem – resistance from the public and businesses.
We have been trying to address the climate change problem by restrictive legislations, extra taxation and disruptive protests. But none of these had any significant effect.
As Albert Einstein said, doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. So why don’t we finally become sane and try something different?
