Thread by @SteB777

Because I have been engaging with non-environmentally aware people, for over 50 years, I have fully realized just how little environmental awareness, penetrates the mainstream.

I've generally avoided environmentalists, because of this.
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One of the first things I noticed, when I attended meetings of environmentalists, was just how detached they were from the rest of society. They mistakenly thought everyone was aware of what they were aware of.
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Even though environmentally aware people come from non-environmentally aware families, socialize with non-environmentally aware people, work with them, they very rarely engage with them about the climate or whatever.
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This is why they mix with other environmentally aware people, so they can feel comfortable talking about the things they care about, rather than just getting a blank response.

For most of the last 50+ years, environmentalists, have been preaching to the converted.
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That's why the movement has never grown. One baffling myth I regularly come across, is that people are a lot more climate, or environmentally aware, than they were in the past. When I contradict, this, I get shouted down.
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The thing is, I was environmentally aware when I was 10, 54 years ago. I was very aware, of the climate crisis, in the 1980s. So I was very aware of what the awareness was, and possibly in the late 1980s, early 1990s, it was greater than it was now.
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I get accused of misremembering. Lucky, I don't have to rely on my memory, because people were doing opinion polls, questionnaires about climate change, since the 1980s, and they prove my memory isn't faulty.

7/ wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.100…

The huge difference is when climate change became big news in the late 1980s, and early 1990s, public climate change denial was almost unknown. So when scientists spoke about it, a load of people brainwashed in fossil fuel propaganda, didn't deny it, very vocally.
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Go back to the early 1990s, and earlier, and the only place you heard these denial arguments, was from from fossil fuel industry spokes people, and the public, would say, well they would say that, wouldn't they.
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To remember, the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, as an adult, you have to be approaching 50 or older. So most people have no actual memory of it. Even most over 50 were not strongly engaged with environmentalism, even if they accepted the science.

10/un.org/en/conferences…

It used to annoy the crap out of me, when Guardian environment journalists, would talk about Al Gore's, movie, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), as the time most people became aware of climate change. Meaning when they personally, first became aware of it.
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The paper I linked to above, says.

"In one of the first polls of its kind to be conducted, only 43% of U.S. respondents in 1982 saw climate change as either a ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ serious problem. Over three subsequent survey waves, this figure reached 75% by 1989,"
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So if 75% of people in the US, hardly the most aware population thought climate change, was "a 'very' or 'somewhat" serious problem in 1989, the idea most people only became aware of the climate crisis in 2006, is obviously nonsense,
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Yet, this is what some of the most influential climate journalists in the world, in the newspaper with the most climate coverage, 2010-18, were writing.

To be clear, there's a huge difference between accepting climate change is real and serious, and being engaged with it.
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The reason I am writing this is there are lots of people, saying we're going to leave Twitter on 19th January, and only post on Bluesky, because of what Twitter had become. There are only 15 million signed up to Bluesky, and as of August there were 611 million active on X.
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This is very like environmentalism of the last 50 years. Go to Greenpeace/FoE meetings, and convince yourself, that everyone thinks like that, when 80+% of the public, have no idea what environmentalists talk about.
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The vast majority of the public has, absolutely, no idea what the climate crisis means, and what will be necessary to stop it turning into a catastrophe. It is an uphill struggle, but disappearing into an echo chamber of like-minded people, will ensure no one else hears you.
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I can understand, it has become very uncomfortable on here. However, any of the few of us, who battled the virulent, often professional climate change deniers, on the Guardian comments section 10 years ago or more, know what uncomfortable is.
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Sometimes I would sit up for 48 hours, battling the same trained advocate, trying to browbeat me into defeat, and intellectually crushed some of the worst denier cheerleaders of the time. I was doxed, hacked and threatened.
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This is the thing, none of the paid journalists, or writers ever got involved in this melee, maybe a few comments and they were off. There were very few of us, on the coal face, for days on end, where it got really very unpleasant.
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Elon Musk bought Twitter, falsely claiming to be a centrist and politically neutral. Falsely claiming it had become too slanted in favour of progressives, what he calls the "woke mind virus". His plan all along, was to get Trump elected.
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Why are people going to just roll over, and disappear into a self-affirming echo chamber. I'm going to do what I did on the Guardian comments section, back then, and buckle in for the ride.
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Sure, I can understand people going to Bluesky to have some constructive discussion, without all the haters and trolls. But quitting Twitter completely, makes no sense. It's what Musk wants, no strong progressive voices.
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As I say, this is the failure of the environmentalist movement, to break out of the bubble it was put in, and ring-fenced so the public just thought it was for those who wore sandals and beards. This is the way it works, ring-fencing and othering.
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Othering, is saying don't listen to them, they are the other. They are weirdo outsiders, revolutionaries, communists, they are not normal. So it ring fences them, and the public never listen to them. That's the idea.

25/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_(ph…

If all the progressive voices, most of the climate activists, all leave Twitter, and going into their little bubbles with like-minded people, then Elon Musk will have won, and completed his mission. This is why he's not being bothered about losing advertisers and revenue.
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Musk will have succeeded in hollowing out one of the few mass platforms for progressive voices.

As I say, fine if people feel more comfortable on Bluesky. If you just want to be in a self-affirming bubble, and your hobby, or even profession, is just talking, fair enough.
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But it doesn't say much about us winning this struggle, and reaching the wider public, if we are not even on platforms, where the majority of the unconvinced public, are not watching or listening.
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It is vital, now that the climate crisis is becoming far more obvious, think the flooding in Valencia, that we are in a place, where we can say to the public, even to Trump supporters, look this crisis is real, you are being lied to.
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I have an admission to make. I'm not really too much into listening to other climate activists and environmentalists. I read all the works years ago, and I see nothing different. I had it all worked out decades ago. It is just about convincing the majority, not activists.
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Climate activists, already know what the problem is, and have done for many decades. They're not the ones that need convincing.

People complain that I "lock down my threads". No, I'm, just not interested in the BS responses.
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On the Guardian comments sections, I heard all the arguments of the climate change deniers, the anti-environmentalists, and I totally demolished their BS. They were livid, they were furious, they said I was rude and had no respect for them.
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Yes, I had no respect for them, and demolished their arguments bit by bit. If you spout lies, propagate disinformation on a public forum, and used false arguments, you deserve to have this exposed and pointed out. If you think that rude, I laugh at the idea.
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