The True Cause of Climate Change

New Yorker journalist Bill McKibben has a laser focus on Earth's climate and the underlying causes of ever-increasing Greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

Bill and I believe that the underlying problem is the inaction of our politicians and corporate leaders. One focused on retaining power, the other on consistently higher revenue/profit/dividends/bonuses. Both are willing to pursue their agendas at any cost.

The crazy and scary headlines about natural disasters should be just a byline to the headline:?POLITICIANS ARE WILLING TO DESTROY THE PLANET TO REMAIN IN POWER, or

POLITICIANS ARE ADDICTED TO FINANCIAL CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY

We collectively seem willing to stand by and watch the planet's natural systems degrade to the point when nature grinds to a halt. It is truly unbelievable that we don't understand tough decisions must be made and that those decisions will interrupt business as usual and that the interruption will include pain, and that our habits must change.

The pain we all need to experience is because politicians became addicted to fossil fuels in the mid-20th century, and ever since then, an industry designed to destroy the atmosphere has become the most profitable industry in commercial history.

The citizenry indeed has Agency, and it's also true that we need to exert our Agency and force politicians to make the hard decisions that are now paramount.

We should put our arms around our civic leaders and reassure them that we need them to act and that we know how hard it is for them to take strong action.

When I facilitate experiential learning in our high school program, we focus on teaching students how to approach solving problems. We start with the fundamental basis for problem-solving: to ensure you're working on a problem, not a symptom.

I then share a short tutorial that begins with the statement: Climate change is a problem.

I ask the students whether that's correct, and they always agree.?

Then I take them through the tried and proven Five-Why method of problems analysis, and after four "Why's," we land on the fact that Climate change is a symptom, and the underlying problem is inaction by politicians.

Should I run that workshop for politicians??

Here are a couple of excerpts from Bill's latest New Yorker article that can be read here: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/is-it-hot-enough-yet-for-politicians-to-take-real-action (you should be able to read at least one free New Yorker article).

"We've crushed so many temperature records recently—the hottest day ever measured by average global temperature, the hottest week, the hottest June, the highest ocean temperatures, the lowest sea-ice levels—that it would be easy to overlook a couple of additional data points from this past weekend. But they're important because they help illuminate not just the size of our predicament but the political weaknesses that make it so hard to confront.

Yet none of this has been enough to really change the political dynamic, which remains dominated by the fossil-fuel industry.

The incredible warming of these current weeks should strike fear, but it should also remind us how valuable a breeze is, how remarkable a deep-blue winter day, or how precious the cool that comes when night falls. The crazily raging river a quarter mile from my door scares me, but it also makes me think how stunning it is in its usual form. This planet remains stirringly beautiful, and that beauty must be one of the things that moves us to act. And so must the beauty that people can produce: we can take the deadly power of the sun and, with a panel, convert it into the electrons that help cool our homes in a heat wave. If all of that sounds overblown, scientists say that this past week broke records for the hottest days in about a hundred and twenty-five thousand years, which takes us back to the bare edge of the human story."

Here's Bill's profile: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/bill-mckibben/page/16

Article by Greg Twemlow , Co-Founder of Future Skills Studio with attribution to New Yorker journalist Bill McKibben