COP 21: climate change isn’t about stopping one bad guy…
Last April, Naomi Klein came to Castlegar, a small town close to where I live, to give a talk about climate change and her latest book “This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate“. So I went with my wife and our little one. It was a great evening and Naomi Klein made a lot of very interesting points. Although I was familiar with many of them, one can always use a (painful) reminder and I was grateful to be reminded that I am part of climate change too. One idea really stuck with me that night, and now that climate change is sharing the headlines with terrorism at the COP 21 in Paris, I thought the time had come to share it as a cartoon.
We are used to addressing challenges in a linear way; solve a single problem A, then move on to single problem B. But climate change is complex and is neither caused by a single issue, nor can it be fixed by one single solution. This is not about stopping ISIS or someone from starting a nuclear war. This is about each and every one of us stopping the ways that we act every single day and which contribute to climate change. We are really good at extracting and burning fossil fuels. We are addicted to it. And it’s very comfortable. But we need to stop. All of us. Right now. And it starts by recognizing that we are part of the problem. May the COP 21 help us get started…
