Express your views: respond to the opinion piece

Throughout this week, you’ve explored the messy terrain of climate communication and discourse, learning to convey our ideas in ways that inspire action, identify common climate delay arguments and analyse flawed statements that can hinder meaningful climate action.

You focused on critically examining the opinion piece, and you explored its various claims, perspectives and discourses surrounding the climate crisis. Now, it’s time to bring together everything you’ve learned to craft your own response.

Your task

To tie together all this week’s learning (and to draw on your learning from previous weeks), you are encouraged to write a hypothetical response to the opinion piece. Your response should critically engage with the piece, pointing out any flawed or misleading statements and offering corrections or alternative views. Feel free to reference specific claims from the article and address why these views might be problematic or misleading. Use the knowledge you’ve gained from the rest of this course to argue what should be done instead – or what kind of climate action should be prioritised – and explain why.

Tips for your response

• Identify and correct misleading statements by highlighting parts of the piece that you find problematic and explaining why. Use evidence and insights from the course to counter these arguments effectively.
• Propose alternative actions or policies that you believe would be more effective in tackling the climate crisis, and draw on your understanding of the issues, from the costs of climate inaction to the role of technology and finance.
• Make it persuasive. Remember, your response is not just about pointing out flaws – it’s about presenting a compelling case for meaningful, urgent climate action.

Share your response

Share your response in the Comments section below and read and respond to other learners’ responses. You can then view a sample answer from the course authors in the Downloads section. This example will provide insight into one possible approach to countering delay discourses effectively.