Not too many people are talking about climate change.
Yes, it’s in the news, it has plentiful coverage from the media people who’ve flown in to Paris to witness the COP21 talks. Various think pieces are being written about whether this new round of talks will solidify the good intentions of the previous talks in Lima, Peru, or whether it will devolve into yet another Kyoto Protocol failure. And the Twitter and Facebook discussions are energetic and lively among people for whom the topic resonates the most.
Climate change demonstrators left their shoes on a square in Paris after authorities cancelled their march in light of recent terrorists attacks. (Photo from The Guardian)
But if those websites that gather trending topics on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are to be believed: not too many people are talking about climate change. There’s talk about HIV awareness (and that’s good, of course), about Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus, about Mark Zuckerberg finally being a dad, about Giving Tuesday. There’s even a hashtag for breakup in five (5) words and the welcoming the first day of December. All well and good.
On Twitter, if you use #climatechange, a charmingly heart-shaped green and blue Earth automatically attaches to your hashtag, so you have to be careful what you tweet about. There’s also a Twitter account run by Climate Change itself no less, personified as a grinning businessman smiling and proud every time he gets a mention in the news, blogs, on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Climate Change thus peppers his tweets with the hashtags #meeeee, #validated, and #loved.
#EarthtoParis: I’m here. I exist. Talk about me. I have feelings too.
— Climate Change (@climatechange) November 5, 2015
Recently while we were in the mall, we posed as an intrepid researcher doing some sort of thesis for school, and asked a few random people in the age range of 18-30 what they know about climate change. Our questionnaire had three simple questions:
- What do you know about climate change?,
- What do you think you can you do about climate change?, and
- Have you shared anything about climate change on social media?
The last question was primarily for finding out if people are as comfortable and game talking about an unsexy topic as climate change as they are when they converse about fashion, music, smartphone specs, their favorite TV series and their hotly-anticipated films, etc. Of course, people’s interest in such things doesn’t necessarily cancel out their positive stance on climate change. One can be the most ardent fan of Scream Queens and still have a say on climate change. But we want to know if millennials can actually sustain conversation regarding climate change on social media, or if that’s something they simply post a single tweet about and are done and over with it.
Out of the ten we interviewed, only one happened to know about the ongoing Paris Talks. Regarding the question of what they can do about climate change, my interviewees offered suggestions like recycling trash, planting a tree, and using a reusable shopping bag, known tenets of eco-friendliness since our grade school days.
Of course, ten is such a lousy small sample, but we just gave up too early in frustration. It’s a sad thing because we millennials are the very people who will be inheriting the Earth, in all its currently messed-up state. And oh, one more thing, all our respondents are of the belief that climate change is something way above their heads, something best left to our world leaders.
That’s true to a point. Big bold actions from the nations most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions are needed to veer us away from the dreaded 2 degree Celsius rise in temperature. We can’t afford another watered-down agreement like last year and the years before that because as French President Francois Hollande said, “Never have the stakes been so high.” Those legally binding agreements need to be ratified now, because if they aren’t, are we going to wait another year for COP22? To put it bluntly, Wired calculated the amount of carbon dioxide the Paris Climate Talks will generate. They came up with 300,000 tons to account for the 50,000 attendees who will be flying in from all over the world. So that massive carbon footprint had better be worth it.
Yes, climate change is such an unsexy topic, but we need to talk about it because our lives depend on it. Even the Pope has chimed in: “We are on the brink. We are on the brink of a suicide, to use a strong word…” On Twitter, the hashtag to use is 2degrees. It’s there for us to read about and share stories to people who may not know yet that right now the fate of the planet and the human race is being decided on by our world leaders.
Of course, a tweet is infinitely different from good ol’ action, so when we put down our smartphones, let’s do something. By all means, let’s recycle our trash, and bring along a reusable shopping bag, and plant a tree. Let’s ante it up and limit our meat consumption to once a week, and use our bikes or commute to work instead of taking the car and have second thoughts about buying unnecessary things in the malls, and be mindful of what we throw away, and actually demand efficient policies from your politicians. Those little acts may look inconsequential but trust us, they ripple outwards, especially when you talk about and share them.
