Today is Blog Action Day and the hope this year is to get people blogging about, talking about, and discussing climate change.  I talk a lot about climate change on here, but I approach it as a scientist for the most part.  I grew up with people who flat out denied that climate change could be occurring, and I still feel like people need to be convinced that something is going on.  I’ve believed for a long time that if people understood the problem, they’d act to solve it.

I’m beginning to think that’s not true.  Most people do believe that climate change is occurring.  Most people even think we need to do something about it.  But most people either don’t do anything about it or think we can solve our problems with CFLs and recycling.  Those aren’t bad things to do, but it’s so far from what we need to be doing as to be laughable.

We need to be implementing fast and efficient public transportation everywhere, not encouraging people to get new cars.  We need to reorganize our cities so that work and services are mixed with residences so people and stuff doesn’t need to travel as far every day.  We need to stop using fossil fuels, period. We need to be promoting contraception, women’s rights, and good education for women here and across the globe to get our population down.  We need to dramatically change our farm subsidies so that they aren’t just increasing profits for agribusiness and consumers see more realistic costs for things like beef, dairy, and corn. We need to eat a lot less meat and dairy.  New buildings should have far less environmental impact and old buildings should be made more efficient.  Our fuel efficiency standards are still much too low.  We need to change people’s focus from consuming things to doing things.

If we managed even some of the things in that list, we’d not only be doing a lot to decrease carbon emissions, I think we’d create a world that we’d prefer to live in. We’ve already passed the point where we could have made changes and avoided the consequences of climate change – we’re going to be facing sea level rise, drought (and famine), worse hurricanes, and all sorts of unpleasantness no matter what we do now, but we have the opportunity to make the future a lot less painful.

The trick is figuring out how to get people to care enough to act – even appealing to a sense of self-preservation hasn’t done much good so far.