Eco-Nomics: Vote as if your home and your planet depend on it
By Paul Roberts / For The Herald
People ask what they can do as individuals to address climate change? The short answer is vote.
Climate activists, scientists and economists generally agree, the most important actions you can take are to support candidates and policies at all levels of government that reduce greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation), prepare for climate impacts (adaptation), and support a zero-emission economy. We do not lack technological knowhow to address climate change. But we’re short on political will. The ballot box is where we express that political will.
Christiana Figures and Tom Rivett-Carnack were the architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement. In their 2020 book “Surviving the Climate Crisis” they say the most important action you can take to address climate change is to engage in politics with your vote: “Democracies are threatened by the climate crisis and must evolve to meet the challenge. In order to help them do so, we all need to actively participate. … we must hold every politician to account … Their policy platforms must strictly be informed by science.”
Hannah Ritchie, lead researcher at Our World in Data, published a book this year titled “Not the End of the World” where she offers a positive agenda for addressing climate change. Ritchie calls for creating a clean-energy economy, recommending systemic change. The first step “is to get involved in political action and vote for leaders who support sustainable actions.”
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/eco-nomics-vote-as-if-your-home-and-your-planet-depend-on-it/