More Americans are asking “What can I do about climate change?”
My new book provides answers
So I’m listening to the radio on my way home from ordering posters to promote my new book, Am I Too Old to Save the Planet? A Boomer’s Guide to Climate Action, when NPR’s Alisa Chang of All Things Considered interviews Anthony Leiserowitz, the founder and director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Their topic: Are the effects of extreme weather changing how Americans are thinking about climate change?
I know and admire the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications, which works closely with George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communications here in Northern Virginia, where I live. I draw on their data in my forthcoming book to show that a large and growing number of Americans — including boomers like me — understand the threat and are prepared to take action.
I finished writing in the spring and the book has since been moving through the editorial and production process. It’s now available for advance orders and will be released at the end of October. Those who order it today will have their copy in hand the first week of November.
Since I finished writing it, the United States, like pretty much all the rest of the world, has suffered a surge in climate change-driven catastrophes: rapidly intensifying hurricanes, massive wildfires, floods, unprecedented heatwaves. As Chang says at the top of the piece, July and August were the hottest months ever recorded.
So I’ve been wondering: what impact are these events having on Americans’ views? Would climate catastrophes make potential readers more interested in my book? Short answer: Yes!
“About two-thirds of Americans say that they’re now worried about climate change, and these particular kinds of extreme weather events, which are just hitting us over and over again like a two-by-four to the forehead,” Leiserowitz told NPR listeners. “People are starting to wake up and really say, oh, my gosh, something’s really going on here.”
Until recently, he said, many Americans felt the problem wouldn’t impact them personally.
“Like, maybe the impacts would happen in a generation, so maybe to my grandkids,” Leiserowitz said. “Or distant in space — this was about polar bears or maybe developing countries but not the United States, not my community, not my friends, family or me.”
“That basic perception has begun to shift pretty dramatically as these events start to roll out across America,” Leiserowitz said.
“People are beginning to really connect the dots and say — actually this is happening right here, right now, to the people and places that I care about.”
Is rising concern leading to action? Fortunately, the answer here is also “Yes!”
Leiserowitz told Chang that the 8% of Americans who are most concerned about climate change are far more likely than others to be taking action to address it.
This includes personal actions, like eating less meat, installing solar panels, and buying an EV, he said. And it includes working together “as part of our collective society to demand the system-level changes that, of course, are crucial.”
Chang agreed this was good news. But she said she had another concern, one that is probably also on your mind, that some people will conclude that “there’s nothing they can do, or that it’s just too late, and they respond with just straight-up apathy or resignation.”
Leiserowitz said that researchers have been tracking this response for many years. Even today, he said, “only “a very small proportion of Americans are what we call fatalists,” believing “there’s no point. We can’t change this. We can’t make any difference.”
Then came the clincher, at least for me:
“I think most people are actually asking a very different question and that is: What can I do? And what can we, collectively, do to actually solve this problem?”
BINGO! That’s what my book offers! Practical ideas for a range of actions, starting with personal behavior and progressing through various types of collective action, such as volunteering with groups like Citizen’s Climate Lobby (CCL) and Th!rdAct, engaging in faith-based climate advocacy, and even risking arrest in non-violent civil disobedience and direct action.
The book draws on extensive interviews, research, and my own personal experience over the past several years of learning about the climate emergency and becoming a passionate climate activist. Chapter titles in “Part 2: What to do about it” include:
Chapter 4: Every little bit helps, right?
Chapter 5: How can I work with others?
Chapter 6: What’s faith got to do with it?
Chapter 7: Should I get arrested?
Chapter 8: Who you callin’ radical?
Chapter 9: Just do it!
Chang closed by asking Leiserowitz what people should do. This being a radio interview, he necessarily spoke in broad terms: reducing emissions and becoming “much more serious about preparing ourselves for impacts because, unfortunately, they’re going to get worse before they get better.” (For details, you could consult my book!)
He ended, however, with something very simple that each of us can do, advice that I strongly endorse.
“All of us — every single person — has a superpower to address this issue, and that is to talk about it,” he said. “As human beings, we are social animals. We constantly pay attention to what other people around us do and say.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a kid, you’re a grandmother, whatever — you can make a difference, if only by talking about it. That’s the first step to all the other things that you can do.”
Leiserowitz isn’t the first person to suggest this, of course. Katherine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian and climate scientist, and the author of Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, has written and spoken passionately about the importance and power of naming the problem.
“There is one thing we can all do that we are not doing: talk about it,” Hayhoe says. After thousands of such conversations, she has concluded that nearly everybody has the values needed to care about climate. “We just need to connect the dots between the values they already have,” she says.
How to begin those conversations? Understanding the basics of the problem, how we got here, and what we can do about it, would put you on solid ground. Having some ideas about what to do about it, in your own life and working with others, would also be very useful.
Whether or not you are a boomer, Am I Too Old to Save the Planet? A Boomer’s Guide to Climate Action” will give you the tools you need to get started.
