My Greatest Climate Success

Michael Nabert
10 min readApr 22, 2024

And you can, too.

Photoshopped together from various sources by author

Being a climate activist means taking up the short end of the biggest David v Goliath struggle on the planet. It’s not the sort of thing you keep striving at because it feels particularly doable. It’s just a straight up moral imperative. Nothing else we might hope for our future is going to matter if we don’t accomplish this herculean, virtually impossible task.

If we hope for a tomorrow where we aren’t increasingly roasted, the first place we are told to look is our personal carbon footprint. That’s by design of those with the biggest footprints, before whom the collective contributions of 90% of us fade almost to insignificance. The almost is important, because we can’t get from the trajectory we’re on into a future that doesn’t suck without everybody doing their part, and everybody includes us. But the insignificance is a lot more important, because it reminds us that even if every single non-billionaire massively shrinks our personal emissions, we are still totally screwed. They want us to blame one another instead of banding together to confront them.

Over decades of climate activism, I shrank my personal footprint wherever I could. Might as well put my money where my mouth is. That’s the low hanging fruit. I didn't drive. I didn't fly. I ate lower on the food chain. I didn’t treat consumerism as entertainment…

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Michael Nabert

Researching a road map from our imperilled world into one with a livable future with as much good humour as I can muster along the way.