Off the Deep End: What can high school students do?

One of the problems that has confronted every teenager in recent history is that it’s the age at which you are becoming aware of the world around you and the problems in it, but according to the law, you are still a child, and have no power or money to make a difference. While that perception is not entirely true (you DO have the power to make a difference), there are many ways in which it is.

Off the deep end: How to make a snowballing climate action fund.

The snowballing climate action fund is a way to start by spending a little money on climate action, and gradually increase the amount you’re able to spend on it by setting aside savings. I’m going to describe it at the level of an individual apartment, but as I’ll explain later, it’s really applicable at any level from individual households, to the entire globe.

The notion is pretty simple, and can be done in a set of easily definable steps. We’ll start with power consumption:

Off The Deep End: How can one person influence politics?

In the last section, I talked about how artists and writers can help create a common vision of a better future that seems within reach. When this succeeds, and that vision takes hold, there are a number of reactions, and one of the more common ones is a desire to look at how to make that future a reality. Sure, we have the technology and know-how to create a better society, but do we have the collective will to do so?

Politics, in America, are daunting, to say the least. We live in an increasingly plutocratic society, in which the majority of legislators are far wealthier than the average American, and the cost of running for office seems to get higher with every election. So how can one person, or even a handful of people, make a difference in this arena?

There are a lot of possible answers to that question, so I’m going to start (as is my wont) with my own experience.

Off the Deep End: Delayed post.

The downside of having a lot to do is that I have a lot to do. The next chapter will come by the end of Tuesday. Sorry for the delay – I should have time to make future updates ahead of time.

Tomorrow’s update will cover what one person can do REGARDLESS of their artistic or technical abilities.

Off the Deep End: An inexpert guide to dealing with climate change

This is an ongoing series of blog posts that will make up a majority of this blog for a while. For an explanation of what it’s about, you can check out the initial “announcement” post and the two prefaces, or you can just go to here and find all the posts I’ve made so far in this series. The most recent addition is likely to be either directly beneath this sticky, or not far below whatever IS there.

UPDATE 09/8/2014: 

Changes coming to Oceanoxia soon, along with more regular updates! Stay tuned, and check out Skeptical Science‘s 97 Hours of Consensus event!

Off The Deep End: But what can one person do?

The titular question here comes up a lot in climate action. It’s literally the biggest problem anybody’s ever tackled, so it’s a bit daunting. After all, in the face of a problem this big, what can one person do?

Well, it turns out that one person can do rather a lot.

When I started working on this post, I ran into some difficulty. I don’t want any one of these chapters to be very long, and I found that when it came down to it, there was simply more than I could fit in one post.

That being the case, I’m going to set aside actions for the technically-minded and those who like getting involved in debates and politics (for now – I’ll get to you soon!), and focus on those among us of the artistic sort.

Off the Deep End: Preface #2, A note on harsh realities.

There’s one more thing to say in addition to the preface I’ve already published.

In the past few years, I’ve encountered what strikes me as a rather peculiar attitude. When faced with a problem the likes of which our species has never seen – a problem which could, realistically, lead to our extinction, a number of people respond by saying that a given action or solution “isn’t feasible” or “doesn’t make economic sense”.

While I’m not suggesting that anybody ruin themselves (that would remove your ability to keep fighting), I AM suggesting that that line of thinking, founded in the largely stable and prosperous 20th century, is not applicable to our current situation.

Off the Deep End: Preface

Preface: The more I think about this topic, the more I realize the scale of what I’ve promised to do here. Global climate change is, as I’ve mentioned many times before, a problem unlike anything we’ve ever tackled before, and at a scale we’ve never encountered before. In the past I’ve likened it to an actual journey to another planet similar to, but completely different from, the planet upon which humans and human civilization evolved.

I suppose it’s appropriate, in a way, that I’m undertaking to write something so ambitious – a guide on how to deal with something nobody’s ever dealt with before. I’ve always maintained that writers need to have enough of an ego to think that everybody wants to read what we write, and enough insecurity to be able to accept that much of what we write is crap.

This series (thinking I can do it justice) represents the ego portion. We’ll see about the other bit.

Silence of the Labs: Canada’s war on Science

The primacy of economic growth is the most toxic philosophy ever adopted.

It assumes that “compromise” means “industry gets what industry wants” and the only question is what the price is.

It means, by default, the every single human, every single living organism, and every single part of the world has a price – a point at which its destruction is worth the monetary gain.

It reduces all of us, and everything around us, to either resources, products, or obstacles to development. Nothing more.

Off the deep end: An inexpert guide to dealing with climate change: Announcement.

UPDATE: Chapter One is going to be a bit late because reasons. I’ll have it up in a couple hours. In the meantime, please enjoy the prefaces.

In my last post, I linked to a video that basically contained a video reprisal of the worst-case scenario voiced in the opening statement of this blog. It’s a bleak picture, and all the more so because it’s an accurate statement of the danger we face.

This post is the first of a series designed to provide an antidote, of sorts for the fear and despair that can so easily rise up when faced with the realities of global climate change. As I said in my last post, I wholeheartedly believe that we can deal with this problem and rise above it to create a civilization that will make our current existence look downright primitive. That belief is, I think, a reasonable one. We have the ability to power our society with renewable energy many times over, and there are many ways to generate, harness, and use energy that we simply don’t exploit. Some of my thoughts on this can be found in the section called “building the future we want“.

My goal in writing this series of blog posts is not only to have you believe that such a future is technically possible, but also to have you share the vision that drives me. My goal is to take the spirit of the quote by Antoine de Saint Exupéry at the head of this blog, and apply it to the Great Work that is responding to the threat of man-made global climate change. I don’t want people working on this because they feel obligated to (although that’s better than nothing), I’d like people working on it because they’re excited about the future we’re working to create.

In this series, I will cover a number of topics, ranging from the grand scale (working on national policy) to the small scale (one step beyond changing your lightbulbs). I will research the topics as thoroughly as I am able to do, in order to present a useful guide to responding to global warming at whatever level you are able. Part of this will be about dealing with the emotional and psychological burden. Part of it will be about looking at the world we have today and seeing the world it could become. The bulk of this series will be about working to bring about the world you want to live in.

I haven’t decided what the first installment will be, but whichever it is, I will have it available by Monday morning on January 20, 2014. Tune in then, and let’s see what we can get done.