The Week #111
by
James
- My office area has been a mess, pretty much since we moved to our house. It's still a mess, but less so. Basically the problem is we have some awkward sized things that don't really fit anywhere and there's no proper place to put things...so they ended up getting grouped in an area. What I realized was I had heaps of storage vertically and I wasn't using it. I bought another steel shelving unit from muji (large this time, instead of the extra large) and put it across from my other shelve.
Now there's a perfect spot to store the bike charger and all the other random stuff that didn't really have a place. It's great. - I've taken about a month off from running. Maybe it's the heat. Maybe it's getting bored with always running the same general area. Maybe it's, despite best efforts, I can't run slow enough to stay in "zone 2". In place, I've started taking out my acoustic bike. It's so much fun to ride. Maybe this will be my thing?
- I finished reading Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World and I'm glad I stuck with it. The three main take-aways I had from it are:
1. You're not going to win over the 5% of the population that are climate change denialist, so don't waste your energy trying. Instead, focus conversations about climate change with the 95% who either agree / can be convinced / are somewhere along that spectrum.
2. For die-hard conservatives, they associate climate change as a liberal political issue and will often automatically disagree with doing anything (we saw this with the recent passage of the IRA). For climate change conversations with such people, focus instead on local issues, which brings it home. e.g. The local river isn't as full as it used to be and this will lead to water shortages -> as a community we've got to be prepared to properly manage -> how can we solve the issue, roughly. Especially important in this is it doesn't matter if you don't agree all the time, but that choices/lifestyles trend in the low-carbon direction.
3. Using your car doesn't make you a sinner and approaching carbon output from the perspective of sin is counter-productive. Sticks don't work. I always felt a sense of moral guilt each time I used my gasoline car knowing that I was making the problem worse. I still feel that to a certain extent (especially in summer), but it's not like before. I don't beat myself up over it. Note that this is separate from general disdain for driving and cars generally, but that's been there for as long as I can remember and is separate from climate change.
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@jamesvandyne I need to read that. Like yourself I haven’t been a fan of cars for a long time, but between climate change and the fact we’re forced into a car lifestyle and economy (North America in particular), I’m beyond done with them.
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@pimoore Yeah. The good news is that most car trips are only a few miles, i.e. something that is easily biked. A cheap e-bike (pedal assist variety) takes away the physical effort when hauling groceries/levels any hills. I still want a proper cargo bike, but it’s not quite in the cards yet.
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