True, but also don’t allow perfection to be the enemy of good.
I think this logic fundamentally misses the point. This isn’t me not starting a project because I don’t think I could do it perfectly so why bother. It’s someone else showing me their outline for the project and telling me that I don’t need to do anything, they’ll get it done on time. Then it doesn’t get done because they never intended to do anything, they just didn’t want anyone else completing anything.
If we were just doing small things because that’s all we could feasibly do for now and we’re working our way up to big things, that’d be fine. It might not be enough, but it’d be what we’re working with. But the small actions being taken by capitalist governments aren’t designed to chip away at the problem slowly. Their purpose is to give the appearance that the current system is capable of solving the problem and someone is working on it, so we don’t need to think about more radical solutions. The goal is to block progress, not merely to work on it in some slow and responsible way. “Look, the government joined a non-binding agreement saying that we’re working on climate change! We should totally keep voting for them because it’s better than nothing!”
It’s even worse than that though. They’re not just doing things for show to dampen political will for greater change. These are the same people that keep giving the military, surveillance, and police state more and more money and power. We are allowing them to build the tools they need to keep us in our place. By continuing along this path we’re making it harder and harder for us to eventually do what needs to be done.
The reality is that we’re not going to be able to save ourselves while capitalists are in charge. Capitalism fundamentally demands endless growth and a concentration of wealth and power. Efforts to curtail that growth will be stopped and the costs of that growth is distributed to those with less power.
As for the science/science communication part of this: I think it should be pretty clear that that isn’t the problem. The science is well known at this point. The problem is that the people who have the power to fix things don’t care and are so invested in the status quo that they’d sooner ratchet up violent repression before they’d actually try to solve the problem.
I think this logic fundamentally misses the point. This isn’t me not starting a project because I don’t think I could do it perfectly so why bother. It’s someone else showing me their outline for the project and telling me that I don’t need to do anything, they’ll get it done on time. Then it doesn’t get done because they never intended to do anything, they just didn’t want anyone else completing anything.
If we were just doing small things because that’s all we could feasibly do for now and we’re working our way up to big things, that’d be fine. It might not be enough, but it’d be what we’re working with. But the small actions being taken by capitalist governments aren’t designed to chip away at the problem slowly. Their purpose is to give the appearance that the current system is capable of solving the problem and someone is working on it, so we don’t need to think about more radical solutions. The goal is to block progress, not merely to work on it in some slow and responsible way. “Look, the government joined a non-binding agreement saying that we’re working on climate change! We should totally keep voting for them because it’s better than nothing!”
It’s even worse than that though. They’re not just doing things for show to dampen political will for greater change. These are the same people that keep giving the military, surveillance, and police state more and more money and power. We are allowing them to build the tools they need to keep us in our place. By continuing along this path we’re making it harder and harder for us to eventually do what needs to be done.
The reality is that we’re not going to be able to save ourselves while capitalists are in charge. Capitalism fundamentally demands endless growth and a concentration of wealth and power. Efforts to curtail that growth will be stopped and the costs of that growth is distributed to those with less power.
As for the science/science communication part of this: I think it should be pretty clear that that isn’t the problem. The science is well known at this point. The problem is that the people who have the power to fix things don’t care and are so invested in the status quo that they’d sooner ratchet up violent repression before they’d actually try to solve the problem.
So it sounds like the first step is to care.
As the OOP said too.