Record heat, record emissions, record fossil fuel consumption. One month out from Cop28, the world is further than ever from reaching its collective climate goals. At the root of all these problems, according to recent research, is the human “behavioural crisis”, a term coined by an interdisciplinary team of scientists.
“We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour.
Fight the next war, not the last war.
The last one led to enormous backlash, in case nobody noticed. It certainly can be done, but it needs to be approached by a good artist, not a good political activist. Those are simply not the same skillset, which is highly noticeable in the final product. So, if you’re not like, really, really good at your artistic medium, find someone who is and let them write the script. Just trust them when they say the message is in there, it may be couched in a way too complex for you to see without the same training and experience they had.
That first one is where the real money is. Nobody can actually fight advertising, except by disconnecting from it completely. If, by way of example, De Beers can convince everyone that diamonds are part of romance with a marketing campaign, then the same tool can probably undo it. Don’t expect De Beers to take that laying down though, they have money and lawyers.