A few days ago I was spending the night in a hotel room watching a movie on a national channel. After the first hour, the movie was interrupted by a brief newscast featuring a breaking news story about global warming, Although I didn’t think about anything else for the rest of the movie, the newsflash didn’t surprise me. I had already heard about that and I was sure that that wouldn’t be the last time. Actually, what really surprised me was that after that apocalyptic news, the same channel that I was watching broadcasted four commercials of four highly polluting products.
Then I asked myself, “What are they talking about??” I am not an environmentalism superhero, but ever since (many years ago) when I listened for the first time to people talking about climate change, I started changing my way of life, and first and foremost, my habits. Not because I had to do it, but because I wanted to do it. Because I feel part of something I want to preserve. Because I realized that I could get rid of many habits I used to have and live better. I think it’s a matter of communication ethics. We are not talking about sports or fashion or gossip – we are talking about our world, and then our future and the future of our children. We cannot talk about an incoming disaster and then avoid acting coherently. Otherwise, we are not reporting news, we are just confusing people. In this particular case, if I am told that we are hitting a point of no return, and thirty seconds later the same channel tells me to buy an SUV or to get a bigger television or to eat $2 chicken, I get confused.
When I first read the speech that Leonardo DiCaprio (a man who decided to consecrate his private life to the climate change campaign) did at the UN Climate Summit I was fascinated. But when I discovered that he spent the summer on board a superyacht (ranked as the fifth-largest in the world) that burns many (many) gallons of gasoline every day, I got confused. Confused because, in my personal point of view, regarding climate change there are no compromises. If we talk about climate change, if we fight for climate change, if we support the cause, if we really believe in this issue, then we must act and live coherently and change our habits. (To be clear I’m not talking about going back to the preindustrial way of life, I’m talking about avoid useless and highly polluting habits like using cars every day, eating meat every day, spending the summer on a superyacht, and so on.) Otherwise we are just confusing people.