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Climate Change

Hope.

We begin a series of short posts to draw attention to progress on climate change and the environment.

SL Staff B

• 2 min read
A boy and a girl spot a way out of a dark and dangerous situation.
Where is the ripcord, the trapdoor, the key? Where is the cartoon escape-hatch for me?1
A lot is going right for the environment, with many victories every week.

Not everything is good news, of course. Many things have gone wrong — continue to go wrong — for the natural environment that sustains us all. Bad news is useful and necessary.

Sometimes Sweet Lightning talks about bad news. This newsletter exists to create a clear, fact-based picture of environmental issues. Specifically, it attempts to create a clear picture of the world's environmental problems as society works to solve the climate crisis.

Everybody you meet knows how negative the news is. But it's so very difficult to remember that the visibility of the bad news is, in part, because of the way events are reported and — especially — because of the way comments are handled.

You can mistake the front page of a news site for life. It's not.

You can mistake what goes on in the world's legislatures for life. It's not.

News reporting, concentrating as it does on politics and current events, cannot help but distort the world. It instead extrudes a dangerous and selective reflection: dark, twisted, and frightening.

The algorithms that decide what you see on a news site are tuned to outrage you, to bother you, to get under your skin in the worst and most annoying ways. They do this to make money: the longer you stay on a page, the more likely you are to click on an ad. Even the best, most-reputable news organizations know that happy news rarely sells advertising or drives up site statistics. Negative, combative comment sections increase tribalism and drive up dissatisfaction ... but they drive up site revenue at the same time.

Outrage attracts eyeballs. Outrage makes money.2

The world is not just outrage.

Outrage farming does not present a real or balanced view of life. Instead, it flings venal, corrupt, ignorant, foolish, and violent actors in your face, often without any regard for facts or objective reality.

Seeing successes — understanding them as factual, repeatable conquests — is vitally important. Success inspires, motivates, and invites more success, just as certainly as clicking on a negative news story invites more negativity.

We must not miss the inspiration, the guidance — the sheer joy! — of the many successes in the fight against climate change. Above all, we can't give up.

Watch Sweet Lightning — and the new menu item, HOPE, at the top of our home page.

Together, we'll discover the ripcord, the way out, the key.

Our first Hope article is out now.

⚡️
  1. R.E.M., "Accelerate," Accelerate, Warner Bros., 2008.
  2. "New Economics for Sustainable Development: Attention Economy" (UN Policy Brief). Accessed October 8, 2024. https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_feb.pdf

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