Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Fabian Dablander PNAS Climate Policy Ph.D. research on the need for "climate action" activism and my response

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTvPDjgCGMI

https://fabiandablander.com/

intentions are very different from the costs and benefits of taking climate action in the real world (e.g., participating in protests, becoming vegetarian), such a correlation is unlikely to be sufficiently large (7). This questions the external validity of the results of Sinclair et al.—the relative ordering of the effects in their intention-based intervention tournament is unlikely to be the same when targeting actual behavior.
These two points concern the wider field. A study of almost 16,000 young people found that 52% said they would participate in protests (8), yet our personal experience at protests points to attendance at least a thousand times smaller. And whereas about 11% of people in the United States say they would engage in civil disobedience (9), the actual numbers are also many orders of magnitudes smaller.

 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2512457122

Hi Dr. Fabian Dablander: Thanks for your new PNAS article. When I was an undergraduate at University of Wisconsin-Madison, I had a plea for my fellow conservation biology students who also were my housemates: We need to focus on policy activism as there's already enough science. This was over 30 years ago, in the early 90s. My fellow students were "working class" and thus had student debt. They focused on science so they could procure a "career" job that would pay their student loans and also achieve the "American Dream" as measured by standards of success. Most young adults are mainly influenced by their parents' strong encouragement to have a career, etc.
In the U.S. since the "Reagan Revolution" there has been next to no funding for conservation biology as a science career. Even though my undergraduate degree was in the "new" option of "environmental" International Relations (an even mix of biology, economics and political science) I realized these disciplines all contradicted each other - the very precise opposite of sustainability.
So I simply went back into "policy activism" work after my undergraduate degree. I finished high school in 1989 and worked full time in environmental policy work. This meant literally begging door to door for donations and I did an excellent job! I'm proud of that work. After my undergraduate degree I worked full-time for Greenpeace, also begging door to door for donations. Our office was shut-down in 1996 and the office director said Germany Greenpeace felt strongly that environmental activists should just be volunteers, not paid organizers. He also told me his main activist concern was global warming.
So I ended up working for half a dozen nonprofits from 1989 to 2009. The last one was Clean Water Action where I scored the lucky job of being a "paper shuffler" (a part-time job for ten years) - for the phone canvass (that once again called people up for donations). My job was replaced by a speed dialer - and that transition also ended up firing most of the "phone canvass" as being redundant (technology being a means to speed up the work process as "efficiency.")
I studied conservation biology at the School for Field Studies in 1992 at Costa Rica. I then started my University of Moinnesota master's degree in 1997 with my focus on interdisciplinary policy activism as my self-designed Liberal Studies degree. I did achieve some success - we got a divestment from Total Oil for slave labor and deforestation in Burma. The university divested around $1.5 million and passed a resolution to stay divested. (The University now says no more divestment policies are allowed). We also got the university to join the Workers Rights Consortium for the sports apparel to be made in less than completely heinous conditions. So this was back in 1999! 25 years ago or more.
I was hired to write an op-ed for the University newspaper serving 50,000 people and I exposed the corporate control of science at the University - in line with the military tax funding of research in the U.S. Some 350 businesses donated 100% tax deductions to then control science at University of Minnesota. So I protested Monsanto, Cargill, etc. I got some threats from people freaked out by my independent research (a professor, the president of the university, the general counsel, etc.) - even some activists claimed I was just in it for myself (not part of their Marxist cult or whatever). 
So after the global financial crash of 2008 I then left the city of Minneapolis for good in 2009. I had been dumpster-diving food and riding a British 3 speed bicycle for ten years. I finished my master's degree focused on nonwestern philosophy as meditation. You can find my research for free on my academia site. I even finally got an actual academic article published in a journal edited by an environmental philosophy professor in Australia.
thanks,
drew hempel
p.s. I did get arrested eight times for civil disobedience (the final time was based on the accusation that I was homeless since I took a nap in an unused stall during spring break at the public university). hahaha. I realized the cops were out of control and this was confirmed with the murder of George Floyd.


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