Someone was telling me the other day that they couldn't see how to move forward on creating the will to change the climate change situation fast enough to make a difference. It's been sitting with me for days, and I think there is a relatively simple answer.
When it comes to actually getting anything done, the science, in a way, is incidental. For the past fifty years, we have heard all about it. Stop burning fossil fuels. Don't. NO. That's enough. Keep going and you won't pass go. The message has already been loud and clear. Though the message is valid and important, reiterating it doesn't seem to be doing any good.
Telling people not to do something is a really great way to get them to dig in their heels and do it. Though it seems to be a view pushed by some media sources, there is a real push back developing against electrification precisely because it is happening in a way that will eventually make it so that fossil fuels are not an option. It may not be everyone. Even if a majority is in favor of positive change, you run into people that think about things in terms of what will be taken away from them as things change. That point really got me thinking.
Let's hope those heels don't have golf spikes.
I don't think it is a secret that scientists are not known for being personable effective communicators. It certainly can take a high degree of introversion to choose science as a career, and communication with the greatest exactitude forces a person to communicate so effectively with peers that the message can get lost on laymen. That fact is slowly changing with shows like "big bang theory", but still, there is an element of reinforced stereotypes there too. Every once in a while you get a scientist with killer communication skills, like Steven Hawking, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku or even a Bill Nye. It's too bad those kinds of scientists are a rare breed. So much science is kept between scientists that it seems colleges just leave out the lessons on communicating with the general public. Of course they don't. Any decent bachelors program will have at least a class on communicating science, but charisma is a hard skill to learn.
At this point, the climate change alarm has been raised. People have been told for fifty plus years that they are going to have to stop using fossil fuel with a constant negative. I reiterate the point because the wildly waving red flags, the blaring sirens and the screaming scientists will continue to fail in pushing a mass movement ahead. It isn't working. At least not fast enough. When you keep trying to do something and it isn't working, it is so easy to keep going at it when it is really really important and you have a lot invested in the approach, but that doesn't make it any less foolish. It is time to change the conversation.
I care deeply about this conversation, the necessary change and expediting the end result, and i am as tired of how it is being talked about as anyone. I think it is time to turn the conversation on its head, and that is a critical factor in creating any sort of solution to the image problem solving climate change has come to have. If we can have a plain and practical conversation about all of this, the kind that you might have with George Carlin or Jon Stewart, one of the best things we can do here is fire up our bullshit detectors and call out the doomism and negativity.
Long before climate change was telling us about the apocalypse nigh upon us, science fiction was telling us another story. There were trips to the moon, mars and beyond, fantastic conveniences and impossible technologies. One need look no further than Jules Verne's writing at the dawn of the twentieth century to see images of the future that in many ways have grown real life counterparts more fantastic than their origins. With each passing day those realities are only progressing further. Just walk into an average modern household and ask Alexa, Siri or Google for something. See what happens.
We are at a critical point in the history of the human race, and it is the possibilities that excite me. I don't want to talk about how terrible it is that we are going to have to trade in gasoline motors. I want to talk about how electric car motors have like ten moving parts or how battery tech is going to let us leave the grease and stink of them behind. We are on the verge of such great things as a society, so let's talk about how to get them together, shake the bugs out and build ourselves a new world. There are elements of the Jetson's that we can have. As science fiction moves out of the realm of fantasy, we can welcome a new era. It is all a matter of framing the conversation.
Especially as we reach disturbing new benchmarks with climate change, there is a growing voice that is saying "it is already to late." Don't accept it. Fatalism is a self fulfilling prophecy. The next time someone tells you how impossible it is to change take a second to think about it. Call Bull. It is too easy to get sucked into the negativity, and that won't get us anywhere.