Quotable Quotes
Climate change is the greatest threat to the future survival of humankind.
Climate change is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.
Sound familiar? Like all that follow and read any media in our country, it’s pretty much avoidable that you’ve heard both of these in their many variants over and over and over again.
What you believe and how you form your attitude about climate change largely depends on your political perspective: if you embrace the former, then you are likely a progressive. If you embrace the latter, then you are likely a conservative.
If you are a progressive, you will visit media outlets that validate your perspective. If you are a conservative, you will visit media outlets that validate your perspective. That’s the way our brains work.
Common Ground
Yet, it is a common misconception in our divided society that these perspectives are mutually exclusive: they’re black and white, true and false, us vs. them, we’re right vs. they’re wrong. If you dig a little deeper, all of that turns out to be untrue.
Underlying seemingly irresolvable divisions often lie honorable common goals. And if the commonality of these goals can be enhanced and understood, then the different perspectives can be found to be not on different sides after all.
This missive will attempt to present both sides of this situation in an effort to show that the two sides are not on opposite sides at all. Instead, they simply have different perspectives with regard to how the issue of climate change should be addressed.
We’ll start by addressing the world views of progressives and conservatives to show how they’re not really different.
Progressive perspective
[link url=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism” title=”Progressivism”] is a philosophy that stresses that science, learning, adaptation, and the ability to ‘go with the flow’ are essential to the survival of humankind. It is fact- and evidence-based, logic-oriented, and fluid with respect to how best to develop and govern a society, depending on the environment. It is strong with respect to adaptation, yet weak with respect to honoring tradition.
Conservative perspective
[link url=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism” title=”Conservatism”] is a philosophy that seeks to maintain the comfortable status quo. It attempts to implant and retain the traditional values of society. It is belief-based, tradition-oriented, and resistant to ideas that fundamentally change society. It is strong with respect to creating a comfortable, stable society, but weak with respect to dealing with any changing environment.
Fact
The progressive perspective has many weaknesses, including the inability to understand and accommodate the conservative perspective. Just view any current media, and you’ll find many examples of this.
But the conservative perspective has a greater weakness: the inability to acknowledge facts that are counter to their worldview. This is a critical weakness for the conservative perspective, because it illustrates how the conservative perspective cannot protect its followers from change. And change is inevitable.
The crux of the issue
Climate change in the form of human-caused global warming is a FACT, and has been validated by science. Progressive efforts to convince society of the importance of this may fail. However, conservative efforts — to convince the population that the sea levels are not rising, droughts are not more pervasive, crops are not failing at an increasing rate, migration due to inability to make a living and support a family is not increasing — WILL fail. We know that because this is already happening.
Up next: Part II will look at how acknowledging and adapting to climate change is not a violation of conservative values, but will actually preserve conservative values. Stay tuned.
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