What Changes Can You Make?

While elections approach for many of you, I wonder what … personal changes people are making in the wake of the IPCC report. The rest of the world doesn’t get to go to the polls, but we can still make changes that effect our planet and our children’s children. Here:

[The Adorable Optimism of the IPCC]

It’s a pretty amusing read. Watts is one of the best sci-fi authors to grace our blue-green world. Reading the post, I’m able to reflect on the changes we’ve made at home (and wonder what else we can do). We’re using public transport a lot (it’s our default), and ride-sharing services when not (we still have cars, but are wrestling with whether it’s better to go electric or keep ’em, as the cost of producing vehicles has a tremendous environmental impact). We’re deleting single-use plastic from our house. More home-cooked foods, with high vegetable content. Recycling, and buying used, and cutting down on device and appliance purchases. I don’t have the latest iPhone, but the old one’s still fine. Digital purchases for media are the norm now – we can still be entertained without producing and shipping goods.

There are bigger things to deal with, though. When I last worked for The G Man™, I suggested telecommuting to cut down on carbon, even taking it to central government as an initiative. I was told it’d never work, the tech wasn’t there, that people couldn’t be managed, or trusted. Then I worked for a top IT company where telecommuting was the default, and yet that corporation still burned all the jet fuel available sending consultants across the planet.

It feels like we need to change ourselves, starting with the ego. Too hard? I don’t think so: it might just mean we need different people in charge. I’d like to see a round of leaders who get to inherit the Earth, rather than the default we’ve got who’ll all be dead by the time the apocalypse arrives.

This brilliant but brutal PSA is trying to motivate young people to vote with some reverse psychology pic.twitter.com/sVZrjtF2Nt

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) October 3, 2018

BTW, vote.