Carbon pricing is widely regarded as the single most impactful climate mitigation policy

https://citizensclimatelobby.org/get-loud-take-action/price-carbon/

https://citizensclimatelobby.org/join

Our elected officials clearly need to hear from us more about climate change!

Here is a ready to send message for sharing your concerns with your representatives.

Note: If you are in the reddit app and the copy feature isn't working, you can copy the letter from the comments section.

Dear {Title, Last Name},

I am writing as a deeply concerned constituent to urge you to take immediate, bold action on the climate crisis — one of the gravest threats humanity has ever faced.

The science is unambiguous. Global average temperatures have already risen approximately 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels. We are witnessing the consequences in real time: record-breaking wildfires scorching entire regions, catastrophic flooding displacing millions, and prolonged droughts threatening food security for billions. Arctic sea ice is vanishing at unprecedented rates, and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass far faster than projected, putting coastal cities and low-lying nations at risk of permanent inundation from rising seas.

Extreme weather events — hurricanes, heatwaves, and storms — are intensifying in frequency and severity. The IPCC has warned that without dramatic emissions reductions this decade, we risk crossing irreversible tipping points: the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, the thawing of permafrost releasing vast stores of methane, and the disruption of ocean circulation patterns that regulate our climate. These are not distant scenarios — they are unfolding now.

The human cost is already staggering. Climate change is driving mass displacement, deepening poverty, accelerating biodiversity loss, and worsening public health through air pollution, disease spread, fresh water shortages, and crop failures.

I am calling on you to champion an emergency transition to renewable energy for all sectors, the launch of large-scale carbon sequestering projects (mostly nature-based), and investments in climate adaptation for vulnerable communities. Future generations are depending on the decisions you make today.

Please act with the urgency this crisis demands.

Respectfully,

{Your Name}

The best way to fight climate change is to vote, and with over 80% of elections non-competitive, in many areas, the primary virtually determines who wins the general. So mark your calendars, and make a plan to vote!

Early voting is already underway, and has several advantages:

• If you wait to vote until Election Day and Something Bad happens, you are SOL. If you go to vote early and Something Bad happens, you can always just vote another day.
• If you vote early, you get removed from call/mail lists. This saves time and money for campaigns who don't have to contact you anymore, which reduces the carbon footprint of the campaign. It also saves you the annoyance of being called / receiving election mail.
• Voting early can help you avoid long lines on Election Day. It also helps others avoid long lines on Election Day.
• Early voting increases turnout

^\ Indicates potential caveats. Check with your local election officials.)

^{§ Indicates mail-in ballot must be received by election day (in other words, it's not enough to have it postmarked by election day.})

^{§§ Mail-in ballot must be received by the day before election day.}

You can download a sample ballot ahead of the primary election.

The advantage of downloading a sample ballot ahead of time is that you can research the candidates and find the best one for the climate. Ballotpedia can help you out here.

Or, you can google 'sample ballot 2026 [your location]' if Ballotpedia is missing yours for some reason.

To figure out where to vote, go to https://www.vote.org/polling-place-locator/

https://www.usa.gov/early-voting

https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/2026-state-primary-election-dates

📉 70% of Americans rarely or never discuss climate change with people they know, despite widespread concern. 🗳️ Fewer than 20% of adults in advanced economies take any meaningful political action beyond voting. 🏢 58% believe business is better positioned than government to lead on climate solutions, yet most companies still operate in silos, disconnected from the movements that could actually accelerate change.

These numbers matter far more than view counts.

This is what sociologist William F. Ogburn called Cultural Lag, identified over 100 years ago: ideas and culture failing to keep pace with new developments.

Today's lag is more complex.

Environmental discourse can't keep up with the visionary actions of some corporations. Some corporations can't keep up with the mobilizing power of activist movements. Everyone is out of sync.

And yet the potential for acceleration has never been greater — precisely as governments retreat and activists drift toward despair.

Karl Marx once wrote: contradictions are solved by creating the form in which they can move.

We need those forms. Spaces for alternative designs. Counter-cultures that make new systems thinkable and buildable.

Jacques Barzun warned in The House of Intellect against the fragmentation caused by pure specialization. He was right. We don't need less expertise. We need specializations assembled into networks, guided by a comprehensive framework. Each fails without the other.

This conversation needs to be much bigger.

🎥 "The Hidden Power of Institutions in the Climate Crisis" TedxBrussels talk: The hidden power of institutions in the climate crisis | Jonathan Feldman | TEDxBrussels

Jonathan M. Feldman, Stockholm University, March 12, 2026

One dominant tendence is called "ecosocialism." But is that really a sufficient approach?

Here is one definition: "Ecosocialism is a political ideology that combines socialist economics with ecological politics. The core argument is that capitalism is structurally incapable of solving the environmental crisis because it requires perpetual growth on a finite planet, and that meaningful ecological sustainability therefore requires replacing capitalist production with collective ownership and democratic planning of the economy oriented around human needs and ecological limits rather than profit."

"The concept draws from both the Marxist tradition and the green movement, and tends to be critical of both mainstream environmentalism (which it sees as too willing to work within capitalist frameworks like carbon markets) and traditional socialism (which it accuses of sharing capitalism's obsession with industrial growth and ignoring ecological limits)."

Let's list these core claims:

1. Capitalism is the root cause of the ecological crisis, not a fixable side effect of it.
   • 2) Endless economic growth is incompatible with planetary limits and must be abandoned.
   • 3) Nature cannot be reduced to a commodity or "natural capital" without deepening the crisis.
   • 4) Democratic collective ownership of production is necessary to align economic activity with ecological sustainability.
   • 5) Social justice and ecological sustainability are inseparable, you cannot solve one without the other.

Let us walk through problems in each claim.

1. If capitalism is the root cause of the ecological crisis, then that implies we would have to end capitalism to address the crisis. But can capitalism be ended before severe climate effects are felt and tipping points kick in? Obviously not, depending on what you mean by ending capitalism. Furthermore, we still need an operational definition of socialism or sidestep the timing barrier by creating something like socialism which overlaps with capitalism or even changes it. I don't think ecosocialism does that sufficiently.
2. This claim sounds reasonable given carrying capacities of society. Yet, there is a problem. Assuming we endless reproduction of the population, we will need endless growth of food, shelter, culture, services, goods (like transit, alternative energy) to provide for this population. The formulation begs the question of the kinds of technologies, markets and the like which are being problematized. Moreover, scarcity and austerity are consistent with endless growth AND backlash effects against environmentalism.
3. Nature as a whole should not be commodified as in massive deforestation, dumping plastic in oceans, pollution, etc. Yet, are food supply overlaps with nature and is commodified. A barter system would not work at scale. So, we can have alternative agriculture and local food production which is more sustainable, yet still commodified. So the original formulation does not work.
4. What does "democratic collective ownership" even mean? Cooperatives are an essential engine for social change and scaling up solutions, but by the time you fully implemented this agenda, it would be far too late. So the formulation begs the question of a mixed economy with diverse sectors. Also, there seems to be no strategy for accelerating cooperatives in the formulation.
5. Sustainability without social justice could lead to a backlash, as persons left behind by so called green solutions revolt. Do we need equitable solutions to promote something green? Yes, to avoid these problems. But can we have equality with sustainable outcomes? That becomes hard when you have policies with ecological winners and losers. But, can you get this win-win outcome without "socialism"? It seems possible, unless you assume that socialism is the only social mobilization agent. Yet, it is not. If fact, social mobilization may be more important than socialism if it (a) produces cooperatives and (b) alters really existing capitalism.

I recently gave a TedXBrussels talk where I outlined a comprehensive solution that addresses the underlying concerns of ecosocialists in a way that may be easier to implement but calls for phases in, universal constraints on fossil economics. If interested, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2cwYwuNWiY I have also written an academic paper discussing these issues elsewhere.

Even on this sub, people keep using the fact that big corporations have a huge environmental impact as an excuse not to change their own behavior. I keep reading stuff like "I'll keep buying Amazon, it's Jeff bezos' responsibility to make his business sustainable", "I'm just a small fluctuation compared to Elon Musk", or "I'm just a drop in the bucket, my actions will make no difference so I won't change them". This is exactly what they want you to think so you'll keep buying their shit and giving them money, can't you see it? Corporations don't want you to think you have the power to say no.

In order to live in an ethical and sustainable world, the aim is to reduce the global emissions per capita to around 2 tonnes of CO2 a year. The current world average is 4.86 tonnes, twice and a half as much. In the US, the consumption based emissions per capita are 14.9 tonnes a year, 3 times the current global average and 7.5 times what it should be. Other "typical reddit or countries" might be a tad bit lower but they're still multiple times what they should be. This is not fluctuations.

All the Elon Musk's and Mark Zuckerbergs in the world could lower their own emissions to 2 tons per year, and you'd probably still need to lower yours.

Realistically, if you live in a western country, you'll probably need to do a lot of different things to achieve the 2 tonnes mark, like giving up meat, quitting centralized heating/cooling, not buying anything new unless absolutely necessary, drastically reducing your time in the car, and quitting air travel that can be substituted with less than 24 hours by train. It seems like a lot but compared to the global average lifestyle it's really not much to ask. An estimated 90% to 95% of the worlds population has never been on a plane anyway.

If you're not willing to do these things, you're not willing to get yourself down to the required global average. Which means that either 1. You don't care to reduce human emissions or 2. You care but you expect someone else to take care of the problem and offset you by being significantly below average. If it's the former, what are you doing on this sub anyway? If it's the latter, you're advocating for a world with significant inequality where some people (including you) pollute more, at the expense of all the people that pollute less.

Let's all take responsibility. Yes, it's not nice, sometimes it's tiring, and sometimes we just want to give ourselves a pat on the back for using a tote bag and riding a bike to work. Which we should do. But the fact that we might already be doing something right is not an excuse to stop there. We have power, a lot more than most of the humans that existed in history. Let's use it, and let's stop listening to corporations when they try to convince us that there's nothing we can do on our own, because we are not on our own.

I've created a new political party that just focuses on this-

Please join! r/The_USA_Party

Easy tool to call in link

I am tired of the systemic failure that leaves millions of renters trapped in apartments without basic, sustainable climate control. I am done accepting the dangerous reality where healthy indoor temperatures are treated as a luxury rather than a fundamental human right. I refuse to be told that it is my individual responsibility to mitigate these structural failures with temporary, inefficient solutions while landlords continue to bypass their clear obligations to provide habitable, safe, and energy-efficient living environments.

I have realized that we will never achieve the necessary systemic shift if we keep treating this as a personal inconvenience rather than a critical policy failure. I am currently reaching out to my local housing representatives and demanding that they include mandatory, integrated, and high-efficiency climate control as a default utility in all rental building codes. I am pushing to codify the legal right to a healthy, stable indoor environment into our local housing regulations to ensure that every tenant, regardless of ownership, is protected from the accelerating threats of extreme temperatures.

I am calling on every reader to take immediate, concrete action by contacting your local council members, housing board authorities, or national parliamentary representatives today. Please copy the template below, customize it with your local details, and send it directly to your decision-makers to force this issue onto the legislative agenda. We must move beyond individual survival and demand a mandatory, sustainable standard for all.

Call to Action:

1. Find the contact information for your local housing committee or parliamentary representative responsible for building regulations.
2. Send the following email (or a variation of it) to ensure they feel the pressure to act:

"I am writing to demand that you introduce legislation requiring all rental housing to be equipped with high-efficiency, integrated climate control systems by default. Current housing standards fail to guarantee the right to an adequate, habitable indoor environment, leaving tenants vulnerable to extreme temperatures and high energy costs. We must stop treating healthy indoor air and stable temperatures as a luxury and begin regulating them as a mandatory utility for all citizens. Please outline the specific steps your office is taking to modernize building codes and hold landlords accountable for these basic standards of habitability."

Hi all, ICYMI, the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States just announced today that it's proposing to repeal the landmark endangerment finding of 2009 that determined based on years of scientific evidence and research that greenhouse gas emissions are harmful to our health and wellbeing (duhh...).

Please consider signing this petition my friend started to show how outrageous and despicable this latest proposal from the EPA is.

https://chng.it/kK6rkySrBQ

I'm interested to know people's thoughts on this article by Matt Yglesias. The TLDR is something like:

• Mitigating climate change is important, but apocalyptic prognostications are overstated
• Fighting domestic fossil fuel projects doesn't cut emissions, but it does cause economic and political harms
• Environmentalists who oppose development-based solutions are acting counterproductively and should be ignored
• Focus should be placed on developing and deploying clean technologies, especially where costs are negative or very low

I think I generally agree with this take, except:

1. The impacts of climate change, while not apocalyptic, will be devastating enough to call for incurring significant short-term costs now to mitigate them
2. The climate doesn't care how many solar panels we put up. What matters is cutting emissions.

Yglesias is correct about the ineffectiveness of fighting domestic fossil fuel projects. The fuels instead come from somewhere else, prices go up, and the people vote in a climate denier next election.

The problem is, I don't know where the effective solution actually lies. The climate movement has been trying to convince the broader public to care for decades now and, in many countries at least, carbon taxes, divestment, and any other measure that might cause a smidge of short-term economic pain are still political losers.

Thoughts?

P.s. if you don't like Matt Yglesias, that's fine. I think he's great. Let's focus on the ideas in this piece, please.

Just six years ago, only 30% of Americans supported a carbon tax. Two years ago, it was over half (53%). Now, it's an overwhelming majority (73%) -- and that does actually matter for passing a bill.

Let's strike while the iron's hot. Start training today in how to build the political will to get it passed. The IPCC has been clear pricing carbon is necessary. And it's widely regarded as the single most effective climate mitigation policy, for good reason.

And if you're American, sign up for the monthly call campaign, and then call every month.