Global protest against overconsumption

You can't solve it yourself. But you can create the system that solves it. This should be your outlook as a climate activist. Head to konsumogklima.no for guidelines on how to create such a system.

As a human being aware of the climate problem, and concerned with your survival, you can't afford to trust anybody to solve it for you. At the end of the day, you can only rely on yourself. Which means you must do whatever you can do to maximize the probability of success.

Sure, as a moral obligation, it appears more noble. But the problem is, human beings are experts at getting themselves exempt from moral obligations. It becomes an endless discussion about who's got the most responsibility to act, instead of finding the best course of action straight away.

Climate activism today isn't selfish enough. #climatechange is a threat to yourself, people you love, and parts of the world that you care about. You should treat it as a matter of immediate personal interest, and act accordingly. Instead, people are treating the activism like a moral obligation.

They just say that because it gives them a good conscience. On election day, people cast their ballots in secret. These 89 % could easily vote for green parties if they wanted to. We need to stop believing the lies people tells themselves and pollsters, and assess what the population truly wants.

Those are just polls. People will say whatever makes them feel good about themselves, and it costs them nothing. Only election day counts, and on election day, people prioritize their immediate needs. Putting any trust in these numbers just sets us up for more of the same disappointment.

We can end #climatechange. But we need to stop letting the opponent select the fields of battle. Stop fighting with proxies, their proxies will always be stronger than ours. We're losing because we're doing it their way - and we don't have to.

Taking the climate struggle down to the individual level is the ultimate gamechanger. All the rules will be rewritten. A popular movement against overconsumption will produce emission cuts, which will fill the Solution Void, and make climate action attractive to entire new parts of the population.

Being right does not in itself win you anything in politics. But see it as what it is: a infinite source of motivation. When you know you're right, you can try again and again. Fighting while being in the wrong, however, is mentally exhausting. If mitigators can keep it up, the resistance will fold.

But won't the indifferents counter-organize against mitigators on the population level? No. As individuals, consumers are short-sighted, greedy and distrusting. These are not a good basis for organizing. And mitigators have a fundamental, priceless advantage: They're right.

Mitigator groups cannot possibly hope to take on the oil industry. But if they change their focus to systematically influencing individual consumers on a large scale, the foundations on which the industry stands, will disappear. Consumer demand is the driving force of polluting industries.

Indifferent organizations are extremely resistant to outside influence. Indifferent individuals, on the other hand, are not. With coordinated effort, the preferences, values and actions of human individuals can be influenced and altered. This is why we need a popular movement against overconsumption

The climate struggle in its current form is lost. But the good news is, we don't have to do it like that at all. We can reject the proxy system and take the conflict down to the population level - where the power dynamics add up in an entirely different way.

When you see it on this level, it all makes sense. The figures of power just don't add up favorably. Of course we're losing the climate struggle - mitigator proxies are taking on opponents that they cannot possibly defeat. The forces of not acting on climate change, are overwhelming.

Who are the mitigator proxies? Activist groups. Some non-governmental organizations. Some small political parties. Some research institutions. Who are the indifferent proxies? Large political parties. Entire nation states. Bureaucracies. Industries and businesses. Mass media. Military. Oligarchs.

The struggle against climate change is ultimately the war of mitigators against indifferents - a war which the mitigators are losing. They're losing it because it's not fought on the population level, but on an elevated organizational level. It's a proxy war, and mitigator proxies are the weakest.

To discuss this error, we must divide the population in two: The minority, who is willing to alter their lifestyle to reduce the impact of climate change, and the majority, who isn't. The former group we will call "mitigators", whereas the latter we know as "indifferents".

The third strategic error is by far the most important, complex and interesting. Understanding and mitigating this error will create an entirely new form of climate activism that stops losing battles and starts winning them. Climate change cannot be stopped until we've overcome the third error.

The #climate movement loses every battle it fights against polluters and indifferents. This is due to three fundamental strategic errors: 1: Planning with unrealized resources. 2: Not controlling the success criteria. 3: Letting the opponent select the field of battle. Let's talk about error #3.

People over-consume because it gives them positive emotions. To get emissions down, climate activists must find effective ways to turn these into negative emotions. Consumption will only ever go down when people stop wanting it.

Because high-speed rail is too massive a collective undertaking for a voting majority currently preoccupied with burning the nation to the ground out of spite. A shame - the US economy is crippled by its inefficient transit system, which high-speed rail would at least partially amend.

This is why we need a popular movement against overconsumption. With the simplest of means, it can break through the paralyzing barriers to change. What we need to stop climate change, is already in our hands.

First: getting people to join the cause. Second: getting protests going. Third: getting attention for it. Getting all of these is all that's needed to make the movement grow in size, relevance and impact. And falling behind on any one of these, can be compensated with more effort and energy.

And here we make the comparison to the popular movement against overconsumption. This movement retains control of the criteria of success, keeping them within reach of the participating activist. There are only three criteria:

Even then, what if someone decides to build a new crypto mine or AI data center next to your new green power plant, to absorb all that added electrical power? Your efforts will all be for naught. For a climate activist to plan for none of these pitfalls to happen, is insane.

And even if your renewable power plants get built, remember: What they produce is electric power, not emission cuts. Green energy does not automatically translate into the emission cuts required for climate mitigation efforts. Electrified vehicles and industries must be ready for the green energy.

Renewable energy deployment is politically controversial for a number of good and bad faith reasons. Wind power construction is frequently crippled by populist uprisings, effortlessly mobilizing masses greater than the climate movement by orders of magnitude.

The cost and deployment times are obvious success criteria. Offshore wind is very expensive, and will take time to get going. "We can work faster," you say. But to prioritize working faster is a decision that the collective economy needs to make, on a level where your influence is minute.

The simplest example is renewable energy. For you as the climate activist to advocate renewable energy as the solution to the threat of global ecosystem collapse, is a method with low probability for success, as the success criteria of renewables deployment is beyond your control.

Not controlling the success criteria looks like a variation of error #1, planning with unrealized resources, but this problem is deeper and more foundational. It's about setting goals that you are unable to fulfil, because the decisions are made outside your control.