Climate Week
I'm just one person.
What can I do to stop climate change?
Don’t pee in the pool.
Public health often asks individuals to do something in order to benefit the common good.
Public health is full of tradeoffs.
Individual
Personal choice. Bodily autonomy. Inconvenience. Side effects. Uneven benefits.
Community
Reduced disease. Lower health care costs. Fewer missed days of school and work.
Two public health questions
Do you believe the costs lead to the benefits?
Do you value the benefits?
Now ask the same question about climate change.
Individual
What do we ask people to do, pay, or give up?
Community
What are the shared benefits of reducing climate change?
Why do we love individual actions?
The individual responsibility narrative is seeded by people who benefit from the status quo.
But it also appeals to us. Doing our part feels moral, concrete, and sometimes easier than working together.
We can’t even.
Working together takes energy we don’t have.
Collective action requires capacity.
In unstable times, it takes more capacity just to survive.
Less excess capacity reduces our ability to work together.
If we work together less and care for each other less, we experience more instability.
Set the stage for collective action
Climate change is a public health problem.
A public health lens helps us look at the physical, psychological, relational, social, structural, and institutional factors behind climate change — and behind effective climate action.
Means matter, not just ends.
Climate action needs to be livable. Something we can do for a long time.
Build capacity. Build relationships. Build community.
Save the world in a way that rights the wrongs of the past.
Climate To-Do List
- Reclaim hope
- Get to know your neighbors
- Talk to people about climate change
- Let individuals off the hook
- Join something bigger than you
Climate models are not crystal balls.
They are structured ways of asking: what happens under different assumptions?
First, the past.
The black line shows observed warming. This is the world we have already changed.
One possible future keeps climbing.
This is the high-emissions pathway: a world where warming continues through the century.
But that is not the only future.
The blue line shows a lower-emissions pathway. The future forks.
Now look at the space between them.
This gap is not just temperature. It is action, coordination, policy, technology, trust, and collective power.
The gap is climate action.
Not individual purity. Not private virtue. The gap is what we do together.
The gap is collective capacity.
The ability to act together depends on stability, relationships, and institutions that make coordination possible.