Global warming appears to have shifted into a faster gear. After removing the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar cycles, researchers found that the planet has warmed at roughly 0.35°C per decade over the past ten years, compared with just under 0.2°C per decade from 1970 to 2015. The acceleration, which becomes visible around 2013 to 2015, appeared across five major global temperature datasets with more than 98% statistical certainty.
This is true but individual action is still necessary. Just because it’s important that we hold corporations and the wealthy accountable and curb industrialized pollution doesn’t mean that the average person isn’t needing to make significant changes. We can’t both maintain a consumer mindset and abdicate individual responsibility while also demanding sweeping societal changes.
We can consume the wealthy and abdicate them of the responsibility of carrying on and also demand change. Especially if we consume them while they’re still alive, as a mob, and do it with dull forks.
The survivors will be far more willing to listen.
And you think it’s the “demanding sweeping societal changes” that has to go?
Maybe we need to start with the individualism and “consumer mindset”?
Not even slightly. I’m just trying to point out that neither of them “have to go;” shouting down someone advocating for either form of action helps no one.
And this stance betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the relative scale of damage each causes.