![]() A framework for bringing about societal change To contend with environmental crises and make life better for everyone, we need the right kind of optimists: those who recognize that the world will only improve if we fight for it. We need optimism to make progress - yet that alone isn’t enough. That’s true not just for climate change, air pollution, and biodiversity loss, but for almost any issue we can think of. Setting aside the moral problem of stretching the truth, this claim is wrong. If they’re exaggerated, so what? They might be the crucial catalyst that gets us to act on climate change. People might defend doomsday scenarios as the wake-up call that society needs. Yes, you can have kids and fight climate change at the same time.īut here, I don’t want to talk about whether pessimism is accurate. Deaths from natural disasters - despite what news about climate change-related fires and hurricanes might appear to suggest - are a fraction of what they used to be. Government commitments are getting closer to limiting global warming to 2☌. Coal is starting to die in many countries. Sales of new gas and diesel cars are now falling. Global deforestation peaked decades ago and has been slowly declining. The prices of solar and wind power, as well as of batteries for storing low-carbon energy, have all plunged. Young people have good reasons to worry about our ability to tackle climate change, but this level of despair should be alarming to anyone who cares about the well-being of future generations - which is, after all, what the climate movement is all about.Īs the lead researcher for Our World in Data, an organization that aims to make data on the world’s biggest problems accessible and understandable, I’ve written extensively on the reasons to be optimistic about the future. In a large recent international survey on youth attitudes toward climate change, more than half said that “humanity is doomed” and three-quarters said the future is frightening. With leading activists like Roger Hallam, co-founder of the popular climate protest movement Extinction Rebellion, telling young people that they “face annihilation,” it’s no surprise so many of them feel terrified. There’s nowhere that I see doomer culture more vocal than on my home turf. We environmentalists spend our lives thinking about ways the world will end. Part of Against Doomerism from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
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