My top thought about Climate Week
With a podcast and book on sustainability leadership, I’ve been invited to many events at so-called Climate Week. It’s when people fly from all over the world to talk about what other people should do.
I wrote the following as constructive criticism. It’s what I would expect people who take personal responsibility for how their actions affect others would want to know.
My top thought is surprise, even as jaded as I am about so-called environmentalists:
Everyone I heard speak, when they talk about polluters, they talk as if it’s different people than themselves. This makes no sense. They are among the greatest polluters on the planet, who have ever lived.
Why do they act like the big polluters are other people? It bears repeating: These so-called environmentalists rank among the greatest polluters ever. I heard 100,000 people attended, probably meaning around 100,000 round trip flights. As I spoke on the phone outside the building watching people arrive, nearly all arrived by vehicles larger than limousines, nearly all one rider per vehicle. I spoke to one person who said he walked to the event, but then said he flew to New York from Boston!
They are practicing the opposite of leadership because, as best I can tell, they have no hands-on practical experience trying to live sustainably. Thus they undermine what credibility or integrity they could have had.
They say they want to lower pollution. They say they have to figure out how to make polluters pollute less. All they have to do is look inside themselves, or at least self-reflection and building self-awareness would make effective first steps.
The polluters they talk about aren’t just pouring fossil fuels into rivers and oceans or burning them arbitrarily. They’re using them how the Climate Week people do: they have goals that they can further more effectively by taking advantage of the energy stored in the fossil fuels. They’re ignoring or dismissing as less important the suffering it causes just as environmentalists do.
Again, they talk as if it’s different people than themselves. This makes no sense. They are among the greatest polluters on the planet, who have ever lived.
Bottom line: everyone would benefit from so-called environmentalists living by their values. They would most. I write this post as a call to them, an invitation to experience the joy of living by one’s own values instead of living in ever-greater conflict with them.
Retry later