To not know how to talk about climate change IRL?

[workwoes123]

I have an academic background in science, and an ongoing interest in it. I follow a lot of climate scientists and activists on Twitter, and read a lot around the subject. What I struggle to bring myself to do is talk to people IRL about it - even they ask me.

For anyone who suffers from anxiety (my sister, my mum) it’s just awful for them as it creates huge worries.

With others, my book group for example, it feels like preaching, telling them off for living their lives in the way they do (they are all pretty affluent, flying frequently for work and pleasure, multiple cars, big country houses, etc etc). When I’m spending time with people I like, I don’t want to be constantly challenging them on their choices / lifestyles or dooming and glooming around.

It’s similar with colleagues at work: they aren’t as affluent but they all drive, fly, eat meat, do up their kitchens because they are bored with the old one, shop as a hobby, run two cars so they can live in a bigger house / further from public transport etc - everything we are told will have to change.

But it’s bubbling up in me. I’m really not given to gloom and doom, but the cognitive dissonance between seeing the train coming towards us and pretending there’s nothing there is starting to get to me.

do you talk to people about this? how do you do it?

Maybe I’ll have to join extinction rebellion or something. Or, conversely, stop following scientists and activists and ignore it.

Off-shore wind is exactly the kind of thing where a medium sized country like the UK can make a difference by early adoption and helping get the technology to a mature stage. And we as individuals can make it clear to our politicians that this is a vote winner, and also use the facts about the increasing renewing share of renewables in the UK grid to rebut people we come across online and IRL who say nonsense like "electric cars/heat pumps are just a scam, because all the electricity comes from burning coal".

Where the crunch comes is in the fact that sometimes in the short term it means us paying more for electricity, and/or paying more in tax to support people who can't afford to pay more for electricity. In the long term renewables get cheaper and cheaper and surely the events of the last six months have shown us that reliance on fossil fuels has perils of its own, but there are real short term costs and what people who genuinely care about climate change can do is give our leaders the popular support to bear that pain (mitigated for individuals by whatever means possible) instead of going for short term fossil fuel fixes. It's worth more to the planet than a thousand beeswax wraps and bamboo toothbrushes.

Do you follow Dr Ella Gilbert? She explains things really well:

https://instagram.com/dr_gilbz?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

There’s loads of climate action and research happening on the ground, in businesses and universities. But the general public doesn’t as a rule understand much about the science or what steps are needed.

As others have said people are just trying to get by, pay bills and have more immediate things to worry about. A lot of changes that we need to make are still too expensive. A lot of the forced changes that could happen will mainly affect poor people.

I live rurally, work in community nursing and rely on my car to work, take my children to school, get to appointments etc. The bus service is pretty good for a rural village but it wouldn’t get me to my patients in the many rural villages they live in. Electric is out of reach currently, too expensive, no driveway and not enough local charging points. I do recycle, haven’t flown since I was 18, get shopping delivered, get milk from the farm dispenser across the road, have meat free nights but I cannot give up my car unfortunately. My concern is that the people making decisions about this stuff live in cities and haven’t a clue how rural people live but we will all be tarred with the same brush

@ElephantsFart it's not just the general public, a lot of journalists and media professionals don't understand or can't read a scientific paper properly so if the media is the major source of news and information they're either going to get alarmist or misleading information.

A great example: The press release of a recent study by emmisions analytics claimed that pollution from tyre wear could be 1000x tailpipe emmisions. I was sceptical so I read the paper. The paper only compared particulate pollution not CO2e, it also included the cumulative particulates kicked up on hot dry days. In effect the road dust suspension after a passing car could be 1000x the pm10 and pm2.5 particulates from the exhaust. The headline implies something quite different, and when the media get hold of it they spin again.

I'm not surprised people are sceptical.

@ElephantsFart and alarmist journalists such as George Monbiot mean that people end up with attitudes like @AlaskaThunderfuckHiiiiiiiii .

@Daftasabroom im sorry what attitude have I got? I’m doing small things within my means? It’s valid to worry about what last minute changes governments make as usual? For example scotland wants net zero by whatever date? That’s only going to happen if infrastructure is put in place and things to achieve this are cheaper

More or Less took that headline to the cleaners. As their guest so rightly pointed out, total weight only matters if it falls on you in a lump.

My apologies @AlaskaThunderfuckHiiiiiiiii I didn't mean it to across as a dig at you. My frustration that the reporting on net zero is of a really poor standard and can lead to many people, perhaps including yourself, to think that you are being asked to do or sacrifice too much.

I'm fortunate in that I get to see on a daily basis the huge efforts being undertaken by government and industry and I read the reports on energy and infrastructure and technological progress. Net zero by 2050 is challenging but totally doable and will not require massive reductions in people's quality of life, if anything it will improve.

This a bump really, but I wanted to keep up the discussion around the positive things the UK in particular is doing to improve our environmental sustainability and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in particular.

The UK's current installed capacity of wind energy is about 11GW which yesterday produced 11% of our electricity, the figures for solar are pretty similar. The pipeline for offshore wind stands at almost 90GW and for onshore solar at almost 40GW within a decade. That's more than 100% of our current electricity generation.

The excess will go towards electrolysis of hydrogen, which can be used directly as a fuel, or reacted with CO2 extracted from the atmosphere to form power to liquid sustainable fuels such methanol, butanol, avgas and syngas.

We will absolutely need to change our lifestyles but not as much the doom mongers make out but I personally don't believe this will require the sacrifices some seem to worry about.

@Daftasabroom Well the OP hasn’t bothered coming back to discuss it, so I think even she know it’s not something most of us consider a high priority in the grand scheme of things!

@Hellsbe why do you not consider a priority in the grand scheme of things?

I think I struggle with the need to get rid of fossil-fuel burning things before the end of their useful life. We have (two) diesel cars that have many years left, a petrol lawnmower and oil heating, all of which will need to go.

It just goes massively against the grain to throw out existing useful stuff rather than make do!

@GuppytheCat I'm not sure we do need to dispose of fossil fuel combustion products before the end of useful life. I don't think I've seen that espoused anywhere by a reputable organisation and it's a bit of an urban myth.

Urban myth? I haven’t really heard it anywhere, I was just musing.

The cars, for instance, will come to the end of their useful lives in the next decade or so anyway, but if we keep them going that long, obviously they will emit more in that time than if we lose them now.

@GuppytheCat no one is suggesting that we need scrap cars before the end of their useful life, apart from you:

I struggle with the need to get rid of fossil-fuel burning things before the end of their useful life

Happy to accept that I’m arguing with myself then…

But it seems logical to me that the sooner I get rid of a polluting vehicle, the less it will pollute.

Is there something I’m missing here?

@GuppytheCat yes, you are missing out the emissions associated with both the manufacture and end of life of the vehicle. However over a 100,000m period an EV running on renewable electricity will have half the emissions of an ICE equivalent.

Should you consider changing to an EV when you decide to change car, absolutely. Should you consider scrapping a perfectly serviceable vehicle or boiler, personally I think that would be a bit daft.

The world will shake us off like a bad case of fleas and will be better off for it. Could get hit by asteroid tomorrow so no point worrying .

Well, you’d hope it would be daft to scrap something before its end of life. But the manufacture and end of life emission costs will be the same regardless of length of use, whereas its emissions will rise with length of use.

I’m not talking averages here but personal decision on when to scrap a polluting car. As far as I can see, pensioning off old tech early - now, rather than in ten years - is part of what’s needed to curb total emissions in time.

We drive very few miles a year so are keeping our elderly little petrol job until it's scrapped by which time hiring an electric whenever we need it should be a practical alternative.

Depending on the way technology moves it's not impossible that we'll end up retrofitting the ICE cars built today to algae biofuel or hydrogen. Probably not the way to bet but not impossible.

@CredibilityProblem I suspect biofuels will be the preserve of marine and aerospace. Hydrogen will fuel larger ICE such as trucks and off highway. But the vast majority or personal automotive will be EV. It would be very hard to adapt the majority of ICE, not so hard with diesel, but particularly anything older than ten of fifteen years. It's also very expensive to certify as each and every engine make and model would need to be tested for 30,000 miles at MIRA which costs about £50k a go

@GuppytheCat manufacturing and end of life emmisions for a car scrapped at 100,000 and replaced by another also scrapped at 100,000 miles, would be double that of a car scrapped at 200,000 miles.

Yes, true.

Im seeing this as a one-off switch from carbon fuelled to electric, though; a step change, not an ongoing one.

Currently the issue is moot unless we can find an affordable electric car tall enough for extremely tall DH. Sawing him off at the knees isn’t the answer.

@GuppytheCat from what I see (at work) there are going to be multiple solutions and much more of a mix and match approach depending on the sector. Think of it more as either a series of small step changes or an evolution.