A recent story in the Guardian is important for the issues it outlines of which climate change warriors should be aware:Climate change deniers’ new battle front attacked, by Robin McKie:
Mann told the Observer that although flat rejection of global warming was becoming increasingly hard to maintain in the face of mounting evidence, this did not mean climate change deniers were giving up the fight.
“First of all, there is an attempt being made by them to deflect attention away from finding policy solutions to global warming towards promoting individual behaviour changes that affect people’s diets, travel choices and other personal behaviour,” said Mann. “This is a deflection campaign and a lot of well-meaning people have been taken in by it.”
We want to address this at Regenerative Culture because we are most definitely not of the opinion that individual action is the only thing one should do. But when individual action “infects” society, then it is that much easier to pass policies that will benefit climate change. Here at DKos, we are a sister group to Green Revolution, which will discuss political action to address climate change, even extreme action when it’s called for. If you’ve been following Greta Thunberg, you know that the kids are seeing extreme action as necessary as long as the world heats up. We will support them.
McKie also addresses the flip side of “we can take individual action,” which is “it’s so bad there’s no point in doing anything”:
However, deniers have not given up their opposition to plans to curtail fossil fuel use and among their new tactics they have also tried to encourage “doomism”, as Mann put it. “This is the idea that we are now so late in the game [in tackling global warming] that there is nothing that we can do about the problem,” he added. “By promoting this doom and gloom attitude this leads people down a path of despair and hopelessness and finally inaction, which actually leads us to the same place as outright climate-change denialism.”
So don’t let either type of “soft denialism” gain a foothold. It is not hopeless. And individual and political action both need to be taken — neither is a substitute for the other.
Future RCAP diaries will include the below disclaimer to acquaint new readers with our philosophy:
