cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12214870
do these absolute buffoons not know how important my crude portfolio is?
We’re in a hostage situation, and the captors own the government.
Meh. I respectfully disagree. This is the system we designed. It’s working exactly as intended. What we need is a sea change. The system is broken and that’s evident everywhere. The path we are on doesn’t work. The only way to course correct is for everyone to get on the same page and as is witnessed during the yearly COP meetings clearly the rich nations don’t fully care about the poor countries. Things are changing but dreadfully slow.
We, as in the people living now, did not design it, we are stuck with the designs of forefathers upon forefathers that had a few centuries to bake in profit above people. Before the American government, the British government did it. Other governments mimic the Big Guys. Governments are designed by the rich and powerful to minimize the power of the individual, especially in America. Keep the citizens too busy, too overworked, too sick, too poor, too homeless, too much lead in the water, too many PFAS, too much fracking pollution in the air. They just pay lip service to freedom and keep education levels low enough so people are either unaware or infinitely feeling helpless.
Look at the water shortages looming in western US. The Department of Reclamation run by a bunch of Mormons that thought it was their God-given right to terraform the US made some overly optimistic measurements at the beginning of the 20th century and ran amok building dams and changing water routes all across the west. That led to building entire cities in places that should not have cities (Phoenix, AZ; Los Angeles, CA; Las Vegas, NV, etc.) and now those cities are “too big to fail” slurping up all the water they can from places very far away. LA has an entire nuclear facility powering water pumps to push water over a mountain range to feed some of it. The agricultural West and midwest (Midwest: NE, KS, etc.) all relied on these river sources as well as giant underground aquifers. The water was always finite, but the US government sold it cheap to push farming and agriculture into the west and away from the south where water was more plentiful. Now it’s running out.
This isn’t even getting into the problems faced by the poorer nations you mentioned above, resources will become spread so thin, looming water wars and other conflicts on the horizon that will start out so civil at their beginning. Those nations at the equator will be on their own to survive, with mass-migration towards the poles being the only real solution for those that survive.
We (now-humans) are stuck having to mitigate the worst of the damage for humanity and many species to continue to survive, and attempt to roll back all these arrogant asinine greedy decisions in the hope that the near-future will be at least semi-habitable.
Earth will be fine, it’ll rebuild and reset and grow some new beings. Trying to guilt people for things they didn’t do and have little control over is not a good motivator when faced with major extinction.
if we exceed the 1.5°C warming target set by the Paris Agreement.
Pretty sure previous studies have already confirmed we’re already blowing past 2°C even if we stopped producing CO2 today.
Not to be too doomer about it but we’re already too late to prevent centuries of damage. What we can do now is try and keep the ecosystem from becoming completely uninhabitable.
Not to be pedantic, but the target is a ten year trailing average. It’s a crime that we’ve likely hit it for a year or two already, and that shows how urgent the problem is but we’ve still got 5 years or so
Even worse carbon emissions haven’t yet peaked, much less started dropping, and way less quickly than they need to drop
That’s not really how that works. The 2°C increase is a prediction of how average temperatures will increase based on already existing carbon in the atmosphere.
If we stop emitting today, the average temperature will still increase beyond 2°C and stay there unless there’s another force actively removing the CO2 from the atmosphere.
This isn’t “if we stop emitting today, we’ll peak at 2°C increase and then it’ll go back down” the 2°C prediction is a permanent increase to the average temperature.
The damage is done. Millions will likely die regardless of how much carbon we put out from this point forward. The fight now is to decrease the people that will die beyond that number.
Those extra years don’t mean anything though. It’s the target that matters. Just because 10 years was predicted doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want in this 10 years as long as it fixed right before that mark.
10 year average was the target definition. Not only does this not mean we can sit on our asses, but it also does NOT mean we have nine lives left
If you still have hope that humanity will stop destroying (the human habitability of) our only habitat in the name of short-term private profit for humanity’s most prolific sociopaths, at least share the kind of drugs you’re on.
“LINE MUST GO UP!”
-Homo Sapien, ~200,000 BCE - ~2100 AD
Accelerationists gotta accelerate, I guess. For the longest time it baffled me as to why anyone with intelligence would knowing act to destroy the planet and, with it, society. Then I learned about this shit called accelerationism and it all starts to make sense.
We ARE in a hostage situation like someone commented, except we’re on a bus, speeding toward a cliff, and the rich elite refuse to take their foot off the pedal. They think they’re going to come out of societal collapse alive and poised to shape whatever comes next however they want. It’s literally the game of Monopoly with that fucking speed die version…
Jokes on them, the earth can stay a boiling lava pit for longer than they can stay in their bunkers.
Also, good luck trying to have people service and maintain your bunker system as you dictate their lives without any of them just trying to kill you.
It would be so much easier to just admit they have to work with the poors to keep the earth alive so everyone can live than just wipe out humanity and think they can outlast it
Right? Shortsightedness is a problem everywhere. And their calculations are not gonna work out for them. Sure, raise the price of goods and services today, who’s gonna buy them if no one has any money cause they’re syphoning off and propelling us to the bottom. I’m convinced the ultra wealthy stopped mentally growing at age 7-10.
Take that Ken Griffith guy, the one who had to get bailed out by other ultra wealthy a-holes in 2020 during the GameStop meme-time. He just spent like $44 million on a stegosaurus skeleton that the company was going to try to sell for like $3-$7 million. Dudes atrocious with money and predictions it seems. He’s like a wealthier Tim Poole.
rich
It’s not about the rich. No one cares, except for a small handful of people. The vast majority of people want to fly away on vacation, own a large home, have a crappy grass lawn, eat meat everyday. They see environmentalism as some sort of odd lifestyle. If you make a law that says they can’t use gas lawn mowers, they’ll scream and go bat shit insane, call you the devil. They are relentless in wanting to pave over anything living.
