Those who are cynical and despairing about facing and dealing with climate change often say that solutions and not realistic because people will not vote for poverty.

However the problem is not that people will not vote for poverty, it is that people ARE

voting for poverty. Older people are voting for poverty for others and for their children and grandchildren, while younger people are actually voting for poverty for themselves.

If they are in conflict, political and social reality will always lose to the physical and environmental reality upon which they are based, and scientists are very clear about what we are doing to our physical and environmental reality. Maintaining the political and social status quo does not avoid change, it merely postpones it and takes it out of our hands.

Part of the problem in facing and dealing with climate change is that solutions have been framed as losses and costs and sacrifices rather than as movement towards a better life and a better world. Even in the absence of climate change it makes no sense to cling to imported and diminishing fossil fuels. Or to spend large parts of our lives in traffic jams. Or to pay heavily to heat the air above our leaky homes. Or to destroy the community and diversity of local farmers in favour of bland produce ripened in containers from the other side of the world. Many of the solutions to climate change are true ‘no-regrets’ solutions that make perfect sense anyways.

And our current consumer-focused lives are nothing to be proud of. Depression, suicide, yobbery, obesity and widespread emptiness and lack of meaning exact a huge and unquantified cost for living in an age focused almost exclusively on the material. As the newly emerging field of positive psychology is discovering, the things that make us happy (health, strong relationships, community connection, goals compatible with values, etc.) have little to do with consumption. (1)

We suffer from a lack of imagination and a resulting inertia. It is difficult for many people to imagine the world and their lives as different from what they are today, and thus they accept the prevailing social and political ‘realities’ not because alternatives are not possible, but because they cannot envision them. And, of course, in any dramatic change there are losers as well as winners. Unfortunately the losers in a change towards a sustainable world are some of the most powerful organisations in our society, and will defend their current positions without regard to any greater good.

This is why real leadership is so vital. John F. Kennedy could envision a moon landing only a few short years after man had first reached the edges of space. American and other leaders of the 18th century could imagine a world in which all men are equal. Many others could see the possibilities in great building projects, new technologies and new ways of organising ourselves when most others could not.

From the conventional perspective we seem to be caught between the unstoppable force of political and social reality and the immovable object of physical and environmental reality. But we are not. We can redirect our energy and our efforts to escape catastrophic climate change and to create a better, happier and more secure world for ourselves and our decendants. We just have to lift our eyes from the mental and political rut of ‘the way things are’ and see what is possible.

(1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/happiness_formula/