Sustainability is not just about solving the climate crisis

This shouldn't need saying, but the application is both simple and profound: if you can use one or more of the pressing issues listed below to connect with someone who doesn't believe in global warming, their denial will cease to matter.  Every one of these problems is a threat to our way of life, and many of them are already responsible for thousands of premature deaths every year.  And every one of them would be solved by transitioning to a sustainable civilization powered by renewable energy.

• Peak oil and the resulting inexorable rise in gas prices
• Indirect funding of terrorist groups via oil payments to nations that harbor them
• Air and water pollution from fossil fuel burning and other unsustainable industrial processes
• Degradation of soil due to unsustainable farming practices, particularly loss of topsoil
• Oceanic dead zones due to fertilizer runoff
• Ocean acidification due to carbon dioxide absorption
• Overtaxed and increasingly failure-prone garbage and sewage handling systems
• Species extinctions and resulting loss of ecosystem services, due to most of the issues above plus habitat destruction and overhunting/fishing

I originally wrote up this list after finding out that we had one or two global-warming skeptics at the climate-crisis-focused mini-State of the World Forum in Washington D.C. last week.  As described here, the original full-scale event was "indefinitely postponed" because the organizers believed the general political climate in D.C. was swinging too rapidly back toward denial and inaction.  So the roughly forty people who showed up anyway talked mostly about leadership in other countries such as Brazil and China, subnational-level approaches, and nonpolitical topics like the rise of a subculture, the Cultural Creatives, that shares the values needed to build a wiser world.  I'll probably talk about other aspects of the forum in my next few posts.