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A need for more positive goal-based reporting on Climate Change [1]

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Date: 2023-01-18

It is my personal observation, without statistics, that the majority of climate news that I come across has a general doomsday feel and tone to it. While shocking people into action is very important, and that style reporting should continue, I’d personally appreciate more positive goal based reporting on what is going on to tackle the issue.

We are desperately in need of more action on Climate Change. As a global phenomenon, there is only so much we can do within the confines of our own private lives. A pessimistic focus on our chances only serves to fuel complacency regarding what we can change. Many people are willing to back a struggle, but it helps to see more concrete paths and plans on how we’re going to achieve our goals.

Again in my unscientific personal survey of climate news, we tend to focus on the big numbers of degrees of temperature change and seal level rise. While these numbers help highlight the big need, they are frustratingly hard to get any sense of what needs to happen between now and later to prevent or mitigate the effects related to those numbers. To go with this, what news related to positive measures being taken seems to focus primarily around the big conferences and agreements. We all want someone to hit home runs for us, but how to make that happen remains frustratingly vague.

I’ve wanted to shift some of my writing away from Ukraine and focus more on Climate Change and have been preoccupied on these dynamics. I’m not interested in writing about the next glacier to go crashing into the sea. Instead I want to know how many legislators we are away from passing a national bill.

I want to see a tally of who currently in office supports a Green New Deal type legislation. The critics will immediately want to jump in here and say why does that matter when we have a Republican House. It doesn’t matter for passing legislation today, but it does matter for 2025 when a new congress is in place. We need to be identifying now who currently supports what to whichever degree, and focusing our electoral plans with that in mind. We need to identify those Democrats not on board and Primary them. We need to recruit candidates in EVERY legislative district (unless the incumbent is already on board of course) in the country to talk up these issues. We need an ongoing Whip count focused on climate change and getting the people into office needed to support it.

But that is still too high of a level. We need to do the same on the state and local levels as well. We need some appropriate prepared legislation that City Councils, County Boards, and State Legislatures can understand, modify for their locality, and enact. And we need fundraising type thermometers to track what percentage of state and local governments have signed on.

We need to be breaking down the carbon usage of each part of our economy and setting goals for those sectors. And “We the people” need to see those numbers and reporting needs to help explain them. We need to invest in the research for those areas that will have difficulty in reducing their carbon footprint. No more offsets. We need to to do it for real. If corporations don’t wish to play along then we can apply the local legislative strategies to help them along, or start up companies to out-compete them in carbon footprint measurements. Then as consumers and citizens, we need to create the environment where the products with the lowest carbon footprint have a competitive advantage.

Maybe we need the equivalent of nutritional information on every product. What is the carbon footprint of the components that went into the good, what was the footprint in manufacturing, and what is the footprint of disposal or recycling?

I’m sure there are many more good ideas out there. But we need to make this as everyday as possible. People should be discussing carbon footprint numbers like they do battery length, calories, or 0-60 times. We as political junkies need to track not just Dems vs Rs, but for-Green deal and against. We need the metrics to track the small changes in our society that we can see. When I look to move to a new city I want to see a carbon-footprint-per-capita score for living there.

I will be writing more about this myself to do my part. I’d love any and all support, suggestions, and fellow writers to join me. We’ve got the doom and gloom covered. Let’s start putting in place the metrics. So if people have particular metrics, legislation, stories, websites, or similar to share please do. We’re not going to tackle climate change waiting for the home run, we need to break the problem into digestible chunks so that we can work on it in every part of our lives and communities.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/1/18/2147860/-A-need-for-more-positive-goal-based-reporting-on-Climate-Change

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