“Climate Chess”: we all need to do our part…

In order for things to change, we all need to change our daily habits. We need to reconsider the routines we’ve taken for granted over our lifetimes. We need to become educated and have the strength to make hard choices. Here’s a note from Mark Trexler that drives this point home:

This Kurzgesagt video has 7 million views in the last week (very odd choice of cover image!)- you should add your own view! One of the best holistic videos on climate change out there. That said, a caveat! It immediately made be think of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, which basically ends with: Plant a Tree, Buy a Prius. A woefully inadequate message.

This video goes MUCH farther towards a systems-based approach to climate change. But I still found the ending message of “Create Systemic Change, Vote!” to be very unsatisfying. After all we know that in the US, for example, the voting system is broken. (2020 Gehl_The Politics Industry How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy is an excellent discussion of this if you haven’t seen it). In the video voting is presented as a silver bullet solution, after the whole video makes fun of silver bullet solutions.

If only the video had promoted the need to play Climate Chess, empowering individuals to really make a difference. 100 million individuals in the U.S. today are concerned or alarmed about climate change, 99% of them have no idea what they can really do. That’s what Climate Chess is about.