Over the last few years, I’ve heard many people argue that climate change is not a driving force in the present day or even in elections because it’s just not a relevant issue in people’s day-to-day lives.
Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s just total bullshit. Because if you care about the fact that food prices, transportation, and inflation are skyrocketing; that water and electric bills are through the roof; that health care costs just keep getting higher; that immigration is on the rise; that there are multiple wars or that owning a home is out of most people’s reach; that the global-average temperature for 2024 was the highest on record, then guess what—you care deeply about climate warming. Rising temperatures made worse by unchecked fossil fuel expansion are driving all of these problems—and they’ll all spiral out of control if we don’t quickly tackle the climate crisis. The evidence is clear and irrefutable. Climate should be the kitchen-table issue of our lifetimes.
The only reason it is not front and center is that our elected leaders, powerful lobbyists in the fossil fuel industries, and national/international institutions don't want it to be. They have together created a world that valorizes short-term profits at the expense of the long-term health and well-being of human beings and the planetary conditions that make life possible. Oh yes, they consistently talk about the problem, but they DO NOTHING to turn things around. Indeed, our Neoliberal Sanctimonious Fraud™ of a Prime Minister has engaged in the worst sort of mendacity, spreading the scientifically false idea that investing in fossil fuels is in line with preserving a livable climate, and so very good for Canada.
Meanwhile, our gutless mainstream media, whose raison d'être should be to inform citizens about the dire civilizational impacts of climate warming, and connect the dots between the extraction and use of fossil fuels and the devastating social and economic impact of the latter, have also been captured by the same powerful people.
So it looks like it's up to us folks. It is now our individual and collective moral obligation to existing and future generations to do whatever we can to make climate warming a kitchen-table issue. Through militant and dedicated climate activism we must interrupt the status quo, file class-action lawsuits against big oil and gas, directly confront and challenge our political leaders to do the right thing, organize climate strikes, mobilize others through the emotional power of persuasive argument, coordinate with other climate action groups, and build a mass movement that threatens the hegemony of the fossil fuel industry.
When people say "I don't feel that I have the power to change things" my response is that the most powerful thing we can do right now is say out loud again and again that we are in the very midst of a historic failure that will end civilization. Here's the reality: The power that is latent in us is precisely what the great Czech dramatist and political dissident Vaclav Havel called the 'power of the powerless'—a power that is so vast we’ve hardly even begun to sense it.
It is now long past the time for us to exercise our collective power for the sake of the present and future health and well-being of our beautiful earth.
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