##The See Through News Politican Challenge
A Simple Test to Determine How Hard Your Leaders Have Thought About Climate Change. Works for Democracies and Autocracies.
Here’s a simple test to determine how deeply the people governing you have thought about climate change.
The See Through News Politician Challenge works in both democracies and autocracies. Adaptations are specified below.
When
If you live in a democracy where you get to elect representatives, try it on whoever’s trying to persuade you to vote for them.
Anytime is fine, but you get best value immediately before elections. This is a good time to point out that elected politicians are our servants, and not our masters.
If you live in an autocracy the STN Politician Challenge still works just fine, just be a bit more circumspect about asking it in public.
The good news is that any time is fine. You get best bang for your buck/renminbi/rouble if you frame it in the context of popular unhappiness with the wrong answer.
What
The STN Politican’s Challenge consists of asking two questions, as follows.
Thank you for the opportunity to ask you two questions.
It’s only fair to warn you that they’re trick questions, though now I’ve told you that, maybe they can’t really be trick questions. Anyway:
Question One: Should we be saving the planet?
Question Two: What’s wrong with Question One?
If they, or the moderator, ask you how you’d answer these ‘trick’ questions, we suggest the following:
Q1. No. The planet is fine, and will continue to be fine. It’s been around 4.5 billion years, is 99.98% rock, and will continue to be around for a few billion years yet.
Q2. Question One conflates the fate of the planet with the fate of human civilization. This confusion betrays precisely the hubris which created global heating in the first place.
Outcome
If you can vote, tell them you’ll vote for whoever’s answer is closest to yours, as this will indicate the degree to which they’ve seriously thought about the problem, as opposed to what greenwashing strategy they’ve calculated they can get away with.
If you can’t vote, tell them you fear not urgently addressing carbon drawdown will lead to popular unrest. Contrary to popular perception, autocrats fear ‘popular unrest’ much more than elected officials, as the stakes are much higher. Consider:
If elected politicians leave office, they can parley their connections into lucrative ‘consultancy’, book deals, or speaking bookings.
If unelected politicians are deposed, they risk dangling by the neck from a lamp-post. Avoiding this can be highly motivating, especially when climate action is presented as a solution rather than a problem.
