It’s time to get pretty fed up with the climate on planet Earth and what human beings are doing to it. Actually, it’s way past time for that and we should all be boiling mad (get it? boiling – oh never mind).
There are things you can do though and some of them are pretty darn fun. So let’s get started.
What You Can Do #1: Beware of Climate Crisis ‘Greenwashing‘
Big fat incredibly profitable companies that make big fat incredible profits for big fat incredibly wealthy people will take out ads, make films, engage in PR campaigns, and otherwise try to make it seem like they are investing in practical solutions to the problems they create.
Fuggedaboutit. It’s insane to trust an arsonist to fireproof your house. That’s not what arsonists do.
There is too much money at stake in the current system for big fat companies like ExxonMobile to give up what has made them fat cats. They’re not going to do it. They don’t want to do it. Their shareholders don’t want them to do it. Other obscenely rich people don’t want them to do it.
The only thing that will make the gigantic corporations that have a big stake in the status quo let go of said status quo is if someone makes them do it.
Understanding this is just common sense. People are designed to do things that reward them until they are so constrained by external factors that they are forced to make an adjustment. Until and unless making real changes to sustainability is more rewarding for huge corporations than raking in big piles o’cash – or until and unless the big piles o’cash are taken away from them – any even slightly rational corporation is going to keep grabbing the cash.
Big corporations are completely aware that regular human beings are suffering (and sometimes dying) under heat domes that didn’t exist before they start raking in big piles o’cash. But they don’t care. Because they’ve got big buckets of cash, and big fat executive bonuses and salaries that allow them to have air conditioning and oases of coolness in a hot climate so they don’t feel the pain that they create for others.
They aren’t unfeeling because they are unusual individuals. They are unfeeling because they are not unusual individuals. Right now you and I are benefitting from a system that allows us internet access while a whole bunch of people around the world don’t have it or struggle mightily for it. You and I might think ‘oh man, everyone should have internet access in today’s world’ but we do not think ‘hey we should change the system so I don’t have internet access anymore but everyone who doesn’t have it gets clean drinking water.’
No, we want to keep our internet access. Big corporations want to keep their piles o’cash. If the climate crisis can go away while they are rich as sin, great. One less thing they have to do a PR campaign about. But they ain’t gonna give up their $$ without external pressure that is at least equal to the attractions of those billions of $$.
Don’t trust the big corporations to alleviate the climate crisis. Get pretty fed up with the big corporations instead.
What You Can Do #2: Tell Other People You Are Angry
TikTok exists for a reason. That reason is so you can make short videos spreading the word about how angry you are about the climate crisis.
People looooove to be angry these days. Take a look at your social media feeds, at clickbait, at righwing media, at leftwing media, or any sports fan whose team has just lost a big game.
When there’s a flood anywhere in the world (and there have been some doozies in 2023), get on TikTok and make a short video about how fucking angry you are about the climate crisis.
When there’s a drought (and there are some big ones in the US and elsewhere right now), get on TikTok and complain like hell about the climate crisis.
You want to make it easy for people to share and express the feelings that they already have. Anger about climate change should be trending on TikTok because it’s a real thing that many people all too silently share with you.
Ask other people to join you in being vocally, publicly pissed off with those big fat greenwashing corporations and everything else that is not moving us toward practical solutions.
Obviously, you don’t have to limit yourself to TikTok or any other medium of expression. You just have to let other people know how angry you are.
Remember: being angry can be fun! Every moment you spend being pissed off at someone else (ExxonMobil) is a moment you don’t spend feeling guilty or sad or hopeless or helpless. Blaming something or someone else is a wonderful psychological galvanizing tactic and we need to be galvanized right now, not mopey.
Pitching a fit and going all ranty can make you feel good and energetic and righteous. It can make other people feel the same way.
Don’t you owe it to your friends and family and random strangers on the internet to help them share in the joy of feeling energized and part of a large group of people who also feel energized? It’s like rooting for a sports team except the team you’re rooting for is planet Earth. Yay planet Earth!
What You Can Do #3: Get Political
Politics and politicians are horrible, but hear me out here.
Everyone in their right mind at least kinda sorta hates politicians. In the US, everyone hates Congress. That’s because Congress is a large collection of human beings quarreling with each other, and it’s incredibly annoying, even at the best of times.
So getting all angry and pissed off at politicians is a super-fun hobby that you can engage in during your spare time!
When there’s a devastating hurricane (they are coming pretty frequently these days), blame it on politicians! They will not like this, which will make it even more fun.
Troll them. Harass them. Remind them that you are their boss. Pressure them.
Right now, in many parts of the world, politicians are scared shitless of the angry rightwing base that hates everything right now (with good reason) and wants to burn it all down and take out their hatred on other people.
So why not make politicians scared shitless of you and your anger about the climate crisis?
Politicians are naturally scared shitless of human emotion, especially human emotion that seems irrationally violent and passionate. Utilize the gutlessness of politicians in your favor.
And you might as well utilize the irrationally violent and passionate hatred of the rightwing base in your favor too. The rightwing base wants change, hates politicians and is spurred by rightwing media to take it out on the ‘left’ and the ‘woke’, etc.
Start telling the rightwing base that you are with them in their hatred of the system and that you both agree that politicians should FIX IT NOW! Communicate that it’s not about making politicians be more woke or left-leaning but about making them FIX THE FUCKING HURRICANES NOW!
The politicians will not be able to do this, which will frighten them enormously, and make them run around pledging to stop hurricanes. The climate crisis will be a priority issue for politicians when you make it a priority issue.
You’re already pretty fed up, now get political too and watch the people you are pretty fed up with squirm. Good times!
What You Can Do #4: Get Off the Damn Airplane
And ditch the damn SUV and monster truck.
If you love to travel, then maybe this isn’t your favorite suggestion, although there are plenty of reasons to be pretty fed up with airline travel these days. If you are convinced you need a gigantic vehicle to drive to the grocery store in, then maybe this isn’t your favorite suggestion either. Although, I gotta tell you, when the weather is halfway decent, walking and biking are great joys.
But of course, the climate crisis means the weather is never going to be halfway decent! Oh the irony.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t turn the whole issue of transportation polluting the air and making the forests burn into a super-fun pretty fed up activity. Here’s how:
Pitch a Screaming Fit About Companies Requiring Back to Office
Don’t they know that increases greenhouse gas emissions! Fuck’em! Shame on them! Boo hiss! There’s no excuse for them.
Blame them. You wouldn’t be in your giant SUV if they didn’t make you come back to the office. You could be at home!
You’re just one person with your gas guzzler. But real change in transportation emissions will come when there are large-scale alterations in things like commuting patterns.
Blame the gigantic companies! It’s fun – and justified!
Pitch a Giant Screaming Fit About Rich People in Their Private Jets
You don’t have a private plane. I don’t have a private plane. Very few people have private planes. If I had one, I would definitely want to use it because it would be way better for my quality of life than booking economy and sitting on a sweltering tarmac for 4 hours. But, as I previously mentioned, I don’t have one and neither do you.
So let’s scream at the people who do. They contribute way more than their share to the problem and they cost the rest of us money that we don’t have and they do.
Since there aren’t very many of them and there are a lot of us, it seems only fair that our desires should be more important than theirs when it comes to things like, you know, ‘majority rule.’ If a small number of people are doing things that harm a large number of people, the small number should cut it the fuck out.
The small number of very wealthy people who are harming the rest of us will not agree with this at all in favor of their own moral calculus, which is ‘rich people rule! Heh heh heh.’ Pointing this out will further enrage the already enraged glump of us who are sick and tired of getting jacked around by rich people.
Don’t you think the justifiably enraged glump of us suffering under the climate crisis deserve a deliciously deserving target of our rage to rage at? Of course we do!
Once you and I and everyone else get deliciously and loudly outraged at private jet owners jetting around to private places where they meet with other private jet owners to hash out the details of their plans to keep the rest of us down, the private jet owners will get their feelings all hurt and fight back.
Good! Get them engaged and start demanding concessions. Like they get to keep their private planes as long as they are taxed out the wazoo and all the proceeds have to go to mitigating the effects of the climate crisis they are contributing to.
Let’s hurt some billionaire feelings and make them cry like the ‘crying Michael Jordan’ meme. Tears are cleansing and it will be good for everyone’s soul.
Who said fighting climate change had to be dreary?
What You Can Do #5: Go Solar, Get a Heat Pump, and Whine Like Hell if You Can’t Do Either
Solar is seriously great. The sun pumps out solar energy in massive quantities – for free! Going solar can make you much less dependent on greedy utilities that literally cause massive raging infernos across big swathes of the country (e.g., PG&E in the western US).
And heat pumps can reduce your reliance on fossil fuels to heat your home. Maine, one of the coldest states in the US, has had good success with them.
There are better ways to heat and cool your home than there were say 70 years ago when the idea of renewable energy was not even a gleam in climate-concerned scientist’s eye. You deserve to have access to them. So does everyone else.
If you have access and can afford it – make use of these climate-friendlier technologies. If you don’t and you can’t – whine like hell.
Say things like ‘where’s my subsidy? Everyone is England is getting a subsidy. Everyone in Maine is getting a subsidy. Why am I not getting a subsidy?’ And so on.
Say this loudly. And frequently.
One of the principal differences between corporations and individuals in the US is that corporations loudly and repeatedly demand all sorts of subsidies for damn near everything they do. Individuals don’t.
One of the great tricks of the world’s long descent into neo-liberal rightwing ideology is infiltrating public discussion with the idea that it’s immoral and excessively costly for the government to do things for individuals whereas it’s morally worthy and a smart investment to give big business anything it wants and a lollipop too. This is bullshit.
It’s incredibly costly and a terrible allocation of resources to subsidize corporations that literally ruin the world we’re living on – whereas it is a good investment to help individuals build sustainable and productive lives.
But that’s just rational thought talking right there – and we all know from recent experience that’s not going to get us anywhere in today’s world.
So let’s do what everyone else does – whine!
Demand solar and non-fossil fuel heating and cooling for your home, your apartment building, your offices and all the commercial buildings you enter.
People will think you’re a pain in the ass. But people think everyone’s a pain in the ass these days and if you can convince a few people to be pains in the ass right along with you (‘yeah, why shouldn’t we get a subsidy? Big business does…’) then you’ll not only have a bonding experience with your fellow ass-pains but a damn good time and maybe even a subsidy to make your heating and cooling bills go down.
Win-win-win.
What You Can Do #6: Eat Well (Or At Least As Well As You Can)
You may or may not have noticed but people love food. People love to eat. Food is (or at least can be) super-yummy. Yay food!
Unfortunately, many, if not most, of the people in the world now live in a system that provides a bunch of stuff to eat but not nearly as much actual food.
Having stuff to eat is better than not having stuff to eat. But having food to eat instead of what are now called (annoyingly) ultra-processed foods is even better. Ultra-processed foods are not really food. They are a combination of, you guessed it, ultra-processed artificial ingredients combined with, you guessed it, ultra-processed forms of sugar, fat, and salt.
I like sugar, fat, and salt. If you are a fairly normal person, you do too. Sugar, fat, and salt are hands down some of the best inventions of the natural world.
Big conglomerates have twigged to this fact. And they have taken over mass-scale production of artificially engineered sugars, fats, and salts and marketed them as food. Food that can be downed in mass, calorie-dense quantities in the blink of an eye. Cheap, time-saving convenient food-like edible sources of calories.
And… thanks to the rigors of modern neoliberal capitalism, individual people who might like to eat actual food don’t have time to anymore. They have to work so hard and so long for so little and spend so much time getting to and from wherever it is that they have to work long and hard that they have neither the time nor the energy nor the resources to get real food, cook it, sip, sup, and savor it, and then clean up afterward.
It has literally become difficult in the modern world to eat real food. Many people live in so-called food deserts, where they can’t even get ahold of anything real to eat. This should piss you off. But you’re probably too tired from working long and hard to be pissed off about anything more than what you’re already pissed off about.
Just the same, whenever you get a chance, eat well. Real food. Delicious organic strawberries, naturally sweet and tart. Delicious fatty nuts, and yeah I don’t mind if you add salt to them. Delicious hearty vegetables served with nice hearty non-artificial sources of fat, like olive oil, and yes, salt if you want it.
Home-cooked meals with real ingredients. You’ll be amazed at how good real food tastes.
And if you can get it, eat relatively local, relatively fresh, relatively un-pesticided, un-antibioticed, un-drugged, plant and animal products. The stuff that goes into factory-farmed products is nasty. When you get a chance to avoid it, do so.
Sustainable agriculture uses up to 56 per cent less energy, creates 64 per cent fewer emissions and allows for greater levels of biodiversity than conventional farming.
How tweaking your diet can help save the planet (unep.org)
If you’re so inclined, you can also grow some of your own foodstuffs. You can also advocate for and participate in community gardens where multiple people can experience the joy, satisfaction, and occasional heartbreak of growing their own food. This is hard, fun, dirty work and can help channel your natural aggressions into a relaxing and productive endeavor.
Which is great.
And don’t forget to invest a little bit in ragging on Big Agriculture and Big Food. Both spend inordinate amounts of time, money, and lobbying resources on screwing over small farmers and small providers and generally trying to take over the world (they’ve succeeded) for their own profit even if it makes everyone on the entire planet fat and dead.
Be grumpy and complainy about all of their practices from seed monopolies to excessive packaging to false health claims to gigantic carbon footprints. Drag ’em every chance you get.
What You Can Do #7: Don’t Be One of the 12%
A recent university study looked into who is eating beef in the United States and found that just 12% of the people accounted for half of all the beef consumption. Almost half (45%) of people didn’t eat any beef on a particular day.
Beef consumption is just one of many variables in the climate crisis equation – but it is a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE).
Livestock alone accounts for 14% of global GHGE
Gerber, P.J.; Steinfeld, H.; Henderson, B.; Mottet, A.; Opio, C.; Dijkman, J.; Falcucci, A.; Tempio, G. Tackling Climate Change through Livestock: A Global Assessment of Emissions and Mitigation Opportunities; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO): Rome, Italy, 2013; ISBN 9789251079201. [Google Scholar]
I’m not saying never eat beef. I eat beef occasionally. What I’m saying is don’t be one of the 12%.
In almost everything in life, there are outliers. People who place an excessive demand on a particular resource or set of resources.
A relatively small number of people are criminals – and yet they place a large demand on society’s resources. A relatively small number of corporations are devoted to fossil fuel extraction – but they cause a large amount of GHGE.
Don’t be the outlier that causes problems way beyond what everyone else is doing. Don’t be the excessive beef eater. The private plane junkie. The guy with the biggest vehicle who modified it to emit more pollutants.
Don’t be the biggest asshole on the block. And give the side-eye to the ones who are.
This is an easy one to follow. And it’s good to remind yourself, often, that you are just trying not to be the biggest asshole on the block.
For some reason, people who care about the climate crisis often have a depressingly earnest habit of indulging in personal guilt, and a particular, and odd, sort of moralism and desire for environmental purity. These emotions, attractive as they may be to some, are impractical and often off-putting. There is a tendency to somehow associate caring about the climate with altruism, selflessness, inconvenience, and desire to shame other people for their lack of said qualities.
Fuck that shit.
Caring about the climate has everything to do with a zestful, joyous selfish desire to stop getting screwed over by people who know damn well they’re screwing us over.
We’re just regular people trying not to be the biggest assholes on the block getting yanked around by people we neither know nor like, and it’s time to get pretty fed up and start yanking back.
Yanking back is fun. Let’s making doing something about climate change fun again!
RESOURCES
10 ways you can help fight the climate crisis (unep.org)
Count Us In: Protect what you love. Join Us. (count-us-in.com)
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