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Why Our Group, The Saners, Doesn’t Harshly Judge People and Instead Focuses on Consequential Actions

Ray Katz
5 min readAug 4, 2024

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It’s not a gotcha game, aimed at calling people hypocrites. It’s about loving people, life, and our planet—and protecting all three.

Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Unsplash

It’s odd for an avowed climate activist to say nice things about people doing bad stuff. But why not? We all do bad stuff. We’re human. We live in the civilization into which we were born.

And this current civilization rewards and even requires a whole lot of very, very bad behavior.

Me AND Them, Not Versus Them. In Fact, US!

As it happens, I’ve never owned a car. Day-to-day, I walk nearly everywhere or take public transportation. This year, I quit eating beef. In my home, we do not have central air. We depend on three air conditioners, that we use sparingly. They are mostly new and fairly energy efficient.

That’s not merit. I still eat other animals. I take airplanes. I’ve been on two luxury cruises. There’s plenty of things I do that are not climate-friendly.

It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. I know that it kind of does. A little. A very little. But actually it doesn’t matter.

My individual climate-friendly actions are for my benefit—symbolic acts to keep the…

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Ray Katz
Ray Katz

Written by Ray Katz

Internet pioneer. But I’m most interested in stabilizing the Earth’s climate and promoting our common humanity. WeAreSaners.org

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