Climate change is real, but...

As humans, we don’t like to be preached at nor told what to do. 

But when it's a small 16-year-old girl lecturing us, we’re more prone to listen. Greta Thunberg, a climate change activist from Sweden, has shown that age is no barrier to changing the world. She will have an impact. If not on our generation, then the next. 

I say the next generation because it’s going to take time. It's quite obvious that we’re not ready for the kind of change she demands. We're not ready to take a solar-powered boat across the Atlantic, as she did. We’re not ready to pay twice as much for gasoline. We’re not even ready to pay more than nine dollars a month to save the planet (based on polling of Canadians). 

We need more time to change our economies than the Earth has to recover from current world emissions. We're on a course to change the Earth’s climate, even if we halt all greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. 

I’ve said before that a carbon tax is little more than window dressing when the largest world emitters fail to take action. Countries like India and China are in the midst of an economic renaissance, the same growth the West has experienced since the industrial revolution. This economic growth has come at the expense of the environment – habitat destruction, air and water pollution and climate change. 

 We have slowly been making the Earth less livable for other species, while at the same time making it more livable for humans. There’s a reason those in less developed countries have climate change far down on their list of priorities. Things like food, healthcare and education take higher priority when one is battling for survival. Millions have been lifted out of poverty thanks to fossil fuels and economic growth.

Fossil fuels will one day be replaced by other sources, but it comes at a cost. I’m sure solar panels will one day power the factories that are pulling Vietnamese labourers out of poverty, but this will take time.

In the meantime, how do we handle the fact that we likely won’t reach our climate change goals? There's a growing helplessness among many young people. Young adults are choosing to have no kids because of their worries about the future. Thunberg herself was prone to depression, overcome by the dire warnings she heard about the climate future. She has dealt with this depression through her calling.

She's fortunate. Many young people won’t have such opportunities.

My own daughter used to make posters about saving the Earth, with no prodding by her father who has succumbed to mid-life cynicism. She hasn’t made those posters lately, however, and doesn’t seem too worried about the future in general.

But should she be? I want her to be aware of the world around her, but I also want her to see things in perspective. We try to discuss how there are people suffering in the world today (especially when she doesn't appreciate her food), but I hesitate to harp on the melting of the ice caps. 

It can lead to overwhelming negativity. Like when a co-worker replied to my comment on how warm it was in spring with: “Yeah, but too bad about the polar bears.” 

It’s good to be aware of the issues, but negativity tends to do less for world problems than we think. Activists like Hans Rosling, who wrote Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, argues that we often get lost in our own bias and emotions when confronting world problems. It doesn't help when we don't understand the facts, or when we don't face problems with optimism.

Climate change is serious, but not insurmountable. Other problems also exist – malnutrition, disease and oppression – that are equally pressing.

Let's not be ignorant, but let’s not despair.