Sarah Ott spent years as a climate change sceptic - now she's an advocate for clean energy.

I spent years doubting the science of climate change and spending time with people who didn’t believe in the science either.

When I realised I was wrong, I felt really embarrassed.

To move away from those people meant leaving behind an entire community at a time when I didn’t have many friends.

I went through a really difficult time. But the truth matters.

I’m the granddaughter of coal miners in Pennsylvania and my family moved to Florida when I was young.

We have a Polish Catholic background and we attended church regularly, but at the same time we were very connected to science because my mum was a nurse and my dad sold microscopes and other scientific equipment.

  • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    My husband didn’t get home from work until late, so I would have four or five hours at home by myself every day, always with the kitchen radio on, tuned to conservative stations.

    We listened to Rush Limbaugh, a radio host known for his controversial opinions on topics such as race, LGBT rights and women, and I would hear him every day for two hours.

    He would talk about how climate change was just a hoax.

    Up to that point, I had been exposed to a lot of misinformation about evolution in my church groups, but I had studied the theory of evolution at university, so I was equipped to spot it.

    But I didn’t have that same skill set for climate change.

    My conviction that climate change was a hoax solidified when I heard Limbaugh talk about Climategate. It was a controversy involving research from the University of East Anglia. Only much later did I learn that the material was twisted and taken out of context.

    …

    I craved intellectual stimulation, so I kept the radio on while I was cooking dinner or while driving in my car. But there were only a few hours of Rush Limbaugh each day.

    That’s when the big turning point came.

    I tuned into NPR, a US non-profit broadcaster. I don’t remember which show it was, or the specific news story, but I remember how they described the issue in a completely different way from what I had heard on my usual stations. And it sounded so reasonable.

    I realised how much my social network had changed since I had stopped teaching. At school, I was around people from all over the world, gay or straight, conservative and liberals.

    Without that school environment, all I had in my social circle was my church group.