This is impossible to fix with capitalism. Capitalism demands infinite growth. We’re going to have to start working on antigravity now to escape this dead planet (the plot to interstellar).
I always want to reply with that chart on every post about some magical new climate technology. Nothing really matters until we stop pulling carbon-based fuels out of the ground and lighting them on fire. That’s it. That’s the only thing that matters. Wind and solar are great but we’re still approving gas/coal/oil projects, at least globally.
It’s like with the water crisis in the American West. They guilt trip individuals into feeling bad about taking showers but it’s like 80% agriculture. And the majority of that is for animal feed. (I’m not saying everyone go vegan. That’s about as unrealistic as asking everyone to stop fucking to keep the population from growing. I’m saying don’t grow alfalfa in the fucking desert and then blame people who bathe.)
This is an excellent point. The energy transition is more accurately an energy addition. Some renewables on top of a still-increasing pile of burning fossil fuels.
Same with EVs. More are being sold every year but more ICE cars are being sold, too.
Until the fossil fuel industry actually shrinks, things are hopeless.
Seeing those alfalfa farms all over my desert state turns me into an extremist.
Nothing really matters until we stop pulling carbon-based fuels out of the ground and lighting them on fire.
I say it all the time. The only possible way to keep carbon from outside the carbon cycle from entering the carbon cycle is to stop taking carbon from outside the carbon cycle and putting it into the carbon cycle. No amount of coal plant filtration or growing trees or building wind farms will take carbon from inside the carbon cycle out of the carbon cycle.
400 ppm is too much, and the mechanisms for putting that carbon in the ground is gone and never coming back. The best we can possibly do is stop making it worse, and we won’t, because everyone wants to have a whole chicken in their fridge that’ll end up rotting because the availability of goods, whether we’ll actually consume them or not, is the most important thing in the world.
You’re not wrong.
…but on the chicken part. Do people really routinely overstock on perishable items? Like, you can misjudge, but if you keep throwing food out because it’s gone bad, surely you’d adjust your purchasing habits?
You would think, but yes, a lot of people really do routinely buy more perishables than they need.
I owe my perspective on it to this essay. It doesn’t talk about money wasted when food goes bad, but it was the first thing that came to mind when I read it—I didn’t just pay $1.86 for those green onions, it also cost me $1.86 worth of green onions when I threw them away.
People don’t even notice how much money they waste on food they never ate because once that 2 lbs of bacon is in their fridge, they no longer assign a dollar value to it. When that bacon goes bad without even being opened, they didn’t lose $10, they lost 2 lbs of bacon, and the thought that enters their head is “I should get more bacon”
where did you get this data? it can’t possibly be right
edit: it’s robbed of context. it’s only illustrating water use in the Colorado River basin, and even at that is being misleading: for instance, corn silage is a byproduct of grain corn. that water doesn’t magically re-enter the water table if we don’t feed it to cattle, but by feeding it to cattle, we are able to reclaim some of that water use.
It’s kinda bizarre how people are brainwashed to think that this isn’t a thing…
https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/devastating-water-footprint-animal-agriculture/163485/
I skimmed this and clicked a few of the references. it does use poore-nemecek 2018, so I’m skeptical of all of the other data that’s included. of course going through a piece the size that you linked to evaluate it for its scientific integrity is a project all onto itself and I’m at work at the moment. I encourage you to look at the methodology for each of the claims made in your link.
The NY Times. Here’s a gift link:
Edit: they cite this study in Nature Sustainability: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0483-z
I bought CO2 sensors for an Arduino project. The firmware is calibrated to 400 ppm. It is rapidly becoming in accurate because baseline keeps going up.
I find the people with hope genuinely confusing at this point.
To lose hope for a better tomorrow is to roll over and accept the worst
I’ll fight to my dying breath for a better tomorrow because I have hope in achieving that goal
Even if that better tomorrow is only slightly better than no change or if that better tomorrow is making sure that those I care about aren’t completely up a creek if shit goes sideways
Anything is better than rolling over and letting the world go to shit like a loaded up semi with no brakes down a mountain
Because the alternative is to become a pessimistic doomer and tune out pretending it’s all hopeless?
I’m not tuning out. Occasionally I wish I could, but that doesn’t align with my core values. Doomers aren’t the ones that tune out, people that primarily consume “reality” TV, aren’t “political, teehee,” couldn’t point to the middle east on a map with a gun to their head, and are habitually bubbly and optimistic about any topic despite living in this world are the ones tuned out living in blissful willful ignorance.
You have to be paying attention to have hope beaten out of you in the first place. You may not like doomers, but they are burdened with knowledge, aka well informed. That’s why they bother the ignorant, they bum them out.
people that primarily consume “reality” TV, aren’t “political, teehee,” couldn’t point to the middle east on a map with a gun to their head, and are habitually bubbly and optimistic about any topic despite living in this world are the ones tuned out living in blissful willful ignorance.
They’re not hopeful about climate change, they’re ignorant of it. That’s not the same thing.
Doomers aren’ t burdened with knowledge, doomers are a burden on everyone else with knowledge who knows that this could be fixed if people acted.
There is literally zero benefit to climate doomerism.
Oh the earth will recover eventually! It’s even possible humanity survives in some form!
Oh yeah Earth will be fine. It’s survived worse than us and will be here long after we’ve died, almost certainly by our own hands. We aren’t even the first mass extinction event to come from a mistake from within instead of an external force like a meteor but instead of runaway, macro-metastatic evolution. There was a blight of early trees in the carboniferous period that stored too much carbon leading to an ice age because the means of their efficient decomposition had not yet evolved, causing the opposite of what we’re doing, leading to an ice age.
Life on Earth suffered, many species went extinct, as some do constantly even in good times, but Earth always recovers. We sadly fashion ourselves masters of this word rather than children and subjects, but we couldn’t sterilize this planet if we wanted to. There’s life in acid pools, in crevices we can’t find, in depths we can’t reach. Until the Sun’s output changes enough in a couple billion years, life will most likely find a way here.
I take comfort, just as George Carlin did, in knowing that we will just be an evolutionary cul-de-sac, quickly forgotten by the living Earth we tried to dominate and rape as our private property.
The funniest bit to me is that for all the idiotic religions people kill one another over, demanding theirs has the largest penis and other believers of gods with smaller penises must convert or die, it was a rare thing indeed for humans to actually respect their actual God, their actual creator, the real one they can and do see every single day, the one we are, in objective fact, made of. Oh the dark irony of desperately seeking approval from a fictional “sky daddy” creator that we often anthropomorphize out of vanity to look and act and think like us, while raping, plundering, polluting, and defacing our true God as thoughtlessly as breathing.
I don’t have any hope, but I’m sure as hell not going to roll over and take it.
Hope us a useless feeling. So is despair. Neither will do anything.
You only get one life, you happen to be fucking born in a time when everything is about to go to shit. Well too bad, you still get to live and make the best of it. I don’t understand people who are so hung up on things they can’t control. If earth was going to get cooked by a supernova in 40 years, I would still live a normal, healthy life and the only thing that would be different is when I die, everyone else does too. Changes nothing.
I value knowledge and wisdom as its own end, knowing it comes at the expense of contentment/comfort.
We all get to choose what we value most, and usually it comes at something else’s expense. I would rather stare into the void so long as the void is something true then be deluded, blissfully ignorant and happy when that happiness requires willful ignorance, another way of saying choosing not to know what is available to know.
I think a lot of the “don’t think about it” willful ignorance is a big reason us sapient beings inflict such cruelty on one another and sentient creatures that feel real pain so easily. Empathy, knowing everyone else has an inner world and feels as deeply as you do, is something you have to allow yourself to know and feel that most don’t care about so long as they “get theirs.”
What you’re describing is exactly why we will go extinct, legions of people choosing to take what they can without the detriment of really internalizing who will be hurt and how deeply by it. Those best at that skill, sociopaths, run this world and are the primary reason our species’ time is ending so they can “win,” feel accomplished, and ultimately scurry into their little luxury bunker tombs to sip expensive bourbon and reminisce about how high their ego scores got and how awesome it was while luxuriating several feet of concrete under the fruits of their own fine work until their heart gives out or one of their very expensive air/water/waste/hydroponic systems fail.
Humanity should have been humanity’s business, not finding “rational self-interest” bliss. But we made our choice and our bed. 🤷
If you can’t understand that there is a very, very wide difference between choosing to live in and appreciate the life you have, and self-centered apathy, then maybe you should revisit your own thoughts on wisdom.
In fact I would argue it’s the people without nuance who will doom our species, the idea that if you’re not one thing, you must be the other, black-and-white thinking rapidly becomes reactionary thinking which rapidly becomes superstition, fear and hate and an embrace of authoritarian reactionary leadership.
And for what?
For that.
Lines must go up.
society lacks a plan. wealth inequality has been going up since before 2000. but somehow, society just carried on. “if we work hard, i’m sure it will turn out alright.”
the current social divide (poor/rich, not dem/rep) was predictable long ago. what do you expect? 10 or 20 years ago would have been the perfect time to question the fundamentals of society and decide where society really wants to go - to develop in the long term.
now we’re here. now’s the 3rd best time to figure out how society should develop in the long term. think about it.