(Al Gore Explains) How to Confront Your Climate Change Denier Friends & Family

NowThis + Al Gore: How To Explain Climate Change To A DenierAG: Sometimes it takes on a kind of tribal dimension - It’s like sports teams, the people wearing one kind of jersey are just inimically opposed to people wearing the other kind of jersey, and there’s some people who are so deeply into climate denial that you might as well just move on, but if it’s someone you love and you respect, then the advice I would give is first seek to understand - try to understand where that person is coming from and what assumptions they’ve been fed that are wrong. You know, we have a cottage industry in the U.S., financed lavishly by large carbon polluters constantly pumping out false information and creating false doubts. They took the playbook from the tobacco companies when they tried to blot the advice from doctors not to smoke cigarettes, and they fooled a lot of people. Young people now see through that, but more and more, people are beginning to see through the false narratives that the carbon polluters are putting out there. It is a challenge, but you just have to have faith that eventually the truth will win out. The late Martin Luther King Jr. once said, ‘No lie can live forever.’ So it won’t be long before it changes. And one of the things that’s bringing the change - there are two things that are bringing the change. Number one: These climate-related extreme weather events are really shaking up a lot of people, even those who might’ve been seduced by the denier false evidence, they’re now saying, ‘Wait a minute, this is not right. We need to change this.’ The other thing that’s changing the narrative powerfully is that the cost of renewable electricity from solar and wind has come down so quickly, it’s now below the cost of electricity from burning fossil fuels in so many places, even less than half the cost in a growing number of regions. So, that’s really making it much easier. We’re seeing people who don’t even want to use the phrases, ‘global warming,’ or ‘climate change,’ or ’climate crisis,’ saying, ‘You mean I can save money and as a side effect, we don’t have the pollution? OK, I’m in.’ The Mayor of Georgetown, Texas, in one powerful scene in the movie, [An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power] conservative republican, one of the most conservative republican cities in the country, is now 100% renewable because it makes sense economically.
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