The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet

Vested interests profiting from our reliance on fossil fuels and their enablers in the policy and media arenas have for decades sought to undermine the scientific consensus behind human-caused climate change. The motive? Forestalling efforts to decarbonize our economy. As the impacts of climate change have now become too obvious to deny, the forces of inaction—the inactivists--have now instead engaged in a multi-pronged strategy of distraction, deflection, division, and despair-mongering. They have (a) pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy of sowing division among climate activists and advocates, (b) deflected attention from systemic change and regulatory policy solutions to personal behaviour, (c) promoted false solutions that enable the continued burning of fossil fuels at the very root of the problem and (d) fomented doomist framing that disempowers us by making catastrophic change now seem inevitable. I will discuss what we can do to fight back, emphasizing the importance of both urgency AND agency in the effort to save our planet from catastrophic warming.