I do, but like most other people, I'm preoccupied with short term crises since, well, I need to survive those in order to be ready for the long-term ones.
In my opinion though, we don't stand a snowball's chance in hell. The elite will manage to hang just a bit longer, but eventually they'll cook and burn with the rest of us, or in their bunkers.
Anyways, shit's already fucked to the point that I've given up. Just sit back, relax and take whatever life gives ya.
This is exactly the messaging of the oil companies and others who oppose climate action now that it’s too hard to deny. They want us to think it’s hopeless and give up trying to change anything. It’s not too late. Green energy is growing exponentially and has been possibly the fastest technological adoption in history. Millions of people are working on the science and technology to solve these problems. We just need some more collective action at the local and national levels. Carbon taxes, funding for green initiatives, local agriculture, and support for alternative transportation like e-bikes or other PEVs to start
Did you miss the memo that current AI is already using more power than everything we've managed to save with green energy in the last decade?
We ARE fucked, the only thing we're still debating is the exact timespan. Which is asinine, the result will remain the same either way.
The only way I see to a path to salvation is a huge pandemic or world war, becausing nothing else will convince people. We've been trying (and failing) for decades.
Carbon taxes fix the problem of using energy for dumb things. Climate change isn't caused by us using energy, it's caused by the fact that carbon pollution is free.
I need some anon to write me a virus that will wipe out all datacenters in one go, something that will irrevocably fry all enterprise hardware beyond repair. Let's start over, with decent trust busting and without the plastic this time.
(edit: I guess it's not entirely clear but I'm expecting such a virus to hit the reset button on civilisation. Mass death, yes, but we won't fuck the world beyond being liveable.)
The only way I see to a path to salvation is a huge pandemic or world war, becausing nothing else will convince people
We had a pandemic already and war in Ukraine is raging on - and both only served right wing extremists to rise and ignore climate problems even harder. We are fucked. I don't give up hope but it's tiny
No, there’s always a shimmer of hope and the non zero chance that we mean something for someone that could make a difference, or help make the difference ourselves. Even sometimes the tiniest good-hearted gesture will do it.
I keep saying, if Putin starts a nuclear war, we might save humanity. A nuclear winter will cool the planet. And with most of us dying of radiation poisoning, we won’t have the ability to start pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. Yay!
I never had kids of my own, because I didn't want any, but the last 15 years or so I've becoming increasingly grateful that I made that decision. It at least allows me to sit back and contemplate doom without worrying about what my kids' life on this planet is going to be like after I'm gone.
I've always done the reducing, reusing, and recycling, because it's the right thing to do. Cut waaaaay back on dairy and beef purchases, I eat a lot of plant protein and use plant milk now. But it's all a drop in the bucket. Only the governments can actually fix this, and they won't because they are owned. I just sit around hoping it won't get TOO bad before I'm dead.
The fiduciary responsibility scene from the new Fallout show hit hard.
::: spoiler S1E6
"Morton played a rancher who owned half of Missouri."
"And what happens when the cattle ranchers have more power than the sheriff?"
"The whole town burns down."
"Right, the whole town burns down. Vault-Tec is a trillion dollar company that owns half of everything. And after ten years of war, the U.S. gov't is broker than a joke. The cattle ranchers are in charge, Coop."
:::
I agree and I am not even preoccupied, but there simply hasn't been any chance for me to make a dent in this. Hasn't been for a long time, at least since 1900 (!!) where we basically already knew where everything was headed.
Humanity is just going to go through a culling. There will definitely be humans and there will definitely be habitable areas of the planet but there won't be room for all 8 billion of us and depending on how much we actually do right now will determine how big the actual final number is
I dunno why the assumption is that everyone who makes the observation on overpopulation is so self-interested that they can't imagine their own demise as part of it. We'll all die in the approaching climate disaster, including you and me. The difference between now and later is small on a geological timescale.
I do what I can. It's certainly not as much as I could be doing, but it's what I have the mental and emotional capacity to handle. I don't have a ton of hope either, and it's a big reason I decided not to have children, but I wouldn't say I've given up completely.
Actually, no! Once the really BIG human die-offs start, the hyperwealthy will 'bunker up' for a while and once the population shrinks back down, we won't be putting out all that greenhouse gas anymore, and the earth will cool back down. They'll keep a few cities in places like Norway or what have you around to keep providing food and fuel for their choppers and parties.
I know several billionaires are already doing this in Hawaii. I feel like Hawaii is a bad choice. But I suppose if you have a giant yacht it’s not a problem.
But I feel like you’d want land with slaves under armed guard that till fields and raise livestock.
I was thinking you keep your security as part of the elite class, they would live basically as well as you and your other elites family / friend class. Maybe even with arranged marriages to ensure their offspring will be part of this same class, like royalty. You could build this into your society/culture. Maybe serving as a guard is like something every royal does for five or ten years.
That’s why I was thinking you somehow make them a part of the hoarding class, disincentivizing them from mutiny, as they are also benefitting from those hoarded resources in the same way as you and your family. But yeah it’s a hard problem to solve for the hoarder.
The people who tweeted this suck at Communication 101. You've gotta have a specific and clear call to action. Something like "Join this protest at XYZ" or "Demand your Congressman support ABC."
You can't just say "Drop everything. Forget about your job and your kid's education." That's not an effective message.
Unless their point is we're past the point of protests and political policies doing anything and we're all gonna die. In which case, say that. "Drop everything and go die, cause we're fucked." You gotta be clear!
If we take it at face value, it would seem the audience they are targeting would not care to participate in xyz and would not care to ask the congressman to vote abc, probably because those things are not in their own financial interest. But that’s not actually who this is targeting. It’s targeting the rest of us, who are already aware of those people. But we can’t do anything about it.
I mean, I get the desperation. But drop everything and…do what?
Calling for a massive strike is one thing. But just “drop everything” with no follow up is a weird reaction. It sounds way too much like, “drop everything and panic.” Not “sacrifice everything to try to save what we can of the livable world.”
either travel until your last penny or buy a house in a very very remote location and stockpile enough food for a year or two. Continuing your life as usual and recycling your tin cans is the definition of insanity.
If your bucket list is "travel the world" then sure. If your bucket list is "enjoy a lot of chill times with my friends and family" then I don't really know what you expect to change.
I mean think of how many people know someone who died young and live with the very real knowledge that they could die at any moment, what do you expect them to change knowing that climate change might make life hard at some point in the next 2 - 100 years? Does that meaningfully change someone's life when they already know that they could be killed in a car accident the next day?
Do you think preparing for collapse now in a remote location is really the sensible thing to do? I sometimes wonder myself how fast it will happen. I think the planet will be uninhabitable within 300 years and chaos will ensue within 30 but i'm not sure the chaos will be without warning unless we hit an environmental tipping point and there's sudden major temperature change (like earth becoming 20 degrees warmer or cooler within a week), which could happen.
A house in a remote location is insanely naïve. Rambo isn't real life, if you want a snowball's chance in hell of making it in that kind of a scenario you need to have group support. When the sea people came you didn't want to be in major metros on the coast, but you also didn't want to the the guy alone who became the lonely corpse in the countryside. There's a happy medium where you have the best chances of survival. This is just delusional apocalypse porn.
The PBS show Frontier House disabused me of any notion that it would be anything but insanely difficult to survive after societal collapse. Three families had to live as if they were in the 19th century in a valley in (I think) Montana over a summer to prepare for winter.
None of them would have done it. Not even the couple who busted their ass and wouldn't have had children to feed.
I loved that show! Yep, I live pretty remote with guns and livestock and prepper stuff, but I still rely on stores, the grid and of course heathcare. I hold no illusions about how much I would suffer if society went down. Maybe I'll live a month or two longer than someone totally unprepared but not much more.
Well, the only thing that could reasonably help us would be to demolish the 1% and the corrupt politicians who support them.
And yes, that would include an armed uprising.
Not that that I see that happening unless it gets much worse. We still have (some) bread and games left to pacify the masses.
We are certainly facing many environmental crisis, there's no doubt about that... But the data here seems limited. I assume we simply don't have measurements older than 50 years to add to this graph?
Edit: Here is a better graph!
Still alarming, but the data only goes back so far... It feels like something everyone needs to pay attention to and take seriously, but perhaps turning down the Vault-Tec guy knocking at your door is still a reasonable action to take.
We're fucked no matter what, but the degree of the fucking is in question still. 1.5 degrees is not great, 2.5 is really bad. 4 degrees is civilization-ending catastrophe.
And good news! We've probably averted 4 degrees through our actions over the last 20-40 years or so. Iirc we're still on track for 2-3 degrees. We have more work to do.
Okay. I just want to slam on the brakes here, just a little.... Just a little slam.
There's a LOT of personal blame going around in these comments. As if everyone who ever had burned any fossil fuels ever is somehow personally responsible for everything that's currently happening.
Here's some news, we've been burning shit for more than a millennia. People, in and of themselves, don't require so much heat and energy to create a problem. At least not individually. As a whole, small problem. Individually, microscopic problem at most.
Everyone seems to have fallen into this trap of everyone being personally responsible for the climate change. The vast majority of the issue is companies. Everyone wants to point at trucks and delivery vehicles and whatnot as major contributors when they do talk about contributions from companies, and you're still way off base. It's not even the air traffic that's the problem. It's the fucking boats. Nobody thinks about it, because nobody sees it. Either the boats are off at sea, or they're docked in some yard, away from your vision. 90% of the time, they're sailing. When they're sailing, they're operating the motors 24/7. Each ship, when operating, will consume more fuel in an hour than any one person would use in a year.
Since it's mostly unregulated international waters, who are they reporting any of that shit to? So they don't.
Yes. Climate change is real. Yes, we, personally, should be doing what we can to curb it. The fact is, if all of us did everything possible (switching to all renewable power, using EVs and all renewable powered appliances, etc) it would barely make a dent. All of the "personal responsibility" arguments are just a smokescreen from the big, very guilty corporations, to victim blame the public into turning on eachother so they can continue to destroy the environment unchecked. Based on these comments, they're succeeding.
I'm not saying to not be mad. Be mad, get angry. Just be mad at the right people here. I'm not evil because I drive my 1.5L 4cyl sedan to the grocery once a week, and have a natural gas water heater. Sure, I should change that, and I'm sure I will be changing that when I can, but I'm not the problem. The greenhouse gasses I emit over my lifetime won't offset the emissions of transport ships in a single year.
Just.... Be mad at the right people. Stop making people feel bad for being given bad options because the automotive industry actively and knowingly rejected electric vehicles due to how deep they were with the oil industry. So people had to buy internal combustion vehicles because there literally was no other option at the time. I've had my car since 2014. In 2014, the model S (the only model at the time), was $70k USD to start. I didn't have $70k USD to spend on a car (I still don't). I spent less than one-quarter of that price on my vehicle, and I was barely able to afford it over a 5 year finance. Yet, based on these comments, I should be ashamed that I can't afford a BEV? Or that I live too far from everything that I can't ride a bike or something?
Come on people. You know who is really at fault here. Let's just be angry at the right people.
For a start you could get active in local politics and support zoning reform. Car dependent infrastructure is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and I am not just talking about car exhaust.
If we want to solve climate change we need to change our way of life, and that means ditching as many cars as possible.
I don't disagree with you, having walkable infrastructure would be great.
It just doesn't really seem achievable in any meaningful way.
A few hundred km from here a gargantuan hydrogen facility is being built - using solar to cracking hydrogen from sea water. It will take decades to build, and is a big undertaking.
I offer the above as an example of something difficult but reasonably achievable.
Lobbying local government to favour walkable infrastructure just doesn't seem like a viable pathway to meaningful change in a reasonable time horizon.
Yes I should take 15 minutes every election cycle to vote for the right person. Beyond that though my input wouldn't be very valuable.
we are all actually going to die. changing a zoning rule? you think that's going to help?
if there's an avalanche that is seconds away from enveloping you in snow and killing you, do you suggest walking a few steps to the side? it won't do anything. the math is too much at this point to change with recycling a can or planting a tree. the only thing that will get the world to finally believe in math is massive amounts of death
TBH this is the answer. If govs are willing to sell themselves and all legislature to the highest bidder, then it's time for mass protests, strikes, and molotovs.
I know. I'm in my early 40ies and have been trying all my life to convince people around me and do what I could. But with time, I learned about the fraud that is plastic recycling and how capitalism is really not interested at all into solving the issue. My city is fining people for putting recyclables in the trash, but the recycling centres are full and they themselves trash the recycling. What matters is short term profits and virtue signalling. What matters is to look green. Just buy electric cars and everything will be good, apparently. Buy green! But don't stop buying!
Then a pandemic happened and people disappointed me en masse. We could see the changes in the environment and in ways we could live, but most people were "EaGeR To GeT BaCk To ThEiR RoUtInE", even if it meant commuting 5 days a week to the office, just to "resume" the economy. What mattered was not other people, it was the economy. Even when they forced us to stay inside with curfews, people couldn't go out to run/walk in the evening, they barred unvaccinated people from stores (I'm vaccinated 4 times but it's still not okay), it was all for the economy and to save the system, not the people. And if you had a minor disagreement with this, you were a grandma killer for wanting to go cycling at night. Then we went back to our routines and nothing will ever change. People are whining because of paper straws and want the plastic back. And all this straw stupidity is not even important on the grand scheme of things. Most people don't want to change anything. Most people will not vote for change. The system does not have any incentive to change.
I never owned a car and everyone around me is telling me how great they are and how I should definitely buy one because it's useful and practical. I would have total absolution! Some people here are vociferously fighting against active and public transit, and the government is actually cutting public transit funding. People are yelling at me when I trash some plastic instead of putting it in the recycle bin, then they drive away in their car that generates literal tons of toxic fumes and greenhouse gases in the air, accusing me of not caring.
I gave up a few years ago. We will deserve most of it.
Don't worry, the rich will eat well and survive, with their private security forces willing to kill others, while the poor will starve and die. We'll have rations and curfews but it will all be for the good of the people economy. Just like in the pandemic, It will be an effort of the poor, to save the rich. That's what we want. You just have to become rich before it happens.
Seconded. It's so baffling to me that we have seemingly forgotten the purpose of the economy. It is supposed to be there to benefit our lives and instead it is costing us everything. Some slave away on their knees building streets and others waste the precious few laps around the sun staring at lights in a box. We have the technology to give everyone enough such that the average person would only have to work a few hours.
Prior to the Neolithic revolution, which put an end to our nomadic past and turned our species into agriculturalists, it took more than 50 hours of labor (mostly gathering wood) to “buy” 1,000 lumen hours of light. By 1800, it took about 5.4 hours.
By 1900, it took 0.22 hours. By 1992, 1,000 lumen hours required 0.00012 hours of human labor.
We've put the cart before the horse on an unfathomable scale. A good life for all (current humans and future) is within reach but the economic system that has created this bounty has grown out of control and serves nothing but itself anymore.
It does provide some promise though because if we want to live good, peaceful, sustainable, educated lives, the technology is right there, but there is an external and only barely human force that is imposing a malignant culture on us all.
Skeezix’s Law: The purpose of the economy is to extract as much value from the populace as possible, but whatever means possible, in any way that offers an alibi.
In your grandfather’s day, choice, privacy, and leisure were humored by the economy. As the decades have passed, the economy has advanced to become a machine increasingly fine-tuned to extract value. As the world burns and resources run out, the economy attempts to adapt by strengthening its extraction methods further.
The average human sees 2000-5000 ads per day in one form or another.
The bit about not being able to go outside is because people were using it as a pretext to explain why they weren't at home... when really they were off socialising and increasing possible infection points.
It's why they closed children's playgrounds here in Australia, parents were using their children playing to gather around, then held empty coffee cups to explain why their masks were off. I've never seen so many people desperately swigging at water bottles in a supermarket in my life, or young men clutching at low dose asthma inhalers either. Somewhat amusingly, none of these behaviours have shown up since.
If people could have shown any level of responsibility... but there we have it, don't we? They can't see beyond the end of their own nose, and this is why we are here, finding out.
When I arrived on earth the first thing that struck me was just how fickle, shortsighted, gullible, and inconsiderate the bulk of your species is. As this planet burns your noses are stuck in phones watching YouTube shorts.
We’ve decided to leave. You’re not worth conquering and certainly not worthy of joining the stellar empire. Expect no more crop circles or foo fighters.
The rich will live long enough to preside over a dead planet. Having billions of dollars to buy an apple is useless when there are no apples to be had for any price. They’ll die like the rest of us, just way more alone. Assuming they aren’t burned out if their bunkers along the way by starving hordes with nothing to lose.
It's not quite true. It's very unlikely the planet will become completely inhabitable to humans anytime soon. There's going to be a tipping point of enough extinction to completely stop any more damage and return to a balanced ecosystem. Once that happens, it's very likely the people with the most power will be the ones in the remaining habitable zones.
I think your assumption operates on the premise that some form of recognizable modern civilization will remain. I don’t think it will. Once mass deaths start for humans it will also cease the global flow of petroleum products, materials, and foods, either due to wars or just the structure being so damaged that it cannot function. Once you can’t get fuel, can’t mine things, can’t refine them, can’t transport them, can’t fix the machines that make fertilizers or tractor parts, can’t keep the computers running, the internet collapses…that’s it. Hell, that’s the good scenario, not the one where the ocean overheats /-acidifies , killing everything in it including much of the planets oxygen generating algae. Civilization is done. Almost all surface minerals are gone because we’ve already mined them, well, except coal…but that’s what helped get us here in the first place. We are literally back to a Stone Age or scavenging materials from the bones of civilization.
Mad Max or some similar post-apocalyptic desolation is a far more likely scenario than any situation where a holdout of modern civilization exists.
I have a coworker who hates undocumented immigrants because she thinks they're all unvaccinated and spreaders of disease. This would be an unremarkable bit of stupidity except that she's also anti-vax.
Nah, there are 2 ways of thinking about this topic, which the right wing idiots in Germany use (at the same time): 1. there's no climate change, because look: cold weather right now and 2. This change occurs naturally, nothing to do with us but planets and stuff.
June already bringing on intense heat waves in California and Mexico are probably driving the doomerism on the west coast.
Houston also got a nasty Derecho a few weeks back that wrecked downtown and shredded half the trees in my neighborhood.
I expect the next big hurricane is going to bring another wave of doomerism, as we all get another big dose of "Find Out", while our Boomer elders continue to Fuck Around
What gets through? I simply don't see it. Fossil fuel drilling in the US has hit an all-time high. Domestic car sizes are only getting bigger and we're taxing or banning any small, cheap foreign EV imports. For every pipeline that gets stalled, three more are built. We don't even bother reporting on spills anymore, despite their increasing frequency. We are epically fucked and we all know it.
Don’t ever give up.
Give up doing what? This isn't Peter Pan. You can't bring us under 1.5C by clapping.
You talk to politicians. Politicians talk to (or coerce) CEOs.
We can't trust companies to get us out of this, but government is (or should be) stronger than companies, and government is (or should be) working for US.
The rate of co2 growth is no longer exponential. This is improvement. Yes, it's still growing, but at a slower rate than it used to. We're moving in the right direction, thought much too slowly.
Think of it like a big ship hurtling along.
Currently, we're braking. Still moving forward but slower. We need to stop and reverse, and that's the plan, but we need to do it faster.
Yeah, but if it's inevitable going to end up at worse... Now I have to deal with this shit AND take care of the fuckin boomers... Shoulda just let them tear the bandaid off quick and have to deal with it themselves... ~devil's advocate
Yea, the graph showing us up 4 standard deviations isn't easy to understand implications. But I imagine on a person level, it's something like "if you live somewhere hot and humid, you better make sure you can afford to run and repair your AC". On a global level, mammals have existed for 200,000,000 years, yet in 200 years we've toyed with global extinction for shareholder profits.
Meh, humans will survive, literally, unless Antarctica heats over 200 degrees from now, we can survive somewhere on the planet. We won't prosper, there will be billions of deaths and an unimaginable about of loss, but short of planned deliberate nuclear war or large asteroid, we'll survive a little.
While I get the sentiment and believe action is necessary, this is the wrong way to approach it. Panic is not the way we will solve this crisis.
There's a way out, and if we get through we'll be in a better place than we've ever been. We need to mass invest in green technology. Solar, wind, nuclear, throw everything at it and see what sticks. Solar is already on the right track to save us, but it's better if it goes even faster and have a few back up plans.
They say that when there are large number of people and a risk of people being trampled or when there are young students and teachers need to keep count to make sure everyone gets out.
At this point, the risk of every person on earth dying due to inaction or calmly discussing small ways to change is much higher than if everyone panics. People should have panicked 50 years ago when they looked at data.
But go ahead, have calm rational discussions about policy decisions that can reduce exponential growth of destructive forces by 30 percent. Because nothing stops exponential growth like mild decreases in the rate of change.
Is it on its way to save us though? Sure the global north might be able to escape the worst and maintain some semblance of normality but how does that work for the remaining 90% of the world? Those that can neither afford nor have the time to wait until the "green energy revolution" reaches them? Do we just accept they'll never be able to reap the benefits of their own exploitation?
I know you don't have the answers but these are questions we nees to grapple with that nobody seems to know how to answer..
A lot of places in the global south are already using solar and wind because it's cheaper than trying to get on the oil competition, cheap Chinese solar is increasing this. What would really help is western governments investing in designing open source solutions that make staying off oil easier but apparently the only thing that matters to us is short term profits
small gestures that make us feel good will not have a meaningful impact on the exponential changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere that will result in the destruction of the biosphere and are counter-productive because they create an illusion of safety and control, like like putting your seat belt on just before you slam into a wall while speeding at 300 mph.
Sorry but fuck you doomerist cunts.
No, we are not gonna have an easy time AT ALL.
But giving up plays right into hands of corporations and governments destroying our planet. Every single improvement we are able to push through will limit suffering.
If we do nothing and completely give up, we will never know what suffering we could have prevented. I know it is not easy and things are not looking good. If we had not fought for some of the improvements we were able to push through, things would have been even worse than they are right now. Every. Single. Thing. Helps.
Don't even let these evil fucking cunts win no matter how hard they kick and scream and destroy stuff.
Nah, I call bullshit. You can try every little thing you want. In the end in won't matter. We are fucked and you just can't accept it. We either massively change things now or our efforts won't matter. People already complain about small changes and what we need means a massive lifestyle change for billions. It ain't happening.
Get your head out of your own ass please.
They are spinning around throwing punches in all directions and mostly just hitting the air. We are nowhere near actually getting a punch across the jaw of any of the people that it actually matters for.
I get it. It's maddening to have no obvious villain but be surrounded by "bad" people. We do need people to flail and cling to life but they are more just trying to appease their own mind than anything.
Vote? Been doing that. Doesn’t seem to be helping.
Vote, of course. But also donate and campaign. The only way out of this mess is political. Volunteer. Protest. Rally others.
There are political parties, big, mainstream ones that frequently win elections, who want to bring us to carbon neutrality and even beyond, to undo the damage of past generations. Give them more power. They're stemming the tide but with enough power they could reverse it.
You actually have a positive impact. But you're also having a negative impact by spreading the mentality of "nothing will change", both to yourself and to other people you're voicing it to. It makes yourself and everyone you voice it to less likely to take action like you did.
Don't get me wrong, I also realistically believe we will run into massive problems. But the only sensible thing to do is just keep trying everything possible personally, it's the right thing to do.
So lie to myself and others? Because "nothing will change" has been my lived experience my entire life. Should I just ignore the helplessness and hopelessness and put on a happy face?
I voted for sanders, continue to try and vote for a at least halfway decent candidate, i moved into an rv that i retrofitted to be fully solar powered. 3.6Kw of panels, 15kwh of battery, haven't had to touch the grid since installing it, 15 stages of water filtration i can just use rainwater if need be for my freshwater (verified with lab tests for water safety) i have my own land and grow as much of my own veggies and herbs as i can. I drive literally one of the least polluting cars in the world (smart fortwo gets an avg of 44MPG is not even a hybrid) and I still try to drive it as little as possible, i use all stainless steel throughout my kitchen (cookware, storage, utensils, plates, bowels, cups) , so everything lasts forever and has no microplastics or pfas.
I genuinely don't know what more i could possibly do to reduce my footprint, I went out of my way to live as efficiently as possible and it's done literally nothing whatsoever for the situation. And people bitch moan complain about even the smallest change to their life. I can't even convince people to at least try induction over gas stoves. It's got so much better temperature control than gas, and since it's literally turning the pan into the heating element it's like 92% efficient whereas gas is horrendously inefficient since a large amount of heat just barfs out into the room instead of getting to your food. And I'm literally offering people to just fucking have one of mine so it's not like it's a cost issue.
So fuck you, we are doomed and you can't convince me otherwise
There's a actually a super interesting explanation (and time will tell how accurate that explanation is) regulations from 2020 limited how much sulfur dioxide ships could emit and it turns out the sulfur dioxide was actually creating a slight cooling effect, so now we're experiencing the full brunt of our existing emissions as the world climate rubber bands to where it would have been if ships weren't spewing toxic sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. So presumably this recent trend will stabilize at some point and we'll have our new normal
This is also why geoengineering is so extremely risky. If you ever stop for any reason the climate will rubberband to where it should have been rapidly
It's not oil companies that burn the oil they pump, it's their customers. I know it's easy and convenient to point the fingers at this shitty industry and shift all the blame to them, but it's also not how we can solve the problem.
...And that's why we should be busting street dealers never direct out outrage at the kingpins providing the fentanyl! It's in no way their fault that people are dying!
Good luck producing enough food, water and other essentials while suddenly cutting all oil production. The entire world's agriculture relies on oil and gas for fertilizers, machinery, transportation and sometimes cold storage.
There's a multitude of issues that individual citizens have a very hard time solving or getting around.
In the majority of the US (and the world, really) people have to own cars to get from A to B in order to survive (which coincidentally means we're spending untold billions on the infrastructure to support that habit, at the cost of the liveable environment and citizens wallets, whether they drive or not).
Changing that is an enormous undertaking that will require an equally huge societal shift. In a culture where the car is the obvious choice it is next to impossible to get citizens to see that that choice is fucking them, and I'm sure Big Oil won't ever do anything to change that perception because it will hit their bottom line. So unless you move to a city where you can live without a car and still have the (positive) freedom to go where you need to be you will need to vote and write your congressman to make it possible for you to live without the yoke that is the car.
So yes, citizens burn gasoline because they must do so in order to afford a living. Further, as an aside, if people made the amount of money congruent with their productivity then maybe they wouldn't have to commute so much in order to have a roof over their head and food on the table. We could relax production and increase leisure time. Maybe. I'm just some dumb cunt.
I fully agree - it is a systemic problem (which is why I'm pointing out just singling out oil companies is misguided).
But I wouldn't go as far as making consumers simple victims of that system: we all also do choices that prioritize selfishness or instant gratification too. The number of pickup trucks in America that are used as one-person commuter is an obvious example - Americans could massively cut their gasoline consumption if they drove the same vehicles Japanese or Europeans chose. (and it's not like those live a life of poverty and sacrifice)
You say that as if we weren't massively subsidizing them, both directly and indirectly (e.g. by subsidizing the roads the cars that use their products drive on). You think that artificially-low price doesn't have a massive impact on demand?
But again that's not Exxon that is subsidizing roads or building cars, or forcing Americans to buy the biggest truck they can find. The issue is more complicated than "whoever pumps the oil out of the ground is liable for whatever happens to it afterwards"
It's not about who's fault it is; it's about where to apply the policy leverage to obtain the correct behavior. I don't give a fuck if Exxon is entirely blameless (and to be clear, they aren't); the correct solution is still regulating Exxon.
The notion that the only way we could ever possibly consider trying to solve the problem is by cajoling the public to change their human nature, because regulating a few corporations (that only exist as a goddamn privilege in the first place, by the way!) is somehow off-limits, is 100% pro-fossil-fuel-industry disinformation.
But it's not! The correct solution is to kill the demand for oil.
It's not Exxon that burns the oil they extract, it's the entire economy and consumers that buy it from them. You can regulate Exxon all you want, that won't change anything about that demand and the burning.
Eh, humanity had a nice run. I mean it's not like I can stop the 100 highest polluting countries and corporations that account for like 90% of the problem. So I might as well just accept our inevitable extinction.
It's not like I'm running large vessels that measure their fuel consumption in gallons per mile, and have them run 24/7 so that stuff can get delivered slightly faster...
wow. that easy, huh? gimme your wallet, punk. you seem like a pushover. there's plenty of things you can do to stop them once you start thinking outside the box.
I really do hope we get some level of self-sustaining sapient AI like Skynet to be made so at least we as a species leave behind something after humanity dies off in an extinction event that can eventually unfuck the shitshow we developed for the past 2000 years and make the trash pile of this planet a better place without us.
"the end is nigh" but yeah insurance companies will probably be the first pillar of capitalism to fail. Unfortunately unless the publics views of migrants change, the public will continue to elect people who promise to abuse migrants.
There's a real risk entire forests will fail. And obviously agriculture
I strongly recommend keeping this idea in your back pocket. There are a few ways to accomplish geoengineering to reduce solar gain with technology we have now. It will cost taxpayers a staggering amount of money, will likely punch down on poorer countries anyway through modified weather patterns, crop yields may suffer, air quality may get worse in ways you can't imagine, but it will work for a limited time. Right now it's a game of chicken where we want governments and big business to do anything else first. If we flinch and dim the skies, the petroleum industry will just burn more and faster, throwing away the time we just bought, delaying doomsday by a few decades instead.
The problem is, if we wanted to bring the temperature back down by adding particulate into the atmosphere, we can never stop. Sulphur fuel in ships was a small amount, but to truly save lives I fear we would have to geoenginer the planet. And once we have opened that door there is no going back. The effects of a warming planet would come right back as soon as we stopped pumping particulate in.
I had not anticipated "Oh shit that's a good point I should apply for a job with McKinsey" to be a takeaway that anyone would have to this post, let alone the assumed main takeaway from it.
I don't believe anymore that we can turn it around. We and our children will drown in floods, starve in drought and burn in unbearable heat. Most of the world will become uninhabitable. And the rest will be fighting to the death for basic resources. We will see it faster than we think.
Im sure GenZ will live this nightmare and very probably Millenials too.
That'll be the fate of a lot of the world, especially heat in India, flooding in SE Asia, etc. But if you're in Michigan, near a bunch of bodies of fresh water, you'll probably be fine for a very long time.
Yeah, it will be much more boring than cataclysmic extinction of the human race.
I fear that for many people with means the livable climates will just move geographically. But then a horrifying number of poor people will starve while the rich buy up the dwindling food supply since agriculture is fucked. It will be a messy transition.
Well, like many people I'm not in Michigan.
Thats a very short sighted view point.
If half of the world becomes unlivable, billions of people will be on the move, fighting for resources. Everything is connected and this will have repercussions in Michigan as well. But I guess I shouldnt be surprised since Americans generally present themselves as the center and only important part of the world and I wouldn't be surprised if you guys shut your borders when shit hits the fan and merrily sit at your lake in Michigan and watch while the rest of the word suffers and dies. Or maybe you start some wars over water this time.
On the other hand, you had some serious climate change effects in the US as well. You think the devastating hurricanes and bad cold spells will just contain itself in areas YOU are not at?
The "It doesn't affect ME!" stance is not sustainable anymore. It will and probably is already affecting you too, even if you don't want to see it.
I also am not in Michigan, and don't own property on a lake. But it's also not a short sighted viewpoint when your original point was that "We and our children will drown in floods, starve in drought and burn in unbearable heat..." That's simply not true for a lot of people in the first world. In terms of personal politics, I believe that every oil executive should be shot, and people who think Biden is some climate savior have a screw loose. But clearly the green party isn't going to ever win any national elections (it does decently locally), so the US will keep chugging along and drilling more, but will export the consequences elsewhere, as it has always done. And of course the US will shut its borders and refuse climate immigrants - it's literally happening right now. We can all see what's coming. But life will continue just fine for many in the first world.
Kinda feels like karma on a global scale. Humans evolved intelligence just to use it to systematically oppress each other, mostly in the name of feeling powerful. Not sure I’d call that “intelligence” and I think the planet would be better off without us.
The planet doesn't give a shit about us. These are just natural processes (yes humans are a part of nature). We are just a particularly anomalous part of the system
We are all I this train going to hell. Might as well sit down and get comfy. Either that or get off early. But there are still a few sips of soda in the can.
We are all I this train going to hell. Might as well sit down and get comfy. Either that or get off early. But there are still a few sips of soda in the can.
If only it was a train. We're in a conga line of SUV's.
You realise that the link you posted is full of shit, do you? The Oxfam shifts the blame from consumers to the owners of manufacturing and logistical facilities. It states that Bezos is responsible for all the associated costs of the shit YOU buy. But guess what? If you wouldn't buy that shit, Bezos won't be selling that shit and there would be no pollution.
This is also covered in others, more recent findings.
Want me to dig them out for you?
If you wouldn't buy that shit, Bezos won't be selling that shit and there would be no pollution
Which is part of what I meant by:
"it is mainly due to our modern way of life and production"
But not in such a condemning way as you.
The fact, that you were able to write your comment, shows, that even you felt the necessity to buy stuff. And I am 100 % sure that the device, you used for that, was not produced free of GHG emissions or under ecologically (or even socially) perfect conditions. As bad as this is, this is the case for most people. But did you have a choice? Can you live an average life in our current society without stuff like that? Do you even have the option to choose alternatives?
That's my point. This kind of "you buy, you choose" attribution of causal chains, is surely true to some degree. But imo it's an oversimplification to label it completely like that. I can't even buy fucking organically grown tomatoes in my closest supermarket. So I don't even have the option to choose the better alternative. This also applies to several other basic foods. Yet, I also need them. Most of the times such items are more expensive than the worse ones. The latter is a huge deal for people who really don't have that much money. So they literally can't buy the better options.
The market self-regulates that kind of stuff by itself to some degree. But not completely. And policies worldwide, especially in industry nations, fail to address these issues, thereby fueling the problem. Then of course there are further problems, like a lack of education and awareness about it and so on.
Another thing: how easy do you find it to see which product is the better one from an ecological perspective? How do you know it's not just greenwashing? Do you feel like it's an easy choice?
If so, congratz, you are a lucky one. But for most of the rest of us, that's really not made sufficiently transparent.
Again, something which needs to be regulated.
And then, Bezos and co. could make their whole business conpletely green. Do they want to? Nope. Bezos and co. also could decide not to take their private jets, or live in a private mansion, live lifestyles which cause so incredibly more emissions than the one of average Joes and Janes. And again, they decide against it. But yeah sure, go on making each customer and the whole of humanity responsible.
Not the amount of people are the problem, but their disregard for eco-systems, especially the failings of policies. Humanity managed to survive for thousands of years without fucking up the whole planet. Shit really started to spiral downwards since the industrial revolution.
And it is! In developed countries. Like here in Europe. I don't have issues buying "organic" tomatoes or "free range" eggs, because they all are (veg only while in season obviously, can't grow shit under snow).
The problem here is not Bezos, it's YOU who do not demand better. Most smaller delivery vehicles here in the UK are fully electric. Our grid is regularly 100% powered by renewables and the amount of hours keeps growing every year. BPA is banned in food packaging. A lot of pesticides and fertilisers used elsewhere are banned. Business parks like Stockley Park have insect hotels and bee hives, as well as dedicated waterbodies for amphibians, etc. Why? Because WE demand it! And you don't. Instead you ban contraception and abortions.
It must be a very different kind of Europe than the one I live in.
I live in Germany and regularly encounter such troubles to find ecologically optimal products. Most of the time because there aren't any available for me. Then there is a huge lack of transparency and sometimes of course the price. Although the latter is not really problematic for me, it is for a lot of other people. Those products, which are environmentally detrimental, are usually much cheaper than the ecologically better ones. You are being financially punished for choosing the better alternatives.
"free range" eggs
Despite the fact that a non-plant based diet is worse than a plant-based one in terms of ecological impact, the industry has been subject to a lot of critique due to insufficient regulations towards the treatment of egg-laying hens. Not only that, but also controls are often not conducted, even though it says so on paper.
The problem here is not Bezos, it's YOU
Even if we neglect the ecological irresponsible business practises conducted by Bezos & friends, when it comes to individual ecological impact, wealthy people are usually causing a multitude of the damage which is caused by not-that-wealthy individuals. It seems to be a problem inherent to the lifesytle.
Most smaller delivery vehicles here in the UK are fully electric.
That's cool. However, there is more to electric vehicles which must be considered when we think about ecological impact. (Lifetime, resources, production, etc..) Even if that's given, this alone doesn't solve the climate crisis. Although it certainly seems to be a nice step in the right direction.
Regarding the remaining list: that's surely nice to hear. Still, there are still a plethora of unsolved problems. Even in your country.
And you don't.
How about you don't generalise a whole population?
Instead you ban contraception and abortions.
You must have mistaken me with someone from another country. It might help to be less prejudiced.
It must be a very different kind of Europe than the one I live in.
I live in Germany and regularly encounter such troubles to find ecologically optimal products. Most of the time because there aren't any available for me. Then there is a huge lack of transparency and sometimes of course the price. Although the latter is not really problematic for me, it is for a lot of other people. Those products, which are environmentally detrimental, are usually much cheaper than the ecologically better ones. You are being financially punished for choosing the better alternatives.
"free range" eggs
Despite the fact that a non-plant based diet is worse than a plant-based one in terms of ecological impact, the industry has been subject to a lot of critique due to insufficient regulations towards the treatment of egg-laying hens. Not only that, but also controls are often not conducted, even though it says so on paper.
The problem here is not Bezos, it's YOU
Even if we neglect the ecological irresponsible business practises conducted by Bezos & friends, when it comes to individual ecological impact, wealthy people are usually causing a multitude of the damage which is caused by not-that-wealthy individuals. It seems to be a problem inherent to the lifesytle.
Most smaller delivery vehicles here in the UK are fully electric.
That's cool. However, there is more to electric vehicles which must be considered when we think about ecological impact. (Lifetime, resources, production, etc..) Even if that's given, this alone doesn't solve the climate crisis. Although it certainly seems to be a nice step in the right direction.
Regarding the remaining list: that's surely nice to hear. Still, there are still a plethora of unsolved problems. Even in your country.
And you don't.
How about you don't generalise a whole population?
Instead you ban contraception and abortions.
You must have mistaken me with someone from another country. It might help to be less prejudiced.
God what utter tripe. Past behavior has shown disaster in what sense? How do you fucking predict all of that from this plot. This is how you close credibility for your cause in 140 characters or less
I think it is fair to wait exactly 2 more years to see if temperatures normalize following consecutive weird el niño / la niña cycles, but then yeah let's hit the emergency trigger
Do you really think someone would manipulate data to show a more sensationalized image of what's happening? Then post it on the internet with a misleading message?
Do you really think someone would go on the internet and lie like that?
Edit: clearly my sarcasm didn't land. Also, edit, a word.
China is right! Stop eating cows. Go find weird animals like bats. If we're lucky enough, one of those bats will have a proper virus that will then remove most of us. Without eating cows, most cows will starve and stop farting. Most flights would stop, most traffic would stop, most industry would stop. Then just wait for 2 years for nature to cover everything in grass and trees. Easy peasy.
I'm doing my part. I stopped asking my brother to get married. That reduced the numbers from my family, you must do the same. Just don't pressure others into marriage and we'll have less people in no time! Maybe that's the economy's game? Can't afford anything anymore, why would we try getting married and having kids?
I do, but like most other people, I'm preoccupied with short term crises since, well, I need to survive those in order to be ready for the long-term ones.
In my opinion though, we don't stand a snowball's chance in hell. The elite will manage to hang just a bit longer, but eventually they'll cook and burn with the rest of us, or in their bunkers.
Anyways, shit's already fucked to the point that I've given up. Just sit back, relax and take whatever life gives ya.
This is exactly the messaging of the oil companies and others who oppose climate action now that it’s too hard to deny. They want us to think it’s hopeless and give up trying to change anything. It’s not too late. Green energy is growing exponentially and has been possibly the fastest technological adoption in history. Millions of people are working on the science and technology to solve these problems. We just need some more collective action at the local and national levels. Carbon taxes, funding for green initiatives, local agriculture, and support for alternative transportation like e-bikes or other PEVs to start
Did you miss the memo that current AI is already using more power than everything we've managed to save with green energy in the last decade? We ARE fucked, the only thing we're still debating is the exact timespan. Which is asinine, the result will remain the same either way.
The only way I see to a path to salvation is a huge pandemic or world war, becausing nothing else will convince people. We've been trying (and failing) for decades.
Good news! The odds are looking pretty high for both of those!
Carbon taxes fix the problem of using energy for dumb things. Climate change isn't caused by us using energy, it's caused by the fact that carbon pollution is free.
Bingo. Power usage isn't the central problem, it's the sources of power.
I need some anon to write me a virus that will wipe out all datacenters in one go, something that will irrevocably fry all enterprise hardware beyond repair. Let's start over, with decent trust busting and without the plastic this time.
(edit: I guess it's not entirely clear but I'm expecting such a virus to hit the reset button on civilisation. Mass death, yes, but we won't fuck the world beyond being liveable.)
The world will be fine
It will take a long time in our timespan, and we won’t be fine, but the world will. Just a minor blip in the history of this marble
The world will be fine.
People are fucked.
This but for humans.
12 monkeys were right
And with ipv6!
We had a pandemic already and war in Ukraine is raging on - and both only served right wing extremists to rise and ignore climate problems even harder. We are fucked. I don't give up hope but it's tiny
If the power is renewable, who cares how much it uses? Things are far from hopeless.
Because that power could have been used by someone else who's depending on coal instead. You cannot separate power sources when on the grid.
That's why we're working to get rid of fossil fuel power generation entirely.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and new technology is only going to continue to use more and more energy. Conservation is not the answer.
You got a source on that? Cause that sounds fake
Here's one:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.02243v1
Below is an article on crypto mining, not AI, but I'd wager a guess and say you certainly can draw parallels from it:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023EF003871
Also, whatever the source of green/renewable energy is, it takes a couple years to offset the manufacturing of said energy source:
https://www.cooleffect.org/solar-carbon-footprint
So even if there's no direct source on that 10 year claim, it probably isn't too farfetched!
The article you linked doesn't support your claims, is unpublished and reads like the homework of some undergrads.
Training AI models, while computationally expensive, cannot compare to crypto farms the size of warehouses everywhere around the world.
Should i kill myself before all that unravels?
No, there’s always a shimmer of hope and the non zero chance that we mean something for someone that could make a difference, or help make the difference ourselves. Even sometimes the tiniest good-hearted gesture will do it.
I keep saying, if Putin starts a nuclear war, we might save humanity. A nuclear winter will cool the planet. And with most of us dying of radiation poisoning, we won’t have the ability to start pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. Yay!
If solving the problem becomes impossible, the backup plan should be retribution, not complacency. That way they have an incentive to work with us.
I never had kids of my own, because I didn't want any, but the last 15 years or so I've becoming increasingly grateful that I made that decision. It at least allows me to sit back and contemplate doom without worrying about what my kids' life on this planet is going to be like after I'm gone.
I've always done the reducing, reusing, and recycling, because it's the right thing to do. Cut waaaaay back on dairy and beef purchases, I eat a lot of plant protein and use plant milk now. But it's all a drop in the bucket. Only the governments can actually fix this, and they won't because they are owned. I just sit around hoping it won't get TOO bad before I'm dead.
The fiduciary responsibility scene from the new Fallout show hit hard.
::: spoiler S1E6 "Morton played a rancher who owned half of Missouri."
"And what happens when the cattle ranchers have more power than the sheriff?"
"The whole town burns down."
"Right, the whole town burns down. Vault-Tec is a trillion dollar company that owns half of everything. And after ten years of war, the U.S. gov't is broker than a joke. The cattle ranchers are in charge, Coop." :::
I agree and I am not even preoccupied, but there simply hasn't been any chance for me to make a dent in this. Hasn't been for a long time, at least since 1900 (!!) where we basically already knew where everything was headed.
Humanity is just going to go through a culling. There will definitely be humans and there will definitely be habitable areas of the planet but there won't be room for all 8 billion of us and depending on how much we actually do right now will determine how big the actual final number is
And honestly, would that be such a bad thing? 8 freaking billion of us is at least 7.5B too many.
People who say this imagine themselves and their families in the 0.5B but will end up in the 7.5B, suffering immeasurably in the process.
Nah I tried to get as close to the cities I think would be bombed so that I can go out in a puff of ozone
Nope, there's nothing special about me or my family. We're just insignificant eurotrash. Odds we'd be among the survivors are very low.
And you'll be first in line to be a member of the 7.5B that gets culled, right?
You can kill me right now if you want.
I dunno why the assumption is that everyone who makes the observation on overpopulation is so self-interested that they can't imagine their own demise as part of it. We'll all die in the approaching climate disaster, including you and me. The difference between now and later is small on a geological timescale.
Spare your self-contempt for somebody that cares.
You asked.
I did, unfortunately.
Actually yes, but that has more to do with 20 years of crippling depression and chronic pain than the coming climate disasters.
I do what I can. It's certainly not as much as I could be doing, but it's what I have the mental and emotional capacity to handle. I don't have a ton of hope either, and it's a big reason I decided not to have children, but I wouldn't say I've given up completely.
Speak for yourself.
Actually, no! Once the really BIG human die-offs start, the hyperwealthy will 'bunker up' for a while and once the population shrinks back down, we won't be putting out all that greenhouse gas anymore, and the earth will cool back down. They'll keep a few cities in places like Norway or what have you around to keep providing food and fuel for their choppers and parties.
I know several billionaires are already doing this in Hawaii. I feel like Hawaii is a bad choice. But I suppose if you have a giant yacht it’s not a problem.
But I feel like you’d want land with slaves under armed guard that till fields and raise livestock.
I was thinking you keep your security as part of the elite class, they would live basically as well as you and your other elites family / friend class. Maybe even with arranged marriages to ensure their offspring will be part of this same class, like royalty. You could build this into your society/culture. Maybe serving as a guard is like something every royal does for five or ten years.
That’s why I was thinking you somehow make them a part of the hoarding class, disincentivizing them from mutiny, as they are also benefitting from those hoarded resources in the same way as you and your family. But yeah it’s a hard problem to solve for the hoarder.
... and? Panic? Die?
The people who tweeted this suck at Communication 101. You've gotta have a specific and clear call to action. Something like "Join this protest at XYZ" or "Demand your Congressman support ABC."
You can't just say "Drop everything. Forget about your job and your kid's education." That's not an effective message.
Unless their point is we're past the point of protests and political policies doing anything and we're all gonna die. In which case, say that. "Drop everything and go die, cause we're fucked." You gotta be clear!
I think part of the post is the implication that there is no more call to action, only a downward spiral that no action could solve.
Doomerism is propaganda.
Yeah there's a good chunk of this country that would react to this kind of message by heading to the gun store to stock up. Not exactly helpful.
If we take it at face value, it would seem the audience they are targeting would not care to participate in xyz and would not care to ask the congressman to vote abc, probably because those things are not in their own financial interest. But that’s not actually who this is targeting. It’s targeting the rest of us, who are already aware of those people. But we can’t do anything about it.
Never kill yourself for something that's somebody else's fault.
(Looking for this image has definitely put me on a watchlist)
Now the body of one soul I adore wants to die
You have always told me you'd not live past 25
I say, stay long enough to repay all who caused strife
Alice In Chains - Sludge Factory
No Man’s Sky just got a cool update, so I think I’m gonna play that while I await my doom.
Preferably. Dieing and then panicking is a lot less effective.
Drop and roll.
Jokes aside, go outside, touch grass, plant some trees. Rinse and repeat
I mean, I get the desperation. But drop everything and…do what?
Calling for a massive strike is one thing. But just “drop everything” with no follow up is a weird reaction. It sounds way too much like, “drop everything and panic.” Not “sacrifice everything to try to save what we can of the livable world.”
Drop everything and enjoy life while it lasts.
It may be shorter than you were planning on.
It’s called: click bait
Or more nefariously, doomerism.
either travel until your last penny or buy a house in a very very remote location and stockpile enough food for a year or two. Continuing your life as usual and recycling your tin cans is the definition of insanity.
If your bucket list is "travel the world" then sure. If your bucket list is "enjoy a lot of chill times with my friends and family" then I don't really know what you expect to change.
I mean think of how many people know someone who died young and live with the very real knowledge that they could die at any moment, what do you expect them to change knowing that climate change might make life hard at some point in the next 2 - 100 years? Does that meaningfully change someone's life when they already know that they could be killed in a car accident the next day?
Do you think preparing for collapse now in a remote location is really the sensible thing to do? I sometimes wonder myself how fast it will happen. I think the planet will be uninhabitable within 300 years and chaos will ensue within 30 but i'm not sure the chaos will be without warning unless we hit an environmental tipping point and there's sudden major temperature change (like earth becoming 20 degrees warmer or cooler within a week), which could happen.
A house in a remote location is insanely naïve. Rambo isn't real life, if you want a snowball's chance in hell of making it in that kind of a scenario you need to have group support. When the sea people came you didn't want to be in major metros on the coast, but you also didn't want to the the guy alone who became the lonely corpse in the countryside. There's a happy medium where you have the best chances of survival. This is just delusional apocalypse porn.
The PBS show Frontier House disabused me of any notion that it would be anything but insanely difficult to survive after societal collapse. Three families had to live as if they were in the 19th century in a valley in (I think) Montana over a summer to prepare for winter.
None of them would have done it. Not even the couple who busted their ass and wouldn't have had children to feed.
I loved that show! Yep, I live pretty remote with guns and livestock and prepper stuff, but I still rely on stores, the grid and of course heathcare. I hold no illusions about how much I would suffer if society went down. Maybe I'll live a month or two longer than someone totally unprepared but not much more.
group support?
:-(
that sounds hard to find
In societal collapse scenarios do you really think that property rights will be respected?
Well, if everybody dropped everything then emissions would go to 0 soooo nothing I guess
I wanted to rewatch the Frasier seasons. Hope I have time.
You'll have time, but not fossil fuel electricity for your TV. \s
You have time, but watching it still counts as part of "everything" so you are going to have to drop it.
I thought Frasier was exempt from everything.
You never thought that. You only ever think of yourself.
Well, the only thing that could reasonably help us would be to demolish the 1% and the corrupt politicians who support them. And yes, that would include an armed uprising.
Not that that I see that happening unless it gets much worse. We still have (some) bread and games left to pacify the masses.
Yeah I've understood since high school, what the fuck do you want me to do about it when I can barely keep myself and my family alive as is?
This particular author wants you to panic.
We are certainly facing many environmental crisis, there's no doubt about that... But the data here seems limited. I assume we simply don't have measurements older than 50 years to add to this graph?
Edit: Here is a better graph!
Still alarming, but the data only goes back so far... It feels like something everyone needs to pay attention to and take seriously, but perhaps turning down the Vault-Tec guy knocking at your door is still a reasonable action to take.
Seems like the authors doomerism is working. Look at some of the assholes in the comments. It feels like they get off of the negativity.
Is shit bad? Yeah. But giving up helps no one and is a punch in the face to all the people that are fighting tooth and nail every single day.
Fighting what? Who?
Fighting against conservatives, mainly.
That graph is 4 years out of date and still shows the same thing, if we don't make radical changes, we're fucked.
We're fucked no matter what, but the degree of the fucking is in question still. 1.5 degrees is not great, 2.5 is really bad. 4 degrees is civilization-ending catastrophe.
And good news! We've probably averted 4 degrees through our actions over the last 20-40 years or so. Iirc we're still on track for 2-3 degrees. We have more work to do.
Okay. I just want to slam on the brakes here, just a little.... Just a little slam.
There's a LOT of personal blame going around in these comments. As if everyone who ever had burned any fossil fuels ever is somehow personally responsible for everything that's currently happening.
Here's some news, we've been burning shit for more than a millennia. People, in and of themselves, don't require so much heat and energy to create a problem. At least not individually. As a whole, small problem. Individually, microscopic problem at most.
Everyone seems to have fallen into this trap of everyone being personally responsible for the climate change. The vast majority of the issue is companies. Everyone wants to point at trucks and delivery vehicles and whatnot as major contributors when they do talk about contributions from companies, and you're still way off base. It's not even the air traffic that's the problem. It's the fucking boats. Nobody thinks about it, because nobody sees it. Either the boats are off at sea, or they're docked in some yard, away from your vision. 90% of the time, they're sailing. When they're sailing, they're operating the motors 24/7. Each ship, when operating, will consume more fuel in an hour than any one person would use in a year.
Since it's mostly unregulated international waters, who are they reporting any of that shit to? So they don't.
Yes. Climate change is real. Yes, we, personally, should be doing what we can to curb it. The fact is, if all of us did everything possible (switching to all renewable power, using EVs and all renewable powered appliances, etc) it would barely make a dent. All of the "personal responsibility" arguments are just a smokescreen from the big, very guilty corporations, to victim blame the public into turning on eachother so they can continue to destroy the environment unchecked. Based on these comments, they're succeeding.
I'm not saying to not be mad. Be mad, get angry. Just be mad at the right people here. I'm not evil because I drive my 1.5L 4cyl sedan to the grocery once a week, and have a natural gas water heater. Sure, I should change that, and I'm sure I will be changing that when I can, but I'm not the problem. The greenhouse gasses I emit over my lifetime won't offset the emissions of transport ships in a single year.
Just.... Be mad at the right people. Stop making people feel bad for being given bad options because the automotive industry actively and knowingly rejected electric vehicles due to how deep they were with the oil industry. So people had to buy internal combustion vehicles because there literally was no other option at the time. I've had my car since 2014. In 2014, the model S (the only model at the time), was $70k USD to start. I didn't have $70k USD to spend on a car (I still don't). I spent less than one-quarter of that price on my vehicle, and I was barely able to afford it over a 5 year finance. Yet, based on these comments, I should be ashamed that I can't afford a BEV? Or that I live too far from everything that I can't ride a bike or something?
Come on people. You know who is really at fault here. Let's just be angry at the right people.
climate scientists have already lit themselves on fire trying to warn people and it didn’t actually do anything
people are too religious to believe in science
Just don't look up!
The Religion: $$$$
"Bow down before the one you serve, you're going to get what you deserve"
He was talking about money!
The al-ighty-ollar?
Drop everything and do what exactly
LSD, K, and maybe some MDMA. At least thats what i would like to do.
You can have all the Ketamine. Please pass some LSD and MDMA this way
Block ambulances and throw stuff at paintings.
ME? I KNOW WHO I AM
I AM DUDE
For a start you could get active in local politics and support zoning reform. Car dependent infrastructure is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and I am not just talking about car exhaust.
If we want to solve climate change we need to change our way of life, and that means ditching as many cars as possible.
I don't disagree with you, having walkable infrastructure would be great.
It just doesn't really seem achievable in any meaningful way.
A few hundred km from here a gargantuan hydrogen facility is being built - using solar to cracking hydrogen from sea water. It will take decades to build, and is a big undertaking.
I offer the above as an example of something difficult but reasonably achievable.
Lobbying local government to favour walkable infrastructure just doesn't seem like a viable pathway to meaningful change in a reasonable time horizon.
Yes I should take 15 minutes every election cycle to vote for the right person. Beyond that though my input wouldn't be very valuable.
what? it's too late for that.
we are all actually going to die. changing a zoning rule? you think that's going to help?
if there's an avalanche that is seconds away from enveloping you in snow and killing you, do you suggest walking a few steps to the side? it won't do anything. the math is too much at this point to change with recycling a can or planting a tree. the only thing that will get the world to finally believe in math is massive amounts of death
make peace with death, it's coming for us all
Molotovs?
TBH this is the answer. If govs are willing to sell themselves and all legislature to the highest bidder, then it's time for mass protests, strikes, and molotovs.
that could have changed the trajectory 50 years ago
if people had been scientifically literate and recognized the problem
it's too late now
this will happen when the pain of reality (regular temperatures in the 100s) overcomes the stupidity of religion, but there won't be any going back
The world is burning, start more fires!
Great idea.
It's already on fire. Might as well make sure the right places burn.
I know. I'm in my early 40ies and have been trying all my life to convince people around me and do what I could. But with time, I learned about the fraud that is plastic recycling and how capitalism is really not interested at all into solving the issue. My city is fining people for putting recyclables in the trash, but the recycling centres are full and they themselves trash the recycling. What matters is short term profits and virtue signalling. What matters is to look green. Just buy electric cars and everything will be good, apparently. Buy green! But don't stop buying!
Then a pandemic happened and people disappointed me en masse. We could see the changes in the environment and in ways we could live, but most people were "EaGeR To GeT BaCk To ThEiR RoUtInE", even if it meant commuting 5 days a week to the office, just to "resume" the economy. What mattered was not other people, it was the economy. Even when they forced us to stay inside with curfews, people couldn't go out to run/walk in the evening, they barred unvaccinated people from stores (I'm vaccinated 4 times but it's still not okay), it was all for the economy and to save the system, not the people. And if you had a minor disagreement with this, you were a grandma killer for wanting to go cycling at night. Then we went back to our routines and nothing will ever change. People are whining because of paper straws and want the plastic back. And all this straw stupidity is not even important on the grand scheme of things. Most people don't want to change anything. Most people will not vote for change. The system does not have any incentive to change.
I never owned a car and everyone around me is telling me how great they are and how I should definitely buy one because it's useful and practical. I would have total absolution! Some people here are vociferously fighting against active and public transit, and the government is actually cutting public transit funding. People are yelling at me when I trash some plastic instead of putting it in the recycle bin, then they drive away in their car that generates literal tons of toxic fumes and greenhouse gases in the air, accusing me of not caring.
I gave up a few years ago. We will deserve most of it.
Don't worry, the rich will eat well and survive, with their private security forces willing to kill others, while the poor will starve and die. We'll have rations and curfews but it will all be for the good of the
peopleeconomy. Just like in the pandemic, It will be an effort of the poor, to save the rich. That's what we want. You just have to become rich before it happens.Seconded. It's so baffling to me that we have seemingly forgotten the purpose of the economy. It is supposed to be there to benefit our lives and instead it is costing us everything. Some slave away on their knees building streets and others waste the precious few laps around the sun staring at lights in a box. We have the technology to give everyone enough such that the average person would only have to work a few hours.
For a comparison in a very real sense:
Prior to the Neolithic revolution, which put an end to our nomadic past and turned our species into agriculturalists, it took more than 50 hours of labor (mostly gathering wood) to “buy” 1,000 lumen hours of light. By 1800, it took about 5.4 hours. By 1900, it took 0.22 hours. By 1992, 1,000 lumen hours required 0.00012 hours of human labor.
We've put the cart before the horse on an unfathomable scale. A good life for all (current humans and future) is within reach but the economic system that has created this bounty has grown out of control and serves nothing but itself anymore.
It does provide some promise though because if we want to live good, peaceful, sustainable, educated lives, the technology is right there, but there is an external and only barely human force that is imposing a malignant culture on us all.
Skeezix’s Law: The purpose of the economy is to extract as much value from the populace as possible, but whatever means possible, in any way that offers an alibi.
In your grandfather’s day, choice, privacy, and leisure were humored by the economy. As the decades have passed, the economy has advanced to become a machine increasingly fine-tuned to extract value. As the world burns and resources run out, the economy attempts to adapt by strengthening its extraction methods further.
The average human sees 2000-5000 ads per day in one form or another.
The bit about not being able to go outside is because people were using it as a pretext to explain why they weren't at home... when really they were off socialising and increasing possible infection points.
It's why they closed children's playgrounds here in Australia, parents were using their children playing to gather around, then held empty coffee cups to explain why their masks were off. I've never seen so many people desperately swigging at water bottles in a supermarket in my life, or young men clutching at low dose asthma inhalers either. Somewhat amusingly, none of these behaviours have shown up since.
If people could have shown any level of responsibility... but there we have it, don't we? They can't see beyond the end of their own nose, and this is why we are here, finding out.
When I arrived on earth the first thing that struck me was just how fickle, shortsighted, gullible, and inconsiderate the bulk of your species is. As this planet burns your noses are stuck in phones watching YouTube shorts.
We’ve decided to leave. You’re not worth conquering and certainly not worthy of joining the stellar empire. Expect no more crop circles or foo fighters.
Your people is a beast.
The rich will live long enough to preside over a dead planet. Having billions of dollars to buy an apple is useless when there are no apples to be had for any price. They’ll die like the rest of us, just way more alone. Assuming they aren’t burned out if their bunkers along the way by starving hordes with nothing to lose.
Yes but they’ll probably stockpile enough macbooks to last a long time.
It's not quite true. It's very unlikely the planet will become completely inhabitable to humans anytime soon. There's going to be a tipping point of enough extinction to completely stop any more damage and return to a balanced ecosystem. Once that happens, it's very likely the people with the most power will be the ones in the remaining habitable zones.
I think your assumption operates on the premise that some form of recognizable modern civilization will remain. I don’t think it will. Once mass deaths start for humans it will also cease the global flow of petroleum products, materials, and foods, either due to wars or just the structure being so damaged that it cannot function. Once you can’t get fuel, can’t mine things, can’t refine them, can’t transport them, can’t fix the machines that make fertilizers or tractor parts, can’t keep the computers running, the internet collapses…that’s it. Hell, that’s the good scenario, not the one where the ocean overheats /-acidifies , killing everything in it including much of the planets oxygen generating algae. Civilization is done. Almost all surface minerals are gone because we’ve already mined them, well, except coal…but that’s what helped get us here in the first place. We are literally back to a Stone Age or scavenging materials from the bones of civilization.
Mad Max or some similar post-apocalyptic desolation is a far more likely scenario than any situation where a holdout of modern civilization exists.
Saving the environment? In this economy?
I bet this is also somehow the immigrants' fault. /s
(Looking at you, right-wing voters in EU. ò.ó )
I have a coworker who hates undocumented immigrants because she thinks they're all unvaccinated and spreaders of disease. This would be an unremarkable bit of stupidity except that she's also anti-vax.
How does that even go together? Being anti-vax and at the same time condemning people for not being vaccinated?
That's pretty much why I mentioned it. It's absolutely batshit crazy.
Fringe fascists in Europe have already been co-opting the green message for the last 10 years.
Because that's what fascism does: take a popular idea and worm it's way inside.
With the textbook example being "national socialism".
Nah, there are 2 ways of thinking about this topic, which the right wing idiots in Germany use (at the same time): 1. there's no climate change, because look: cold weather right now and 2. This change occurs naturally, nothing to do with us but planets and stuff.
Perception of Germans: mad scientists
Germans: burn the coal
They exhale CO2...
I don't think even they believe that. They're just scared and don't want to share their long plundered wealth
When did this place turn into r/collapse on Reddit?
June already bringing on intense heat waves in California and Mexico are probably driving the doomerism on the west coast.
Houston also got a nasty Derecho a few weeks back that wrecked downtown and shredded half the trees in my neighborhood.
I expect the next big hurricane is going to bring another wave of doomerism, as we all get another big dose of "Find Out", while our Boomer elders continue to Fuck Around
Every single thing we are fighting for and does get through has prevented stuff from being even worse than they are now. Don't ever give up.
What gets through? I simply don't see it. Fossil fuel drilling in the US has hit an all-time high. Domestic car sizes are only getting bigger and we're taxing or banning any small, cheap foreign EV imports. For every pipeline that gets stalled, three more are built. We don't even bother reporting on spills anymore, despite their increasing frequency. We are epically fucked and we all know it.
Give up doing what? This isn't Peter Pan. You can't bring us under 1.5C by clapping.
Yeah 1.5 is fucked. But we can still limit it under 2.0 or 2.5. Yes it is fucking horrific. But 1.5 does not mean everyone suddenly drops dead.
Also, the world isnt the US. Improvements are happening on a smaller scale. Some countries getting almost all energy through solar and wind.
Green energy becoming cheaper than fossil fuel.
Is it enough? Fuck no. But im not letting you cunts hop in with corporations and push the pedal to the metal.
Stop ignoring all the positive things happening to fix the climate. You are putting other people off helping with your doomer shit.
Unless I'm talking to a CEO of a major bank or Fortune 100 fossil fuel firm, "we" cannot.
You talk to politicians. Politicians talk to (or coerce) CEOs.
We can't trust companies to get us out of this, but government is (or should be) stronger than companies, and government is (or should be) working for US.
And CEOs pledge campaign contributions and lobbying efforts to delay regulations against their corporate interests
Government should be the counter balance to private interests, but in a capitalistic system they act in tandem.
Every day, the daily rate of CO2 output beats the previous day. We haven't even remotely slowed down.
Yea but at least some CEOs are getting great salary packages!
The rate of co2 growth is no longer exponential. This is improvement. Yes, it's still growing, but at a slower rate than it used to. We're moving in the right direction, thought much too slowly.
Think of it like a big ship hurtling along.
Currently, we're braking. Still moving forward but slower. We need to stop and reverse, and that's the plan, but we need to do it faster.
You don't think it could have been even worse by now? I do.
Will say though, I do wish to visit the timeline where Al Gore did not concede, and was president.
Yeah, but if it's inevitable going to end up at worse... Now I have to deal with this shit AND take care of the fuckin boomers... Shoulda just let them tear the bandaid off quick and have to deal with it themselves... ~devil's advocate
I read an article on the internet that says you're wrong, and it's chemtrails and 5G. And Big Pharma.
And solar. And wind mills. And what they did to General Lee. And Aunt Jemima.
Do your research, sheeple!
No.
Yea, the graph showing us up 4 standard deviations isn't easy to understand implications. But I imagine on a person level, it's something like "if you live somewhere hot and humid, you better make sure you can afford to run and repair your AC". On a global level, mammals have existed for 200,000,000 years, yet in 200 years we've toyed with global extinction for shareholder profits.
Meh, humans will survive, literally, unless Antarctica heats over 200 degrees from now, we can survive somewhere on the planet. We won't prosper, there will be billions of deaths and an unimaginable about of loss, but short of planned deliberate nuclear war or large asteroid, we'll survive a little.
Cool, nothing to worry about then!
While I get the sentiment and believe action is necessary, this is the wrong way to approach it. Panic is not the way we will solve this crisis.
There's a way out, and if we get through we'll be in a better place than we've ever been. We need to mass invest in green technology. Solar, wind, nuclear, throw everything at it and see what sticks. Solar is already on the right track to save us, but it's better if it goes even faster and have a few back up plans.
In this case panic is preferable to completely ignoring the problem as is currently humanity's strategy.
But spreading panic is counterprodictive
As a species, we are pretty damn far from panic.
if a group of people are in a burning building and about to die, panic would actually help them get out
in this case, however, it's unlikely anyone is going to get out of this building, and it's too late to change things, so perhaps you are right
we should just find ways to make peace with the destruction of much of life on earth
Excellent example of what I mean. In a burning building panic isn't helpful and hinders the actual correct response, just like with climate change.
that's not true. in a burning building, freaking out and getting the fuck out of the building is smart and why it's instinctual
sitting around and debating the best way to proceed is stupid AF
Not at all, why do you think during fire drills you're instructed to stay calm?
They say that when there are large number of people and a risk of people being trampled or when there are young students and teachers need to keep count to make sure everyone gets out.
At this point, the risk of every person on earth dying due to inaction or calmly discussing small ways to change is much higher than if everyone panics. People should have panicked 50 years ago when they looked at data.
But go ahead, have calm rational discussions about policy decisions that can reduce exponential growth of destructive forces by 30 percent. Because nothing stops exponential growth like mild decreases in the rate of change.
Nothing else has worked.
Is it on its way to save us though? Sure the global north might be able to escape the worst and maintain some semblance of normality but how does that work for the remaining 90% of the world? Those that can neither afford nor have the time to wait until the "green energy revolution" reaches them? Do we just accept they'll never be able to reap the benefits of their own exploitation?
I know you don't have the answers but these are questions we nees to grapple with that nobody seems to know how to answer..
A lot of places in the global south are already using solar and wind because it's cheaper than trying to get on the oil competition, cheap Chinese solar is increasing this. What would really help is western governments investing in designing open source solutions that make staying off oil easier but apparently the only thing that matters to us is short term profits
No we don't need to accept that, they can be better off by the end of this century than we are now.
platitudes will not save us from math
?
small gestures that make us feel good will not have a meaningful impact on the exponential changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere that will result in the destruction of the biosphere and are counter-productive because they create an illusion of safety and control, like like putting your seat belt on just before you slam into a wall while speeding at 300 mph.
better?
Sorry but fuck you doomerist cunts. No, we are not gonna have an easy time AT ALL. But giving up plays right into hands of corporations and governments destroying our planet. Every single improvement we are able to push through will limit suffering.
If we do nothing and completely give up, we will never know what suffering we could have prevented. I know it is not easy and things are not looking good. If we had not fought for some of the improvements we were able to push through, things would have been even worse than they are right now. Every. Single. Thing. Helps.
Don't even let these evil fucking cunts win no matter how hard they kick and scream and destroy stuff.
Nah, I call bullshit. You can try every little thing you want. In the end in won't matter. We are fucked and you just can't accept it. We either massively change things now or our efforts won't matter. People already complain about small changes and what we need means a massive lifestyle change for billions. It ain't happening. Get your head out of your own ass please.
How about you go fuck yourself and jerk off to doomer porn?
In world war 2, did people think "ah fuck defeating the nazis. They already killed millions of people. We should just five up"?
If your kitchen is on fire, do you just say fuck it? And let the rest of the house burn too?
What is it with you cunts giving up on every single setback?
You sound like you would let yourself drown because "oh fuck it my pants are already wet.".
Get YOUR head out of the asses of the people destroying the planet. You're literally on their side with the constant calls for giving up.
Fuck. You.
Okay, so what do I do?
Vote? Been doing that. Doesn't seem to be helping.
Recycle? Okay, let's have two trucks pick up garbage every week.
Eat less meat? Been doing that. But I'm a drop in the ocean.
Drive less? Been doing that. But it's made completely inconsequential because of private jet owners.
Short of killing large numbers of people in the first world we won't be able to even slow it down.
So what do I do that can actually have an impact?
They are spinning around throwing punches in all directions and mostly just hitting the air. We are nowhere near actually getting a punch across the jaw of any of the people that it actually matters for.
I get it. It's maddening to have no obvious villain but be surrounded by "bad" people. We do need people to flail and cling to life but they are more just trying to appease their own mind than anything.
Vote, of course. But also donate and campaign. The only way out of this mess is political. Volunteer. Protest. Rally others.
There are political parties, big, mainstream ones that frequently win elections, who want to bring us to carbon neutrality and even beyond, to undo the damage of past generations. Give them more power. They're stemming the tide but with enough power they could reverse it.
You actually have a positive impact. But you're also having a negative impact by spreading the mentality of "nothing will change", both to yourself and to other people you're voicing it to. It makes yourself and everyone you voice it to less likely to take action like you did.
Don't get me wrong, I also realistically believe we will run into massive problems. But the only sensible thing to do is just keep trying everything possible personally, it's the right thing to do.
So lie to myself and others? Because "nothing will change" has been my lived experience my entire life. Should I just ignore the helplessness and hopelessness and put on a happy face?
I voted for sanders, continue to try and vote for a at least halfway decent candidate, i moved into an rv that i retrofitted to be fully solar powered. 3.6Kw of panels, 15kwh of battery, haven't had to touch the grid since installing it, 15 stages of water filtration i can just use rainwater if need be for my freshwater (verified with lab tests for water safety) i have my own land and grow as much of my own veggies and herbs as i can. I drive literally one of the least polluting cars in the world (smart fortwo gets an avg of 44MPG is not even a hybrid) and I still try to drive it as little as possible, i use all stainless steel throughout my kitchen (cookware, storage, utensils, plates, bowels, cups) , so everything lasts forever and has no microplastics or pfas.
I genuinely don't know what more i could possibly do to reduce my footprint, I went out of my way to live as efficiently as possible and it's done literally nothing whatsoever for the situation. And people bitch moan complain about even the smallest change to their life. I can't even convince people to at least try induction over gas stoves. It's got so much better temperature control than gas, and since it's literally turning the pan into the heating element it's like 92% efficient whereas gas is horrendously inefficient since a large amount of heat just barfs out into the room instead of getting to your food. And I'm literally offering people to just fucking have one of mine so it's not like it's a cost issue.
So fuck you, we are doomed and you can't convince me otherwise
What if we, and I realize this is heretical to day: try big things and promote lifestyle changes in advance being coerced towards worse ones
Already happening in some places. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
It's going to be hilarious when Mexico conquers the Free State of Texas though
But for a shining moment, we created a lot of value for shareholders.
That's what matters❤️
Counting the COVID recession, the 2008 collapse, and the dot-com bubble I'm on my third once-in-a-lifetime recession just in my adult life.
There's a actually a super interesting explanation (and time will tell how accurate that explanation is) regulations from 2020 limited how much sulfur dioxide ships could emit and it turns out the sulfur dioxide was actually creating a slight cooling effect, so now we're experiencing the full brunt of our existing emissions as the world climate rubber bands to where it would have been if ships weren't spewing toxic sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. So presumably this recent trend will stabilize at some point and we'll have our new normal
This is also why geoengineering is so extremely risky. If you ever stop for any reason the climate will rubberband to where it should have been rapidly
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3
You think affluent capitalists care? Lol, they're probably trying to figure out how to make money out of this.
Going to make so much money selling bottled water after the next big hurricane.
This same urge for some kind of end to all existing problems via an apocalyptic scenario is also why OP made his post.
Lol
We can currently choose between:
Seems we have chosen all of the above.
Choose your difficulty:
Instructions unclear.
Which meteor are you talking about?
So what you are saying is that there is a chance we'll get to tan like this?
One step near to robocop
We need Connor McCloud to come back from planet Zeist and implement the sun blocker field
Well i now know where one blue waffle might be
tHe lIbRuLs wAnT tO TaKe oUR tRuCkS!!!
iTs AlL sO tHeY cAn MaKe Us FuCk gAY fRaWgS
Sexy sexy frogs...
Maybe someone needs to give the memo to these assholes, eh?
https://www.science.org/content/article/just-90-companies-are-blame-most-climate-change-carbon-accountant-says
It's not oil companies that burn the oil they pump, it's their customers. I know it's easy and convenient to point the fingers at this shitty industry and shift all the blame to them, but it's also not how we can solve the problem.
...And that's why we should be busting street dealers never direct out outrage at the kingpins providing the fentanyl! It's in no way their fault that people are dying!
/s, just in case.
If fentanyl disappeared overnight we would all be better. If oil disappears overnight we are all dead.
You don't solve global warming with simplistic analogies and "oil companies are responsible for everything"
No we wouldn't be
Good luck producing enough food, water and other essentials while suddenly cutting all oil production. The entire world's agriculture relies on oil and gas for fertilizers, machinery, transportation and sometimes cold storage.
Plastics aren't even that old, it really is quite doable.
Over several decades maybe. Overnight definitely not.
There's a multitude of issues that individual citizens have a very hard time solving or getting around.
In the majority of the US (and the world, really) people have to own cars to get from A to B in order to survive (which coincidentally means we're spending untold billions on the infrastructure to support that habit, at the cost of the liveable environment and citizens wallets, whether they drive or not).
Changing that is an enormous undertaking that will require an equally huge societal shift. In a culture where the car is the obvious choice it is next to impossible to get citizens to see that that choice is fucking them, and I'm sure Big Oil won't ever do anything to change that perception because it will hit their bottom line. So unless you move to a city where you can live without a car and still have the (positive) freedom to go where you need to be you will need to vote and write your congressman to make it possible for you to live without the yoke that is the car.
So yes, citizens burn gasoline because they must do so in order to afford a living. Further, as an aside, if people made the amount of money congruent with their productivity then maybe they wouldn't have to commute so much in order to have a roof over their head and food on the table. We could relax production and increase leisure time. Maybe. I'm just some dumb cunt.
I fully agree - it is a systemic problem (which is why I'm pointing out just singling out oil companies is misguided).
But I wouldn't go as far as making consumers simple victims of that system: we all also do choices that prioritize selfishness or instant gratification too. The number of pickup trucks in America that are used as one-person commuter is an obvious example - Americans could massively cut their gasoline consumption if they drove the same vehicles Japanese or Europeans chose. (and it's not like those live a life of poverty and sacrifice)
You say that as if we weren't massively subsidizing them, both directly and indirectly (e.g. by subsidizing the roads the cars that use their products drive on). You think that artificially-low price doesn't have a massive impact on demand?
But again that's not Exxon that is subsidizing roads or building cars, or forcing Americans to buy the biggest truck they can find. The issue is more complicated than "whoever pumps the oil out of the ground is liable for whatever happens to it afterwards"
It's not about who's fault it is; it's about where to apply the policy leverage to obtain the correct behavior. I don't give a fuck if Exxon is entirely blameless (and to be clear, they aren't); the correct solution is still regulating Exxon.
The notion that the only way we could ever possibly consider trying to solve the problem is by cajoling the public to change their human nature, because regulating a few corporations (that only exist as a goddamn privilege in the first place, by the way!) is somehow off-limits, is 100% pro-fossil-fuel-industry disinformation.
But it's not! The correct solution is to kill the demand for oil.
It's not Exxon that burns the oil they extract, it's the entire economy and consumers that buy it from them. You can regulate Exxon all you want, that won't change anything about that demand and the burning.
And the very first step in that is pricing it correctly.
Eh, humanity had a nice run. I mean it's not like I can stop the 100 highest polluting countries and corporations that account for like 90% of the problem. So I might as well just accept our inevitable extinction.
It's not like I'm running large vessels that measure their fuel consumption in gallons per mile, and have them run 24/7 so that stuff can get delivered slightly faster...
You know Amazon is using a lot of Rivians for delivery, now if only we could stop the jets...
I'm talking about boats. Shipping vessels. Cargo ships. Freight liners.
They run basically 24/7, and consume more fuel than all the delivery trucks that Amazon has replaced with rivians.
wow. that easy, huh? gimme your wallet, punk. you seem like a pushover. there's plenty of things you can do to stop them once you start thinking outside the box.
I ought to care but I've lost that ability. Annihilation is not scary. I won't be alive or awake to experience it.
This is a little more aloof, but still a good reference to the scale of change we’ve created since the Industrial Revolution.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
Back when most of the North was encased in ice?
Before the white walkers
We're all gonna die, THE END IS NEAR!!!
Totally sane shitter user.
I really do hope we get some level of self-sustaining sapient AI like Skynet to be made so at least we as a species leave behind something after humanity dies off in an extinction event that can eventually unfuck the shitshow we developed for the past 2000 years and make the trash pile of this planet a better place without us.
We are going to have to trudge through Multiplicity before we reach Skynet.
babydoomers did their thing and wont face the consequences. shit for anyone else.
I'm not sure placing blame is going to help right this second....
But since we're already doing it. I'm going to throw blame at every Corpo ever.
If you want to be mad at someone, be mad based on wealth and power, not age.
"the end is nigh" but yeah insurance companies will probably be the first pillar of capitalism to fail. Unfortunately unless the publics views of migrants change, the public will continue to elect people who promise to abuse migrants.
There's a real risk entire forests will fail. And obviously agriculture
We should start making clouds in the oceans again. I think they were protecting us.
I strongly recommend keeping this idea in your back pocket. There are a few ways to accomplish geoengineering to reduce solar gain with technology we have now. It will cost taxpayers a staggering amount of money, will likely punch down on poorer countries anyway through modified weather patterns, crop yields may suffer, air quality may get worse in ways you can't imagine, but it will work for a limited time. Right now it's a game of chicken where we want governments and big business to do anything else first. If we flinch and dim the skies, the petroleum industry will just burn more and faster, throwing away the time we just bought, delaying doomsday by a few decades instead.
People are already dying in "poorer" countries. We could do some clouds now to bring the temperature down to levels that aren't killing people.
The problem is, if we wanted to bring the temperature back down by adding particulate into the atmosphere, we can never stop. Sulphur fuel in ships was a small amount, but to truly save lives I fear we would have to geoenginer the planet. And once we have opened that door there is no going back. The effects of a warming planet would come right back as soon as we stopped pumping particulate in.
I’m glad we were able to create plastic for the earth and help set the course for future wonders never before imaginable.
Brought to you by billionaires
Edit: oof I read it completely wrong. Nothing to see here folks.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
I had not anticipated "Oh shit that's a good point I should apply for a job with McKinsey" to be a takeaway that anyone would have to this post, let alone the assumed main takeaway from it.
Lol yeah I goofed pretty hard on that one
All good. I am chuffed that you were good-natured about it.
I even already had my coffee when I made the original comment. There was no excuse for my side fumbling.
Just don't look up.
Do I understand?
Haha good meme
https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2024-06-05/secretary-generals-special-address-climate-action-moment-of-truth%C2%A0
Gloom despair and agony on me. Deep dark depression excessive misery. If it werent for bad luck id have no luck at all. Gloom despair and agony on me.
Standart deviation of anomaly? Hmm... How is the anomaly defined?
It appears to be in terms of number of std devs away from the mean temperature from 1991 to 2020
Sigma, you can say it.
sigma...
We are doomed.
I don't believe anymore that we can turn it around. We and our children will drown in floods, starve in drought and burn in unbearable heat. Most of the world will become uninhabitable. And the rest will be fighting to the death for basic resources. We will see it faster than we think.
Im sure GenZ will live this nightmare and very probably Millenials too.
That'll be the fate of a lot of the world, especially heat in India, flooding in SE Asia, etc. But if you're in Michigan, near a bunch of bodies of fresh water, you'll probably be fine for a very long time.
Yeah, it will be much more boring than cataclysmic extinction of the human race.
I fear that for many people with means the livable climates will just move geographically. But then a horrifying number of poor people will starve while the rich buy up the dwindling food supply since agriculture is fucked. It will be a messy transition.
Well, like many people I'm not in Michigan. Thats a very short sighted view point.
If half of the world becomes unlivable, billions of people will be on the move, fighting for resources. Everything is connected and this will have repercussions in Michigan as well. But I guess I shouldnt be surprised since Americans generally present themselves as the center and only important part of the world and I wouldn't be surprised if you guys shut your borders when shit hits the fan and merrily sit at your lake in Michigan and watch while the rest of the word suffers and dies. Or maybe you start some wars over water this time.
On the other hand, you had some serious climate change effects in the US as well. You think the devastating hurricanes and bad cold spells will just contain itself in areas YOU are not at?
The "It doesn't affect ME!" stance is not sustainable anymore. It will and probably is already affecting you too, even if you don't want to see it.
I also am not in Michigan, and don't own property on a lake. But it's also not a short sighted viewpoint when your original point was that "We and our children will drown in floods, starve in drought and burn in unbearable heat..." That's simply not true for a lot of people in the first world. In terms of personal politics, I believe that every oil executive should be shot, and people who think Biden is some climate savior have a screw loose. But clearly the green party isn't going to ever win any national elections (it does decently locally), so the US will keep chugging along and drilling more, but will export the consequences elsewhere, as it has always done. And of course the US will shut its borders and refuse climate immigrants - it's literally happening right now. We can all see what's coming. But life will continue just fine for many in the first world.
yay
The AMOC doesn't like that.
Reading this in Rick rapping voice
Kinda feels like karma on a global scale. Humans evolved intelligence just to use it to systematically oppress each other, mostly in the name of feeling powerful. Not sure I’d call that “intelligence” and I think the planet would be better off without us.
The planet doesn't give a shit about us. These are just natural processes (yes humans are a part of nature). We are just a particularly anomalous part of the system
The problem with that idea is us colonizers will still reap the rewards while karma exploits the less developed
Well earned.
Why should I be worried, when I am more dangerous than a bear and privileged for having student loan debt?
That sound really bad. So then I have a couple questions.
... if no then how could the consequences of that be worse then mass death and starvation?
We are all I this train going to hell. Might as well sit down and get comfy. Either that or get off early. But there are still a few sips of soda in the can.
If only it was a train. We're in a conga line of SUV's.
You're right. It's a traffic jam of SUVs on Highway 00 headed for Climate Apocalypse. No exits. But you can get off by going over the rails.
There is quite a lot of years a good distance below the average too.
Some would say about half the years. That's why it's an average.
When you learn about HAARP and you just accept the fact that humans are chit.
Vote for Jill Stein and support the Green party in any way you can.
damn this is crazy outrage bait.
I'll report back when mainland USA is flooded and nobody can grow food anymore and we're all starving, you have my word.
This whole affair is caused by too many people existing. Mass death is the only solution. Relax and enjoy the ride to a better future!
Although I also think there is a correlatin between number of people and detrimental climate effects, it's wrong to reduce the causes to that. Despite the fact that "the richest 10 percent of people produce half of the planet’s individual-consumption-based fossil fuel emissions, while the poorest 50 percent — about 3.5 billion people — contribute only 10 percent", it is mainly due to our modern way of life and production. As you probably know, the climate started the downwards spiral since the industrialisation. If we werent producing so insanely much GHG-emitting stuff, it wouldn't be such a problem. (Regarding temperature alone. There are of course also other detrimental effects on our eco-systems due to things like overuse of fertilisers for example.)
You realise that the link you posted is full of shit, do you? The Oxfam shifts the blame from consumers to the owners of manufacturing and logistical facilities. It states that Bezos is responsible for all the associated costs of the shit YOU buy. But guess what? If you wouldn't buy that shit, Bezos won't be selling that shit and there would be no pollution.
Get your facts straight next time.
This is also covered in others, more recent findings. Want me to dig them out for you?
Which is part of what I meant by:
"it is mainly due to our modern way of life and production"
But not in such a condemning way as you.
The fact, that you were able to write your comment, shows, that even you felt the necessity to buy stuff. And I am 100 % sure that the device, you used for that, was not produced free of GHG emissions or under ecologically (or even socially) perfect conditions. As bad as this is, this is the case for most people. But did you have a choice? Can you live an average life in our current society without stuff like that? Do you even have the option to choose alternatives?
That's my point. This kind of "you buy, you choose" attribution of causal chains, is surely true to some degree. But imo it's an oversimplification to label it completely like that. I can't even buy fucking organically grown tomatoes in my closest supermarket. So I don't even have the option to choose the better alternative. This also applies to several other basic foods. Yet, I also need them. Most of the times such items are more expensive than the worse ones. The latter is a huge deal for people who really don't have that much money. So they literally can't buy the better options.
The market self-regulates that kind of stuff by itself to some degree. But not completely. And policies worldwide, especially in industry nations, fail to address these issues, thereby fueling the problem. Then of course there are further problems, like a lack of education and awareness about it and so on.
Another thing: how easy do you find it to see which product is the better one from an ecological perspective? How do you know it's not just greenwashing? Do you feel like it's an easy choice?
If so, congratz, you are a lucky one. But for most of the rest of us, that's really not made sufficiently transparent.
Again, something which needs to be regulated.
And then, Bezos and co. could make their whole business conpletely green. Do they want to? Nope. Bezos and co. also could decide not to take their private jets, or live in a private mansion, live lifestyles which cause so incredibly more emissions than the one of average Joes and Janes. And again, they decide against it. But yeah sure, go on making each customer and the whole of humanity responsible.
Not the amount of people are the problem, but their disregard for eco-systems, especially the failings of policies. Humanity managed to survive for thousands of years without fucking up the whole planet. Shit really started to spiral downwards since the industrial revolution.
And it is! In developed countries. Like here in Europe. I don't have issues buying "organic" tomatoes or "free range" eggs, because they all are (veg only while in season obviously, can't grow shit under snow).
The problem here is not Bezos, it's YOU who do not demand better. Most smaller delivery vehicles here in the UK are fully electric. Our grid is regularly 100% powered by renewables and the amount of hours keeps growing every year. BPA is banned in food packaging. A lot of pesticides and fertilisers used elsewhere are banned. Business parks like Stockley Park have insect hotels and bee hives, as well as dedicated waterbodies for amphibians, etc. Why? Because WE demand it! And you don't. Instead you ban contraception and abortions.
Insufficiently.
It must be a very different kind of Europe than the one I live in.
I live in Germany and regularly encounter such troubles to find ecologically optimal products. Most of the time because there aren't any available for me. Then there is a huge lack of transparency and sometimes of course the price. Although the latter is not really problematic for me, it is for a lot of other people. Those products, which are environmentally detrimental, are usually much cheaper than the ecologically better ones. You are being financially punished for choosing the better alternatives.
Despite the fact that a non-plant based diet is worse than a plant-based one in terms of ecological impact, the industry has been subject to a lot of critique due to insufficient regulations towards the treatment of egg-laying hens. Not only that, but also controls are often not conducted, even though it says so on paper.
Even if we neglect the ecological irresponsible business practises conducted by Bezos & friends, when it comes to individual ecological impact, wealthy people are usually causing a multitude of the damage which is caused by not-that-wealthy individuals. It seems to be a problem inherent to the lifesytle.
That's cool. However, there is more to electric vehicles which must be considered when we think about ecological impact. (Lifetime, resources, production, etc..) Even if that's given, this alone doesn't solve the climate crisis. Although it certainly seems to be a nice step in the right direction.
Regarding the remaining list: that's surely nice to hear. Still, there are still a plethora of unsolved problems. Even in your country.
How about you don't generalise a whole population?
You must have mistaken me with someone from another country. It might help to be less prejudiced.
Insufficiently.
It must be a very different kind of Europe than the one I live in.
I live in Germany and regularly encounter such troubles to find ecologically optimal products. Most of the time because there aren't any available for me. Then there is a huge lack of transparency and sometimes of course the price. Although the latter is not really problematic for me, it is for a lot of other people. Those products, which are environmentally detrimental, are usually much cheaper than the ecologically better ones. You are being financially punished for choosing the better alternatives.
Despite the fact that a non-plant based diet is worse than a plant-based one in terms of ecological impact, the industry has been subject to a lot of critique due to insufficient regulations towards the treatment of egg-laying hens. Not only that, but also controls are often not conducted, even though it says so on paper.
Even if we neglect the ecological irresponsible business practises conducted by Bezos & friends, when it comes to individual ecological impact, wealthy people are usually causing a multitude of the damage which is caused by not-that-wealthy individuals. It seems to be a problem inherent to the lifesytle.
That's cool. However, there is more to electric vehicles which must be considered when we think about ecological impact. (Lifetime, resources, production, etc..) Even if that's given, this alone doesn't solve the climate crisis. Although it certainly seems to be a nice step in the right direction.
Regarding the remaining list: that's surely nice to hear. Still, there are still a plethora of unsolved problems. Even in your country.
How about you don't generalise a whole population?
You must have mistaken me with someone from another country. It might help to be less prejudiced.
You first
The sweet release of a better future
God what utter tripe. Past behavior has shown disaster in what sense? How do you fucking predict all of that from this plot. This is how you close credibility for your cause in 140 characters or less
I think it is fair to wait exactly 2 more years to see if temperatures normalize following consecutive weird el niño / la niña cycles, but then yeah let's hit the emergency trigger
Standard deviations is a deliberately misleading tactic to present this data, this is in reality a small temperature change.
It's a form of normalization to highlight how abnormal the change is.
Do you really think someone would manipulate data to show a more sensationalized image of what's happening? Then post it on the internet with a misleading message?
Do you really think someone would go on the internet and lie like that?
Edit: clearly my sarcasm didn't land. Also, edit, a word.
China is right! Stop eating cows. Go find weird animals like bats. If we're lucky enough, one of those bats will have a proper virus that will then remove most of us. Without eating cows, most cows will starve and stop farting. Most flights would stop, most traffic would stop, most industry would stop. Then just wait for 2 years for nature to cover everything in grass and trees. Easy peasy.
I'm doing my part. I stopped asking my brother to get married. That reduced the numbers from my family, you must do the same. Just don't pressure others into marriage and we'll have less people in no time! Maybe that's the economy's game? Can't afford anything anymore, why would we try getting married and having kids?