[troutman]

Want to Fight Climate Change? Stop Believing These Myths

https://www.wired.com/story/guide-to-climate-success/

You’d be forgiven for feeling hopeless right now.

But all is not lost. Take it from economist Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University in Canada, who has for decades advised governments on climate policy, and who wrote the new book The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success: Overcoming Myths that Hinder Progress. In it, he argues for essential steps we still can and must take to save ourselves and the planet. And he points out that in order to make political changes, scientists and activists don’t have to convince everyone of the seriousness of the threat—they just have to motivate what he calls “climate-sincere” policymakers to put new regulations in place, and fast. With decisive action, he argues, humans eliminated acid rain and ozone-killing chlorofluorocarbons, and we can do it again. But it means confronting persistent myths about climate change. Think of it like the illumination of inconvenient truths within the larger Inconvenient Truth.

Jaccard argues against some conventional wisdom, like the idea that fossil fuels are altogether evil, pointing out that almost nothing around you would have been possible without coal, oil, and gas. In response to the argument that we can ditch oil and coal immediately, he points out that renewable technologies are still more expensive and are not as readily available in the economically developing world, where plentiful and cheap fossil fuels are helping pull people out of poverty. And he says the notion of peak oil—the argument that the world’s about to run out of the stuff—is a lot farther off than you imagine, thanks to oil companies finding ever more ways to extract the stuff. Sorry, he argues, but we can’t rely on fossil-fuel scarcity to get us out of this mess.