Instead of trying to convince people that climate change is scary, you can offer hopeful ideas that can help people think of solutions. Human beings are creative innovators, and many people feel a responsibility to come together to enact change. One way to get people thinking this way is to focus on community level solutions, not individual solutions.
Individual solutions focus on what one person can do to reduce their own carbon emissions. They include instructions such as riding your bike instead of driving a car, turning off the lights when you’re not using them and buying local produce and used products. While these suggestions will help someone reduce their own carbon footprint, they address the problem on a small-scale. Furthermore, some of these solutions can be expensive or physically difficult to implement, which leaves many people feeling more hopeless.
Meanwhile, community-level solutions include ideas such as adding bike lanes to a city’s infrastructure, reducing bus-fare so people ride buses instead of cars, including tax-incentives for buying electric vehicles and giving tax breaks to manufacturers that use alternative energy. While these solutions can be even harder to implement, they address the scope of the problem, and the part an individual has to play is relatively easy and small. Part of the idea with these solutions is that we can address people’s mindset, helping them to understand that this is such a large problem that we can’t solve it without system-wide institutional change.
That said, many community-level solutions deal with legislation, and Pacific Science Center isn’t trying to convince people to vote in a certain way. Instead of trying to get people on-board with these solutions, our mission is to educate people on the fact that these solutions exist and can help address the problem.