alt Hacker NewsNormal people don't care about climate, and 1.5C is meaningless to them.
Pollution in the air they breathe, the water they drink and the soil their food comes from? That's something normal people care about and understand.
Climate change is a branding and communications failure. Fight pollution (bad thing) not "climate" or "change".
Why doesn't anyone understand this and rebrand?
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> Normal people don't care about climate
This is not true, it's fossil fuel propaganda that has been very successful. The overwhelming majority of people are concerned about the climate but assume that they are in the minority. See https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change-support for example.
"Fight pollution" is the old approach, it doesn't work as well because greenhouse gases are generally invisible and cause no noticeable short-term impacts, and because in the US the industry has been successful in distorting the law such that greenhouse gases do not legally count as pollutants.
Climate change and renewables are broadly popular causes.
It might not seem like it if you live under a broken political system that can ignore what people want and so that doesn't translate into action.
When you point this out people say, "well it's not as important as cost of living or health or migrants from hot countries or getting out of wars in the middle east" despite it helping with all of those too.
This ignores the big wheezing elephant in the room: climate action is fighting extremely entrenched and monied interests that are betting on dying before the bill for their action comes due and are ready to lie on almost unimaginable scale.
Saying it is simply a "branding failure" is about as accurate as saying "planning failure" is why around 80% of Ukrainians lost power in 2024.