All Countries Should Be Fighting Climate Change
Climate change will not be stopped by simply forcing only Western countries to do their part.
In a loud, angry, and divided world, the loudest, angriest, and well, divided voices resonate the most. There have been recent troubling trends concerning environmental “wokeism” that have virtually accomplished nothing towards its intended goal of reversing climate change. It is a very admirable cause, and frankly, people need to understand how serious climate change is; however, simply being a loud and destructive force is not going to convey a message that resonates with the masses. Voice resonation within a circle of people that already share the same opinions is just not enough. Climate change is not a political issue, it impacts all of us equally; ostracizing people who may not be aware of its impacts doesn’t help the cause.
Throughout the course of human history, people have been terrified of the unknown. Genuine human nature is to ignore what you cannot see, and pretend its consequences are not real. Now, as counterproductive as we know this is, it is a very real way the brain is wired to think. Climate change is a prime example of this. It’s something that feels very far away, and we cannot directly see it coming; therefore human nature is to pretend it doesn’t exist. So how do we actually convince people to get rid of this mindset, and take the warnings very seriously?
One method of convincing people that climate change is real and a serious threat to our life is to instill shock in the public. This can include stuff like vandalism, destroying property, and creating public disturbance scenes, all in the name of showcasing a stance on climate change. Perhaps most notable is the “Just Stop Oil” group which vandalized various artifacts in the past, and most recently disrupted a live tennis match to bring attention to climate change. They used paint in order to vandalize artwork, and glued themselves to the wall while shouting, “Climate change is real,” and “We need to stop oil companies.”
Now, admittedly, oil companies have done damage to our environment in the past, and it should be understood that they have contributed greatly overall to global warming. One prime example of this is when British Petroleum (BP) had an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This disaster killed millions of fish and destroyed an entire ecosystem within a couple of days. It also subsequently covered the gulf with oil that took many months to clean up. It cost billions of dollars to fix and did damage that can be felt to this day.
With that being said, oil companies are also subject to extremely complex regulations that virtually no other industry is subject to. It would be naive to deny the fact that oil companies also have made massive strides in trying to ensure that the climate is taken care of, and disasters like that don’t happen again. Additionally, virtually every Western government has made it a priority to reduce its global emissions of Carbon Dioxide and reduce oil consumption in general.
All of that taken into consideration, these public displays of shock and awe, intended to raise awareness, are actually doing nothing to stop climate change. They’re only further upsetting people who don’t actually even disagree with the message, per say. So far these displays have not influenced any government to enforce more regulations, nor have they influenced any company to stop using oil. These displays have also not garnered any real public support, nor any sympathy for that matter. Essentially, they have failed in every metric. So what could we possibly do to convince more people about the impacts of oil, and do more for climate change?
Well for starters, one thing that we could do is acknowledge that generally speaking, great strides have been made as a globe to stop this problem. From there, we have to treat this like it’s a global problem and not a local one. It’s in the name, “global warming”…
Climate change will not be stopped by simply forcing Western countries to do their part, and ignoring the destructive impacts made by countries like China. China is, and has been the world’s leading polluter for the past 5 decades or more. A more practical solution would be to try to convince Chinese businesses and regulators to follow in line with the expectations that are met by the West. Everyone must agree that our differences need to be put aside for this cause. Simply keeping this to local displays of public nuisances will do nothing to stop this problem.
