Reset default settings

We’re all contributing to this big scary climate situation in some way.

A rough framework for how I see our contributions:

• Active vs Passive
• Positive vs Negative
• Ignoring everything

In many cases, you can choose whether your contribution is passive or active – are you cruising through life accepting the default options for everything (plastic packaging, banks that invest in dirty projects, cheap clothing made in poor conditions) and knowing they’re not great options, or are you actively seeking out better alternatives?

Your contribution can be positive or negative: Switching to renewable power suppliers creates positive change, while sticking with a polluter adds to the negative.

And whether your contribution is positive or negative… you can also choose to ignore everything. Unlike the passive person who is aware of solutions or alternatives but chooses not to go for the, the ignorer switches off the signals altogether. You know, the the ones who say climate change is a conspiracy, that sort of thing 👽

Unfortunately today, ignoring probably means your contribution will be passive and mostly negative just because of the way the world works right now. A small number of default options are actually good so you’ll fluke a win here and there but mostly, the default options suck.

A decade or two from now though, the work we’re do in scaling up climate solutions means that the ignorers and the passives will contribute positively anyway, because all of the crap default options from today will have been phased out and replaced with awesome defaults.

Check out the growing number of ways we can contribute on Project Drawdown’s peer-reviewed, commercially viable climate solutions – reset default settings!