Eat beef, ride public transit, or vote?
As a climate activist, I am always looking for better ways to empower and motivate people to become more engaged in the fight for meaningful climate action. Some advocates want to focus on how bad things are right now and how much worse they will get if we keep on our current trajectory. Others debate the effectiveness of personal actions versus collective actions.
This report “Why common climate messaging often backfires – and how to fix it” from the Doerr School of Sustainability discusses a June 9 report in PNAS Nexus that found that Americans often overestimate the relative climate impact of behaviors like recycling, biking, and eating less meat but don’t participate in more impactful actions like voting or protesting.
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Electoral Participation
One statement in the Doerr article that really stuck with me was “a single vote in a recent national election in Canada could be more than 20 times as effective as skipping a long flight”, which referenced this 2021 article in PLOS. The PLOS article was an interesting analysis of personal vs collective climate actions. Admittedly, the analysis was a bit of comparing apples to apple pies given the different assumptions and generalizations in calculating each type of emission.
On the other hand, given the likely impact of the current US administration’s rejection of the science of global warming and the cancelling of actions to fight climate change, a few thousand more votes by climate-concerned but disenfranchised or disillusioned voters in key states in last November’s elections would have avoided the gutting of climate policies and the abdication of the US as a leader of climate action. As Hillary Clinton said, “Yes, elections have consequences!“
Simple lesson, please act responsibly in your personal climate actions and choices, AND engage fully in the electoral process from supporting climate (& science) active candidates to getting other like-minded voters to vote, too.
Please let me know your thoughts on this issue and on other topics I’ve shared. And, if you know someone who might find these discussions interesting, please pass along their name & email and I’ll add them to the list.
Cheers, Bill
