Acting with kindness in the eye of a storm

There’s a quiet in the eye of the storm of the new Trump administration, as people figure out what to do in a landscape where logic is turned on its head. 

Demanding that Canada become the 51st state, threatening to take over the Panama canal, Gaza and Greenland, gleefully taking a sledgehammer to USAID - none of this is sensible. Acting like Americans are victims when we are the richest, most powerful country in the world is selfish and short-sighted. Denying that the climate is changing, hobbling clean energy and promoting fossil fuels whilst cities drown and burn, is flat out foolish. 

My work at TED Countdown is about amplifying solutions to climate change and the pathways to a cleaner, healthier, more prosperous future. I am also the founder of Leaders’ Quest and Blue Dot Collective, and have spent the last two and a half decades working to promote compassion, kindness and how to make wise choices in an interconnected world. 

Here’s how I think we respond now on climate - and many of these pointers apply well to other battles underway. 

We start by recognizing that skepticism about climate change is understandable. The language has often been apocalyptic in ways that cause people to shut down; the subject has become entangled with a host of other social priorities in ways that alienate people who do not subscribe to a whole progressive agenda; mis and dis-information is rife. But the evidence is clear and the pundits who argue otherwise either haven’t bothered to study it or are being disingenuous. 

So, we state the facts. The world is warming even faster than scientists predicted and the effects and costs are widely felt. The cause is greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere by human activities. The solution is to transition our economies to clean energy, clean industries, less waste and improved farming practices. There are many benefits from this transition that go far beyond slowing warming, including clean air, clean water, and restoring nature and wildlife.  

The green transition is underway and already there are huge winners. According to Our World in Data, solar photovoltaic costs have fallen by 90% in the last decade, onshore wind by 70%, and batteries by more than 90%. In 2004 it took the world a year to add a gigawatt of solar power - now it takes a day. The relentless logic of innovation will continue to drive down the cost of these and other technologies. Consider what it might mean if we capture even a fraction of the energy that the sun shines upon us, to enter an era of cheap, abundant energy? We will get there - it’s a question of how late we are in arriving. 

Next generation work is concentrated in this new economy. Solar and wind installers are amongst the most in demand jobs in the world today. AI, if applied for good, has the capacity to accelerate solutions in ways we have yet to imagine. We don’t need to be frightened of the future. Humans are extraordinarily ingenious and adaptable. 

Inaction is far more costly than action and the poorest are the most vulnerable. We have resisted carbon taxes as a way to dampen fossil fuel demand yet are now faced with escalating insurance costs. A tax in another guise. When citizens lose their homes and livelihoods the only viable backstop right now is the tax payer.

Our task is clear. We start with the facts and focus on implementing solutions. 

How we do so matters too. For me the saddest part of the Trump hurricane is its casual cruelty and vindictiveness, and the pace at which this has normalized. Challenging the status quo, questioning how money is spent are important factors in a world of competing priorities.  But it’s not OK to boast about feeding the US’s aid agency (responsible for less than 1% of the federal budget) into the woodchipper, to vilify migrants, to make up nonsense. In this version of reality, kindness is associated with weakness and cruelty is a sign of strength.

Yet we know from history and our own intuition that this isn’t true. Looking out for one another is fundamental to our survival. Compassion is part of who we are. Communities naturally pull together in adversity and behaving with kindness leaves us feeling better about ourselves. The Golden Rule, common to almost every faith, states that we should treat others as we wish others to treat us. Or as astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote after viewing the first images of our solar system from the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990 where the Earth showed up like a speck of pale blue dust:

“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

We’re in the eye of a storm. Time to focus on facts, listen to people who see the world differently, and solve problems together. Time to treat one another with kindness - because it’s a far happier way to live.

Lindsay Levin