By Jim Thompson
Former Vice-President Al Gore is angry. He’s angry about the lack of progress toward reducing greenhouse gases and places the blame squarely on the fossil fuel industry in his recent Ted Talk called, “What the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want you to know.”
I’m especially grateful his anger is targeted at the “bad guy” who is slowing down progress and making our situation worse: the fossil fuel industry, which has purposefully misled the public about its role in climate change for several decades, spent millions of dollars to stop our government from taking the kind of huge, effective action we need, and continues to spew its deadly wastes into our biosphere.
Many of the actions people are encouraged to take to fight climate change don’t address the urgent need to stop fossil fuel companies from depositing ever more carbon into the atmosphere.
It’s as if our house were on fire but instead of putting it out or at least refraining from adding more fuel to the fire, we add solar panels to a part of the roof that is not yet on fire.
I believe in the “everything, everywhere, all at once” approach to resisting climate change AND we have to stop burning fossil fuels.
We developed the Climate Change Literacy Quiz because so many people I knew were talking about climate change actions without acknowledging the elephant in the room — that we can’t solve runaway climate chaos as long as the fossil fuel industry is allowed to continue destroying the habitability of the only planet we have.
We call the lack of climate change literacy ‘deadly naïveté.’ This includes ‘business as usual,’ which the fossil fuel industry is working so hard to maintain so it can continue to make money off the destruction of our collective home.
Until we start acting as if we are in an emergency situation, we won’t be able to do what needs to be done. Thank you, former Vice President Gore, for calling out so effectively and clearly this truth.
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