Climate Interactive on Daily Kos -- "Time to Do it Yourself"

November 24, 2010 by Andrew P. Jones

Pimped a post by gmoke on Daily Kos — he heard our team member John Sterman of MIT Sloan.

DIY Climate Change: Ain’t Nobody Else

by gmoke

Tue Nov 23, 2010 at 07:48:30 PM PST

Last week, I heard presentations from the chief climate person at the World Bank on the outlook for international agreement in Cancun, a Harvard economist on the national outlook under the new Congress, and an MIT systems dynamicist on an online model of climate change anybody can play, C-LEARN http://forio.com/…

John Sterman, the business and management professor, demonstrated the C-LEARN and the C-ROADS /… simulations.  C-LEARN is designed for the general public and C-ROADS for negotiators. He said that even a majority of MIT engineering students don’t understand the dynamics of the climate system but that playing the simulations could be a powerful learning tool.

If neither international agreement nor national policy are forthcoming, we have to build a climate policy ourselves.  DIY climate policy.  Ain’t nobody else.  Yes, keep lobbying the Congresscritters and write those LtEs (go, Warren!!!) but we need to organize energy fairs,  weatherization and solar barnraisings, simple solar PSAs on youtube, Appropedia ( http://www.appropedia.org/ ) and Global Swadeshi http://globalswadeshi.ning.com/ open source global experiments in sustainable living and climate reclamation…

Plus everything else we can do.  And, as the song goes, we got to do it for ourselves.