We can’t afford to be climate doomers

Rebecca Solnit, writing for The Guardian:

I keep saying I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis. You can feel absolutely devastated about the situation and not assume this predicts outcome; you can have your feelings and can still chase down facts from reliable sources, and the facts tell us that the general public is not the problem; the fossil fuel industry and other vested interests are; that we have the solutions, that we know what to do, and that the obstacles are political; that when we fight we sometimes win; and that we are deciding the future now.

Another great friend sent me this last night after reading my Shatner post, and his comment was “it’s too easy and too unsatisfying to give up entirely.”

This article gave me the shot in the arm I’ve been needing. Maybe I need to start saying “okay, doomer.”

At the tail end of my full time involvement with JMG, I was pushing into the idea of climate work within mobile app development. As I was thinking of my next side hustle, climate work was the first thing that came to mind.

But as I started to consider where I wanted to go with focus, I started getting overwhelmed. There is so much that is being done in climate, and in addition to feeling unapproachable, it also felt like “what’s the point?”

My big idea was to start a podcast where I chatted with folks in the climate industry to hear the stories of what work is being done to clean up our planet.

Some companies I’d want to start with would be Ecosia (who is building a sustainable search engine), Treecard (which is a debit card that plants trees), and The Ocean Cleanup (which uses this dope-looking boat to get plastic out of the ocean).

This is supremely cool shit that’s being done, yet thanks to doomerism, I’ve felt paralyzed from starting.

Maybe this article will be the shot in the arm I need to start helping in just about the only way I know how: helping others make sense of the work that’s being done to solve this seemingly insolvable problem.