Forget all the doom and gloom
In every action movie there’s always the moment when the hero makes an inspiring speech to the assembled troops or, having made a plan and geared up, finally ‘‘goes in’’. Think Mel Gibson in Braveheart, or Sigourney Weaver in Aliens.
This is where climate action is now. A few weekends ago, we participated with 200 other people in the Wellington Climathon Challenge. It was a 24-hour frenzy at which groups of people around the world come up with startup ideas for climate change action. Our group was working on building a generic DoView visual strategy model of how a city can get on top of climate change, for use by cities around the world. There were heaps of other wonderful ideas. It was positive, it was fun, it was exciting, it was inspiring. It is the future.
We realise that people sometimes find themselves a tad gloomy about climate change news, but look at it this way: we are really lucky that climate change is hitting at this particular moment in human history.
Dip into the hundreds of pages of amazingly detailed hardcore science in the latest IPCC report. It’s a magnificent tribute to the legions of climate scientists who have camped out in Antarctica, fired satellites into space, and crouched at supercomputers to tell us exactly what’s happening and what we need to do about it. Imagine what it would be like to be flying blind, trying to grapple with this beast, 100 years ago with no satellites and no supercomputers.
Technology has put us in a fantastic position to deal with the radical steps we will no doubt need to take on climate change.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Say, disruptive though it would be, we decided we needed to turn off passenger air travel tomorrow. Would it be the end of the world as we know it? Because of technology, every couple of days we Skype family living in the United States. Imagine if you turned off passenger air travel and poured just some of the US$700 billon spent on air transport each year into truly immersive and seamless video conferencing. Would we really be that much worse off? No jet lag, not having to sit next to that guy with BO for 12 hours, and not having to line up in those security queues?
How lucky is it that, at the very moment when we are trying to reduce people’s carbon footprints, more and more of us are content to sit most of the day in a small room? Just moving our eyeballs and pecking away now and then at our keyboard or Xbox controller.
And the innovation and rollout of technology directly focused on climate change is amazing. This year, for the first time, renewables became cheaper than coal and oil. Electric cars drive up and down our streets. Solar panels spring up on our roofs. A team in the US is currently developing a way to suck carbon dioxide right out of the atmosphere and turn it into jet fuel.
Every day, a growing army across the globe is busy contributing in one way or another to figuring out innovation and responses to climate change. We are now like an army of people running across a field all focused on getting to the other side – a world where climate change is stabilised and we have a convivial sustainable society and economy.
Of course, there are still the groups of denialists, and some leaders who have not yet got with the programme. But the direction is so clear and so exciting that those of us who are now running are not even bothering with anyone who has not got it together enough to understand what is happening while we run past them. Even the stay-behinds are now starting to back off and will soon be joining us. For instance, South Park just had an episode apologising to Al Gore for mocking him about climate change. What, South Park apologising?
The IPCC says we have only got a decade or so to get this done. That doesn’t seem very long, but think of the fact that Google opened its first office only 20 years ago. And now we could hardly function without it. We don’t even know what climate change’s Google moment will be yet. We just know that today is the day to start laying the path for it.
All that we are now focused on is the unlimited business, social enterprise and community possibilities that climate change means we can be involved in. And making sure no-one, especially those with the greatest need, is left behind.
So join the climate change Positivistas – there is not a moment left for any downer doom and gloom. Yes, it will be hard work, and we will need to do things in radically different ways. But let’s all get Sigourney and Mel Gibsoned-up, get out there, and take this beast down.
Paul Duignan is an honorary research fellow at Massey University. Kena Duignan is the social innovative lead at Wesley Community Action, Wellington.