Daily Adventures

When my son decided to go to Mines, he met a bunch of like minded young people his age, and when he first came home there was this time when he admitted that he and his cohort had decided that they were the ones who were going to have to save the world from Climate Change because all those who had gone before didn't seem to be up to the job. He and his friends were facing that reality with determination.

A few months ago, he showed me this video: Kurzgesagt's "We WILL Fix Climate Change!"

I watched it and cried, and he told me later that when he watched it, he cried too because the main gist of the video is that humanity, in concert, has brought ourselves back from the brink of self-destruction. The weight of the impending disaster was immense, and to know that we weren't all going to just die of Climate Change was huge.

There's a lot more work still to be done, don't get me wrong, but all the Apocalyptic tones of authors screaming for attention and the studies of the early 2000's are now wrong. Human kind has adapted, heard the call, and is moving. The evidence of that move is well-documented.  Despite the fact that gas and oil are still subsidized by various governments simply for those industry's profit, humanity as a whole is moving to sustainable energy sources. 

So why do the calls to climate action still, "The world is being destroyed, you have to do SOMETHING!" and why are there only calls to have faith that what you do will make a difference? How many people, like me, have been vastly discouraged by the media and even our own UCC Environmental pastor saying that there's this huge disaster coming, and all we can do is have faith that whatever we do will make a difference? Why aren't people saying, "We are making a difference, we just have to keep doing more of it?" I wish I understood why.

It turns out that there is documented evidence that Exxon has been doing active campaigns on social media and through various publishers of media to discourage action by people. Harvard's study highlighted the complex, strategic, and hidden nature of the discourse by both Mobil and Exxon. The discouragement started with denial and evolved to "expanding the science" by making it seem such a huge problem that no one person could make any difference. It's a deliberate effort to discourage activism on the part of people like you and me. 

Don't let them discourage you.

There are studies that show that people who actively change their lifestyle to combat climate change are also the people who become more politically and vocally active in the fight to save the planet. Your individual actions lead to social and more global activism, and your example inspires others to do the same. And, as Hank says, "People don't react to a fire because there's a fire. They react because they see people rushing around with water to put out the fire."

Very few people have the energy or interest to wade through the actual data and documentation of what's actually happening out in the world. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme to study and report their scientific, fact-based findings about human caused climate change. They've published six Assessment Reports, the last being the sixth in 2022, on the data that scientists around the world have found about the changes that are happening to our world with respect to global warming, the efforts being done to mitigate and repair harm, the overall technologies and culture shifts that have happened to combat global warming, and to point out where further efforts and research have to be done. 

If you watch the video that Jet shared with me, and open up the details about the video, it actually points at all the sources they used for all the points that they made. DO take a look at it, even if you can't or don't want to digest all the diagrams, data, or references. There are so many items of encouragement in there.

John and I were the first people in Longmont to install a residential solar system on our house. We worked with Namaste and with Longmont Power and worked through all the possible hiccups and kinks and ended up being an electricity supplier to the city back in the early 2000's. And we've had a great time talking with people about how to do it, what was involved, and what a wonderful change in our life that has been. We've helped more than a dozen families put solar panels on their roofs and it keeps expanding as their roofs get seen by their neighbors. There are hundreds of solar panels on houses in Longmont these days, nearing a thousand, and the numbers keep growing.

UCC Longmont, as a community, has been doing the same sort of inspirational work on the level that our church as a whole is capable of doing. With the conversion of areas that could have been made lawn into community gardens, the labyrinth, and the memorial garden; the addition of solar panels on the church proper; and the concerted effort to make recycling and composting available to everyone who uses the building, we're making others aware of the fire by doing what needs to be done to put it out.

• When we hugged as he was about to go into security he grinned and said, "See you in four months!"  And he hugged me solidly because there was so much more going on than we could say, and that's kind of been my mantra of the last few days.  We'll have him back in four months.
• That he was really patient with me when I was doing the anxiety Mom thing while we were checking him in, including indulging me by putting his boarding pass in with his passport.  *laughs*
• And when he went through security, he actually turned back and waved.  Three times.