It would be bad enough if our campaign financing laws allowed fossil fuel purveyors and others to corrupt our government, but we're almost all implicated in not quite wanting action against using that fuel (and against other sources of greenhouse gases such as methane from fracking). There must be vigorous research in this area, but scientific papers alone will not bring action. Nor will appeals to save a world for the children or grandchildren, although every initiative can help. One is the Juliana lawsuit filed in the U.S. by children; another, the strike led by Grete Thunberg, a Swedish girl who spoke at the Davos conference this year. But a mass mobilization must have many source, many vehicles.
There is a national emergency, a real one, not a fake one whipped up by the President. It's triply invisible: (a) it's caused by invisible gases, (b) it can be met only by international action, by acting with far-away countries that most of us will never see, and (c) its worst effects will manifest only in the future, not in the familiar present in which we live.
In the 1980s, trying to help end the Cold War, we sought forms of action. One was citizen diplomacy. Let there now be a thousand forms of action about climate disruption, motivated by anything that might work. It's easy to understand the discouragement of the pioneers, but they have done more than is yet apparent. The challenge is harder than winning the last world war, but it's not impossible to prevent the worst damage. There is only one question with many answers: how do we mobilize?
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