If you think your three friends not caring, and my three friends not caring, and OP’s three friends not caring is all inconsequential and there’s no point in changing their minds, then how do you envision change happening?
Material conditions compress to the point that people begin risking their lives and livelihoods for the sack of access to physical necessities. The institutions that subsist on a stable, pliant public begin to fail as more and more economic surplus gets plowed into law enforcement. Food shortage and riots, combined with public hostility towards energy companies, make working in the fossil fuel sector too dangerous compared to the money it brings in. Natural disasters do enough damage to domestic infrastructure that generating and transporting fossil fuels cannot continue at the same rate.
Like the saying goes, “no individual drop of rain sees themselves as responsible for the flood”, or something along those lines.
Floods don’t happen because a large number of water drops decide to spontaneously leap over the side of the river bank. You need the terrain to change. You need a lot more water or a sudden compression of space all at once.
Without that, the current keeps all the little droplets moving in the same direction.
Now, unlike water droplets, individuals can be forces of radical change. But they need to be prepared to take radical action. Telling your friends “have you heard about this thing called climate change” isn’t going to cut it. Telling them “have you heard about this movie How To Blow Up a Pipeline” isn’t going to cut it. Telling them that you’re decamping from society to form a guerrilla chapter of Greenpeace is a start, assuming you don’t think any of your friends will rat you out to the police.
But even then… its three droplets against hundreds of thousands moving in the other direction. And all the individual droplets know that.
Material conditions compress to the point that people begin risking their lives and livelihoods for the sack of access to physical necessities. The institutions that subsist on a stable, pliant public begin to fail as more and more economic surplus gets plowed into law enforcement. Food shortage and riots, combined with public hostility towards energy companies, make working in the fossil fuel sector too dangerous compared to the money it brings in. Natural disasters do enough damage to domestic infrastructure that generating and transporting fossil fuels cannot continue at the same rate.
Floods don’t happen because a large number of water drops decide to spontaneously leap over the side of the river bank. You need the terrain to change. You need a lot more water or a sudden compression of space all at once.
Without that, the current keeps all the little droplets moving in the same direction.
Now, unlike water droplets, individuals can be forces of radical change. But they need to be prepared to take radical action. Telling your friends “have you heard about this thing called climate change” isn’t going to cut it. Telling them “have you heard about this movie How To Blow Up a Pipeline” isn’t going to cut it. Telling them that you’re decamping from society to form a guerrilla chapter of Greenpeace is a start, assuming you don’t think any of your friends will rat you out to the police.
But even then… its three droplets against hundreds of thousands moving in the other direction. And all the individual droplets know that.