This is a strange misconception about climate change, even among many of what should be the better educated and informed section of the population, at least on the issues of the science. The misconception is that more people need to be convinced about climate change and the need to take action.
Many climate change topics that come up even on here get well received comments about problem of the greedy selfish uneducated rednecks who are preventing climate change action, and the subsequent hand wringing about how to educate or scare or convince them into changing their minds.
The facts just don't support this outlandish idea though. Even in the country with the most climate deniers in the world, Indonesia, they number just about 21% of the population. In the USA, deniers are under 20% and a staggering two thirds of people and more than half of Republicans think the government should take more action on climate change. This is an overwhelming political mandate, it's not even a question.
The ruling class enacts far less popular policies and legislation all the time and doesn't bat an eye. You're telling me they'll go on expeditionary wars on flimsy pretexts that last decades and cost trillions of dollars and kill thousands of Americans, but they won't implement overhwelmingly popular policy that has bipartisan support of voters to address what they keep telling us they believe is the biggest and most important problem facing humanity? This is clearly utter bullshit.
And that's the way they like it. Their divisive propaganda (which includes seeding distrust in science) has worked extremely well. The facts show that they never had any intention to more about climate change, that they routinely lie about the political reasons for not doing more, and they're happy that the commoners are blaming one another for it instead of the robber barons who own them.
> Currently the US is 1 of 3 countries not cooperating on climate change
That's demonstrably false as a leader in environmentally friendly technology (both participation and development). Specifically, what you consider cooperating is not what I consider cooperating. The confusion of politics and the physical condition of the earth, is not constructive.
> I'm fairly confident most people think climate change is concerning, but not "on the brink of destruction"
Lucky for them, those people jus haven't yet experienced the destruction of a category five tropical cyclone.
> Interesting, because the United States has actually been lowering carbon dioxide emissions
You can use this excuse when talking to children or US Republicans, but it doesn't work with people who have more than half a brain.
I live on a quarter of an acre. I could use my property to make X, or I can just buy X from my neighbour and make the claim that my property isn't used to make X, and is therefore uncontaminated and clean.
You can't get China to make your polluting garbage, and then blame China for being the worlds polluter.
It's Americans who demand massive trucks to drive on hours-long commutes every day instead of building public transport; who fight wars for fossil fuels to burn.
> Interesting how America is always to blame for the world's problems.
Not interesting at all. Quite depressing actually.
> Advanced economies like the US and EU are prioritizing reducing their own emissions.
I'm not sure we're living in the same US. The USA I live in is one of the few countries not agreeing to climate change, with a subset of its population not even believing it is real.
I'm glad you are doing policy work - it is important. But I'm not ready to declare the problem solved in our own backyards quite yet.
>> The world’s governments might not coordinate to stop climate change.
> A bit frustrating to read coming from an American. Every government in the world is into it. Except America's.
Yeah, India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, they’re going to tell their citizens that they’re sorry but they’ll never have cars, meat on the table every day or an international vacation every two years. Their consumption must be held to 1950s US prosperity for climate change, where the middle class worried about the price of basic food stuffs.
There will be no political solutions to climate change, only technological ones. The clearest example is carbon taxes, they fail to pass or are repealed in Australia, Canada, Washington, France.
“We’re going to make you poorer, for the environment!”
> Governments are to blame for...not push for alternative energy sources while they had the chance
Here in the US roughly 1/2 the population believes climate change is a hoax or exaggerated by researchers to get gov't grant money. It's hard to run a democracy properly when half the country are conspiratorial about major issues.
> At this point, I'm not sure there is any possible experiment or evidence that would actually change most people's mind on climate change. It has become a cause to support rather than a theory.
Aren't you (your way of thinking about this) part of the problem here, or even the whole problem?
You've reduced climate change to politics - certainly there are many people (myself included) who don't agree that it is political.
There are people that say "we need to think about the climate" purely because they are liberal, but they can be ignored, and their views don't change the reality.
> I am really not impressed by any sides efforts to combat global warming.
The reality today is that no efforts are made whatsoever by any political movement on the planet to combat global warming, in the entire planet (except perhaps the CPC of China, against all odds). American Republicans do not even have the hint of honesty of admitting the issue at stake. They denied it 10 years ago, now they want to turn their audience into believing that it may not be human-caused.
> I would love to see more discussion beyond conservatives are anti-science radicals who want to kill the earth.
The discussion was over dozens of years ago, there is no debate. Human activity (intensive farming, petroleum and coal burning, cement production, ...) is causing climate change, period. And the changes are already past the point of being reversible. The data is plentiful and everywhere for the world to see.
> If you don’t believe in climate change, there is no value in a discussion.
it's not the belief that's in question. It's the actions required.
I, and many others (whether they admit it or not), do not wish to make personal sacrifices to fix climate change, if others are not willing to make the same level of sacrifices (such that relative positioning within society does not change).
> Climate change I give you the market would ignore. For the same reason it is ignored politically - nearly nobody thinks it is worth spending real money on to try and fix it.
Some of us feel that you can literally wipe the US off the map and it wouldn’t make a single degree’s worth of difference to climate. Some of us also feel that the climate movement is not about climate but about resource redistribution and thus suspect in its real intent.
> If I think about the USA, where politicians listen to their constituents even less, and the general opinion is just not concerned enough to VOTE for their president, much less get involved politically, I fall in despair. I cry. Then I just try to forget because I want to carry on.
I live in the US. Indiana. Our last governor was Mike Pence.
Our state is full of Republicans who wholly reject any idea of global warming or climate change. Fracking is cool and a good way to make money. Public institutions are a place to extort more money from students. Our state and national forests are places the Dept. of Natural Resources have deemed OK to sell old growth trees for $3 (2.6 euro - yes, pocket change)/tree. A law was passed 2 years ago banning communities from banning or putting fees on plastic bags.
Where I live cares nothing for ecology or environmentalism. The crony politicians only further their own private business interests. I do try to find city/county local politicians that care, but their hands are tied.
I also live with my wife and practice the 4 R's (Repair, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle). But that meager effort only goes so far.
> What does it matter who believes what if the real things that are actually happening are that they build a lot of renewable energy sources?
It matters A LOT. The anti-climate change propaganda is one of the biggest roadblocks to meaningful climate action. In a normal world, the population of the US would have risen up instantly if their president had withdrawn from climate accords or forced the EPA not to talk about global warming. These are lunatic acts, much crazier than the than Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
Sure, it's nice that they're planting a few wind farms. But that is a drop in the bucket compared to the real changes required if we are to stop global warming from completely dooming our civilization. Building wind-farms would have been a solution if it had started 40 years ago.
Today, the only option is to stop most non-renewable plants, and most factories that rely on their power. We need to produce a fraction of the goods we are producing today (not talking about the US specifically, this is a global problem), with all the human costs that will entail. I'm not holding my breath for any of it.
> I have yet to hear anybody actually describe what they propose to do to cool down the planet and (supposedly) make it sustainable.
Plenty of people did just that. You can start with the IPCC reports. A lot of think tanks also published reports focused on specific countries. Not knowing is not an excuse, particularly when so much noise has been made on the subject and so much information is available.
> I have heard a lot of people insist that we need to raise taxes and redistribute wealth to social justice causes in the name of combatting climate change, though.
We (the rest of the world) by and large do not care about your culture wars. The fact that saving the goddamn climate we rely on is somehow controversial is maddening. You collectively sound like children arguing about who started and who’s the meanest.
> Current policy prescriptions are going to kill a lot more people than the warming they are trying to prevent.
If you think climate change is real, I don’t understand how you can believe that the current prescriptions (which aren’t even addressing the problem head on) will kill more people than the effects of climate change. The effects of climate change will probably kill at least several tens of millions of people and more likely the count may an order of magnitude more through direct and indirect effects (including displacement, riots, disease, etc.).
True in the US. Not true in countries where the political system is not to such an extent corrupted, poisoned and perverted by Big Money.
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