Climate change is a collective challenge

Rebecca Solnit, in an opinion piece for The Guardian, reminds us that climate change is a collective challenge.

Value of Individual Carbon Footprint Virtue 

Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements, and the climate movement is no exception. People pop up all the time to boast of their domestic arrangements or chastise others for what they eat or how they get around. The very short counterargument is that individual acts of thrift and abstinence won’t get us the huge distance we need to go in this decade. We need to exit the age of fossil fuels, reinvent our energy landscape, rethink how we do almost everything. We need collective action at every scale from local to global – and the good people already at work on all those levels need help in getting a city to commit to clean power or a state to stop fracking or a nation to end fossil-fuel subsidies. The revolution won’t happen by people staying home and being good. (Solnit, 2021)

We require action today that will take big steps to greatly reduce our use of fossil fuels, electrify our energy and transportation systems, and mitigate the effects of wildfire, severe storms, and coastal erosion.

References

Solnit, R. (2021, August 23). Big oil coined 'carbon footprints' to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook | Rebecca Solnit. The Guardian. Retrieved October 6, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook