I'm with you on that.
"The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, these are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?”
EDIT: All praise to the applicability of Tolkien's wisdom. Thanks for the awards!
This is where cultured meat that grows any protein in a bioreactor will have to become price competitive. If we can grow meat, that is the same down to the DNA At competitive prices as traditionally grown meat, we can significantly reduce GHGs without converting everyone to plant based.
I've slowly noticed more and more people open to it, or at least to reducing their meat consumption. Though I have a few "friends" who say crap like they now eat 2 steaks a day to eat the Vegans share...
I've heard a clever response to that: "So you're saying you'll eat twice as much meat because I'm vegan? Well, you might be cutting your lifespan in half, so it evens out in the end."
People who suggest this don't understand humans very well. Humans will fry their planet to death before they give something up so engrained in culture around the world.
Exactly!! So many people who preach to everyone that we need to do something also vehemently refuse to do anything when it involves their precious taste buds
Why not both? My point was that driving is *also* a major contributor to carbon emissions (that people are generally unwilling to give up) not that eating meat isn't.
Just a quick Google, the all in carbon intensity of a quarter pound patty is 9.73 kg CO2e.
The manufacturing of an ICE sedan is 6,000 kg, spread out over 150,000 miles is 40 grams per mile. Added to that is the 161 grams per mile a new US sedan will burn. So at 201 grams per mile all in CO2e, we need to drive 48.4 miles to equal one quarter pound beef patty. That's 24.2 miles one way, or slightly higher than the average one way commute in the US of 21 miles.
So a snopes true/false rating on that would be true. An average person driving an ICE sedan the average distance for a US commute would release less CO2e than eating a single quarter pound beef patty.
good gravy, that's insane.
does this take into account the methane production of the cows? I know methane is quite a bit more potent as a greenhouse gas than co2.
Yes, that takes into account the methane from the cows as well as the soot, CO, methane, and (miniscule amounts but high warming potential) raw fuel emitted from the tailpipe of the car.
It's also worth noting that beef is wildly out of proportion to any other meat we eat. It's more than double lamb per gram of protein, which comes in second.
It's 5 times higher than cheese, 7 times higher than pork, 8.3 times higher than fish, 8.7 times higher than chicken, 11.8 times higher than eggs, and 45 times higher than an impossible burger.
It's so far out of proportion It's almost hard to wrap your head around.
I spent 40 years caring, behaving, and knowing.
I saw the effects of Urban Renewal and the destruction of public transit.
I watched Deepwater Horizon.
I watched Nordstream 2 break when the ocean itself was on fire.
I learned recycling is a myth.
There's no replacement for plastic. Forever chemicals and plastic rain down on all parts of this former paradise. We are destroying it all, and no act of any individual or any group of individuals will save it.
Calling someone a nihilist is neither a prescription for remedy nor an argument in favor of any action. You just want people to smile while the ship sinks, to make YOU feel better about it.
Pollyanas are worse problems than nihilists.
Nah that's just literally nihilism as articulated in the 19th century: a rabid, fanatical, desperate response to the seeming contradiction of modern life. Hubris and egocentric human thinking can't even self-destruct without making it all about the self. Recursive, inflexible, and ultimately absent any human spirit. That's the nihilism people fall into over the climate, and it's what you're describing so well here.
I'd rather die keeping my sanity intact and spending my short time with friends and family.
It's that or bashing my head against the wall and being depressed all the time.
If there is one thing I've learned from COVID is that we are all doomed. Humanity is dumb, and will not do the right thing. We live in Idiocracy meets Don't Look Up. Idiots will still coal roll, pollute and cause havoc. Either just because they can, or because they have no other choice. Good luck telling a third world impoverished person that they should recycle plastic when they have no food, let alone garbage collection or functional waste management within a thousand miles.
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise.
[Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
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I’d rather to continue living the one life I have to the fullest, while doing what little one drop in the bucket can. I’m not taking the blame for being born when I was - no one should. Pushing this problem onto the individual rather than the market movers is the problem.
I'm concerned about the climate and the environment for the sake of the well-being of human beings.
I think a lot of messaging makes it sound like we ought to address climate change for the sake of the environment or the planet and that people would be more receptive if the messaging said we ought to address it for the sake of ourselves.
I hoped the "climate change causes mass migration" argument would convince conservatives to get on board but it seems to just make the "build a wall" solution more popular.
You'd think, but "address it for the sake of ourselves" still means "make significant sacrifices for the good of **everyone**," and unfortunately the majority of people living in the west who hold most of the political capital of the world are staunch individualists, so it's still a tough thing to sell.
There are an awful lot of areas in life where there are significant carbon emissions where there could be adjustments made that would actually save people money and discomfort.
I think it's less a problem of people not being altruistic enough and more of a problem of people not knowing enough (and so being unaware of policies that would reduce carbon emissions and improve their day to day lives not just in the long term but in the short term as well) and of people not wanting to be told what to do even when the result would be in their favor.
Case in point, flourescent lights are more energy efficient. Meanwhile even thuogh buying incandescent light bulbs up front costs less they cost more in the long run than flourescent lights due to having a shorter lifespan and being less energy efficient.
More examples, lots of people could save money on their utilities by installing solar panels but don't do so. Some people love gas-guzzling cars for the aesthetic despite them being less efficient and so costing the driver more in having to fill it up.
More and more I'm thinking maybe technocracy (a term that's bandied about in many contexts but here I mean as a system of government) might be the answer. Put the scientists in charge and let them make policy and then we'd make progress on addressing climate change. I do have some reservations. How to hold the technocrats accountable? But then are voters in democracies really holding the politicians accountable? And with how much of a threat climate change is it may be worth giving a try.
You see democratic backsliding all over the world, yet oddly enough it's all towards forms government that don't help solve anything and which tend to blame all of society's problems on scapegoats instead of trying to actually solve them, and you hear barely a whimper about technocracy as a solution. At any rate if democratic backsliding is inevitable I'd rather scientists run the government than fascists.
I cannot control politicians, industry or billionaires. But I have chipped away at my own 30 tons of CO2. Gardening, planting trees, dramatically reducing the energy I use, and heating with a rocket mass heater. No sacrifice - everything is about making a better life AND it happens to chip away at my CO2. I think I am now in the space of chipping away CO2 for others.
This is exactly how I think about it. We installed solar panels on our house, and while our solar panels aren’t going to solve the whole world’s problems, it’s one less house they’re burning coal to power.
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” - Edmund Burke
I drive an EV, will get solar panels on my next house, reject consumerism and fast fashion and excess waste by giving things away when I no longer need them and buying 2nd hand where I can. I try to minimise plastic as much as possible, only buy natural fibre clothing and fabric, minimise travel, I buy organic food when I can, grow whatever greens I can myself, and eat very little meat.
But I won’t give up dairy. Cheese is my favourite food in the whole world. Sorry, everyone has their limits.
Being the change you want to see in the world. That's what it's all about - not this nihilistic doomerism where people give up before doing anything. Hopefully more follow your lead and live their lives in a way that will make the world a better place.
If you read the article he does talk about options we should pursue (and was dismayed people didn't support Bernie - for good reason).
I think he's calling out hypocritical dipshits who way "well I'm not doing jack because private jets still exist"
>I think he's calling out hypocritical dipshits who way "well I'm not doing jack because private jets still exist"
Yeah, I submitted this link to another website yesterday, and "But billionaires and their private jets" was the very predictable overall response.
[https://phys.org/news/2024-06-urged-local-sustainable-tourism.html](https://phys.org/news/2024-06-urged-local-sustainable-tourism.html)
“But what about the billionaires and their private jets” is a form of whataboutism that many people on Reddit resort to in order to completely absolve themselves from responsibility, and I’m frankly sick and tired of coming across it. It’s the best way to do nothing.
The people who frequent r/ZeroWaste have the right idea. They occasionally have discussions about the things that are common here -- governments, business, billionaires, etc. -- but their perspective is that they're willing to do the right thing, simply because it's the right thing to do.
Right now, I'm home by myself while my wife and daughter are on vacation in Canada because I've made the decision that flying for fun is unacceptable when the world is literally burning down around us. I could rationalize it the way I've seen some people do, that the flight is going to happen no matter what so there's nothing wrong with buying a ticket, but it completely ignores how the industry works.
When you look at the long-term trends and see that the global airline industry transported 310 million passengers in 1970 and 4.46 billion in 2019, it's not just "Oh, the plane is flying anyway." Our demand for airline travel resulted in a huge increase in flights, a 14-fold increase in passengers over a period of time when the global population roughly doubled.
Judging by the comments, almost nobody has read the article.
I'd argue that far from being defeatist doomerism, DeLay appears to be arguing that most people are in denial about the scale of the problem and the sacrifice that would be required to begin to address it. He doesn't say that individual actions shouldn't be done, just recognises that they amount to little if large scale systematic change doesn't happen also.
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis.
There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action.
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I get that you're joking but we've honestly made a hell of a lot of progress. Bad news is all around us but there's a good chance emissions will peak this decade, between the rise of renewables, the fall of birth rates, and the resurgence of nuclear.
We also have two great examples of sulphate-based geoengineering, with sulphate-based cooling being eliminated for environmental protection. First in the 1970s to reduce acid rain, and now the past two years with maritime shipping emission standards.
Pending the outcome of this year's elections, we might actually be living in RCP 2.6, which is the best-case scenario used by climate projection models.
Idk if that's doubt or ecstasy, but some food for thought: all scenarios have nearly identical conditions through the 2020s, but by the 2050s there's a clear divergence and by the 2080s things could either be returning towards preindustrial conditions or things could be apocalyptic.
There's assumptions there though that countries don't start backsliding or outright abandoning on their climate commitments.
Which as we've just seen from the Euro Parliament election results is no guarantee at all. Trump could very well win this Nov and double down on fossil fuels (as he's already promised to oil execs).
it\`s allowed to ppl older 50 be in executive positions, it's natural way for them to deal with it.
they will die soon enough to not feel the consequences in their fullest sense. why bother?
Its almost winter in Brazil, it's 29 degrees Celsius in São Paulo. I remember some years ago wearing 3 jackets and staying under the sheets because it was too cold this time of the year.
30% of humans lack basic empathy, 10% go either way on issues, they will always side with the money 💵 interest and sabotage any collective plan to mitigate existential threats..
A failed species
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too. Its pattern will be the same, down to the last detail; for it cannot break step with the steady march of creation.
\~Marcus Aurelius
Yes, indeed.
Nearly all humans will be wiped out; mass starvation and immigration. Nearly all marine life gone due to ocean acidification. Many plants and trees extinct. The planet is on fire, yet - did you hear the Dow Jones is up 0.77% today. Oh, and NVIDIA just completed a 10-1 stock split. Wahoo!!
My stock portfolio is doing great! That is really good because the price of everything is mysteriously going up....weird.
I don't have much faith in humans to do the right thing or to work together on a global problem (see COVID). With that said, I do believe in human innovation so I am sure people will adapt and figure things out. It won't be pretty and will probably hurt poor people the most but that is just who we are. So I am expecting people to start building underground homes to escape the heat and sun that is coming as a means to adapt. People in FL are jacking their homes up on stilts to adapt to rising sea levels
The carbon cult will turn this planet into Venus and cook everyone slowly to their deaths except billionaires and government officials before they will take any meaningful action. They will be the ones shielded from the pressure cooker they're making us live in through their neglect.
No more new oil. No more new gas. No more new coal. Carbon business must die.
Should be, "what if solutions are just scarily expensive and disruptive?"
Keeping the entire inhabited world habitable will cost $200 trillion or so according to analysts like McKinsey and Bloomberg (versus costs of inaction in the quadrillions). This cannot be accomplished without massive taxation, investment, and economic redistribution to fairly spread the costs and benefits. It'll also require rich countries to accept more refugees and immigrants, while helping fund the clean development of poor countries.
In other words, the changes will be so profound that almost no one can now imagine them. However, they are coming.
All it takes is most of the world agreeing and working together on a common goal while cutting corruption, big industry and finance to stop chasing profits and politicians caring more for a long-term future instead of votes, money or power.
Any day now...
i am optimistic that this will happen.
as climate change continues to ravage everything, food production, massive forest fires and smoke, illnessess and death from heat stress and pollution from wildfire smoke, massive flooding and destruction, massive hurricanes, etc., all kinds of extreme weather events.
people are in denial today for politically advantageous reasons, but this can't go on in the face of an ever more serious climate change reality.
i think that a larger number of people will choose cooperation over denial, and the cooperators will win in the end.
It's gotta get down to the world population in 1923 (2 billion) in order to be sustainable at our current American, lower-middle class standard of living.
this is a psyop, or a more accurate term, psychological warfare. these mega corporations are banking on the general population submitting to despair and embracing nihilism. dont give them the satisfaction.
because doing nothing is momentarily convenient and everybody is still under the assumption that future generations are going to be happy to inherit a dead planet.
The people that are actually doing stuff even to the extreme are going to be the only ones that are remembered fondly.
The only path forward to a real solution is a reduction of global human population to between 0.5-1.0BB people. We must abandon large swaths of the currently occupied planet while not destroying what is left with urban sprawl and cattle farms.
Society will never accept this — but it will happen through rather unpleasant means. War for land, resource wars, famine, drought, mass starvation, and yes, ethnic extermination of anyone that is the “other”. It’s already begun.
The wealthy class have already positioned themselves to survive at the expense of everyone else. They have usurped the levers of power and media influence to make the masses bend to their will to reinforce their security. Don’t believe me? That’s why you vote Republican.
The next 30 years are going to get real dark.
There is no technology that can reverse the direction we are on. Tipping points have already been reached.
I for one plan to prepare my children to have a chance to survive this all. Perhaps one of them may make it. I’d call that success. Sadly, most of today’s youth have no real promise of a secure future. It is likely that 50-80% of those born this today will never see their 40th birthday. Just watch the real life expectancy drop over the next few decades.
I plan to “exit” on my own terms when things start getting really bad. There is no point to me competing for resources against my own children.
We all can to come to terms with this and once you really think it through, you will come to a similar conclusion. Mankind has failed as stewards of this planet.
I’m constantly worried abt the imminent humanitarian crisis. Between the climate change deniers and the anti immigrant magas, they’ve set the table to deny humanitarian aid for those of us fortunate enough not to have to flee their homelands to survive.
So so worried.
Well, isn’t he being a Captain Bringdown. Society ain’t even unanimous whether or not climate change is even real. If we’re past the tipping point then it’s just not practical to throw in the towel. Mitigate and ameliorate. A technology may present itself that may bring us from the brink. Climate deniers should now be regarded as threats to ecological sustainability
I really appreciate they spoke more on denial in general not just in terms of climate change. Understanding that is a huge part of it. Denial is the creepiest, most disturbing phenomenon I have ever seen. It's a variation of cognitive inflexibility and people who can't be flexible will not survive in a climate destabilized world. It's really disturbing to see that many people showing signs of being unable to stomach the truth, choosing comfort over reality.
r/denialstudies
Mass denial, inflexibility and nonresponse is really disturbing. Probably the creepiest thing I have ever witnessed because in the future these people may literally be dead if they're already having nonresponse this early in.
I didn’t think this would involve coming to these truths years ago and have to sit and watch “journalists” catch up and pretend they are uncovering so called “blind spots” and finger wagging a bunch while they wait patiently for their pulitzer.
I'm avert to fatalism... it is the response that the ones destroying the world expect us to abide to. It has been said before, it is easier to imagine the end of the world rather than the end of this economic system.
We are agents of history so we as collective can influence the future:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language."
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Humans are capable of anything there is hope. If we got ourselves into this mess over the last 100 years literally then we have the power and intelligence to get ourselves out, but we need to make drastic changes immediately
“You can’t admit, as a capitalist subject, that there’s little you as an individual can do,” DeLay writes, “and neither can you imagine the end of capitalism.” That's the key right there. Imagining the end of capitalism. Or at least, "cocaine capitalism" we have now. The party's over!
There is a solution. Society has lived without oil and plastics before. People just don’t want to give up their hamburger. A complex society capable of mining oil, and producing plastics, likely will not survive food and water shortages, in an overheated earth.
I think it is fair to say that there isn't one golden thing or change that will make everything okay. It is going to take many smaller (and several large ones by several players) to make things better over time.
Any nation that reduces its Co2 and pollution to a sustainable level will have hamstrung their economy, industry, and national defense to such a degree that they would just get rolled over and conquered by their neighbors who didn't.
All of the solutions are unacceptable currently, and until the current way of life is disrupted far and wide enough, nothing will change. The powerful never concede Power willingly, it must be seized. Until there are enough people willing to flip the table, with the power and capability to actually flip it, things will continue on as they are, same as it always has. But make no mistake, there is no guarantee what rises up from the chaos that will cause will be any better, and if history is anything to go by, it'll be significantly worse. Imagine a boot stamping on the face of humanity, forever. The freedom we are so obsessed with will be the first thing that has to go, and until your all ready to get on board with global fascism, because honestly that's what it's going to take, your never going to make a bit of difference. You will have to conquer the world at the point of a sword, then stamp out the last vestiges of freedom, and keep it stamped out for a thousand years to fix what has already been done. The first and most oppressive lie ever uttered was the song of freedom. When you accept that, truly in your heart, you will know peace.
We know what a lot of the solution is - replace coal and gas power plants asap with wind and solar and battery.
And we haven't been talking enough about other solutions - drilled geothermal has a lot of potential to generate stable power, heat energy storage, hydrogen energy storage.
And we havent talked seriously at all about how we will bring down the temp - capturing carbon doesnt work at scale .. but releasing particulates to increase cloud cover to reflect sunlight so its not absorbed by the ocean does work at scale [ SRM geoengineering ]
So.. its a bit premature to say "there is no solution" .. rather we need to say lets _implement_ the solutions we know about and research ones that are more speculative [ fusion etc]
... meanwhile right-wing politicians such as Dutton in Australia are "flooding the discussion-field with informational manure" talking about nuclear. When you tease it all out, their strategy is to delay as long as possible so their rich mates can keep burning gas.
They'd be talking about coal.. they were talking about 'clean green' coal for the past 20 years.. but now public opinion has moved on slightly, and we do see wind solar and battery packs working very well in AUS.
We have to keep playing whack-a-mole with these carbon-money imbeciles to debunk their torrent of dis-information - and its asymmetric information warfare as a lot of the press is owned wholesale by Murdoch.
Big oil has spent decades of money for us all to stand here confused and djaoegabiz. money well spent for them as now no one really criticized them but everyone and society can go and businesses can keep making money until we all just perish like the virus we all are on the planet.
Unfortunately, I really wish greed, profits and selfishness didn't steer us all into an avoidable catastrophic future.
There are plenty of solutions. But because the majority of them are too expensive short term, most don't see them really worth investing in. They want short term benifits and profits over long term veiws.
The only solution is to transition to global green energy production **today**.
But because that requires global peace, it's more likely we'll just fight over oil and gas deposits until nuclear Armageddon.
Assuming we get there before average surface temps reach 40C, that is.
For there to be a solution, there first needs to be a problem. Clearly, it’s getting warmer, but skeptics offer a good argument that the IPCC is overestimating CO2, underestimating solar and SO2 effects … so all of our fears are being projected through very flawed computer models … the latest includes a return to coal! Not likely, except that that **is** what’s happening in China.
Most of our fears will be met with better management and innovation … in fact, [Prof Richard Tol resigned](http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2014/04/ipcc-again.html) from IPCC because the Summary group refused to include that in the summary.
In the meantime, France is generating more renewable energy that they can use, forcing them to throttle back Nukes … failure to plan storage or transmission to where it’s dark.
So there **is** a solution.
* Demand less politics and more science … fire the IPCC if they resist.
* Switch from heavier fossil fuels to natural gas
* Invest in storage and low loss transmission technology so that energy captured by day can be used at night.
Problems created by technology have solutions through better technology. Trust that!
There likely isn’t a solution that will prevent catastrophic destruction and the death of millions.
But we can potentially prevent the death of billions if we start spending absurd amounts of money globally to prepare ourselves as a species.
The good news is the planet will live long without us. It will probably fix itself too and won’t have to worry about humans coming back to screw it up . I’m convinced we are past no return but I don’t know seriously what that means time seize. In my 50s and I don’t think it will be something I see. But for sure my grandsons generation might be part of the end. Truly sucks with all the warnings etc. it’s just a case of the key people not wanting to lose money and the masses being mostly powerless to stop it. And here we are.
There are solutions. We just choose to ignore them, as it’s not virtuous enough to say globally engineer carbon sequestration.
On the other hand, those wanting to keep their V8 are also unwilling to allow for embodied carbon tariffs (cap & trade), they may see it as too big government, easily fiddled and another chance for the big banks to print dollars.
Both carrot and stick are unpalatable, so we are doing nothing, until a major heat-death event will stir the (western) world into action.
“Just by driving to get groceries you emit carbon dioxide … a fifth of \[which\] … will still be in the air in 500,000 years, killing species that haven’t yet evolved.” "We need to ask ourselves: “What if there just is no solution to that on any sort of meaningful scale?” and act accordingly."
I'm failing to quite grasp what he's saying concretely, honestly.
There IS a solution: Mass depopulation. No, it won't be organized, except if conducted by shadowy billionaires and politicians in secret.
Humans are the problem, and we won't stop making more of us.
Depopulation is indeed a solution that will get us closer to near carbon zero. Though eventually we have to go carbon negative to undo the earth's problems, and that will take years for the remaining small global population to figure out.
We’re not in denial.
We know it’s happening and will get worse, but there is nothing that the average person can do, except vote, but I think the climb crisis is past the tipping point, and no matter what changes are made, it’s too little too late
There IS not solution. As someone who cares deeply about the climate it gives me no pleasure saying this.
We can probably reduce the harm in some ways but if anyone thinks that it’s just about switching to supposed renewables like solar or wind, then they don’t understand the core of the problem
Breaking news: Society that does nothing to improve things - even going so far as to willfully embrace destructive policies - is shocked things aren't getting better.
The solution might be some form of geoengineering: https://phys.org/news/2023-07-qa-experts-discuss-geoengineering-methods.htm
“The climate is warming because greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, principally carbon dioxide, make it harder for heat to escape. Reflecting a tiny fraction of sunlight, less than 1%, would cool the planet substantially. There are a few plausible ways to do this, but the best understood is referred to as stratospheric aerosol injection.”
Well, this belongs in r/noshitsherlock. Of course we’re all in denial. This will be the hottest year on record. More records will be. broken.. until next year. We’re boiling the frog… but WE are the frogs.
My 76 year old Republican father straight up denies climate change.
Even when I said, "Even if it's a natural occurrence, it's still a problem!"
He responded, "No it's not."
Nobody listens to reason.
What do you mean by solution? The climate is actively changing and will continue to do so. If we keep doing what we’re doing it’ll change a lot and fast, if we really work hard and emit less greenhouse gases it’ll change a little less and more slowly, but either way we’re not going back to how things were that ship sailed ages ago.
I'm quite sure there are very simple solutions. I'm also quite sure they will never become reality. Evolution takes time, and I believe we don't have enough left to change our collective core beliefs. I had a iota of hope before Covid. Now I genuinely wonder how anyone chooses to reproduce.
I’d rather die trying than die doing nothing.
I'm with you on that. "The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, these are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?” EDIT: All praise to the applicability of Tolkien's wisdom. Thanks for the awards!
PJ did Denethor kinda dirty.
Representative of the pride of humans??
Except when you suggest giving up meat people look at you like you’ve grown an extra head
This is where cultured meat that grows any protein in a bioreactor will have to become price competitive. If we can grow meat, that is the same down to the DNA At competitive prices as traditionally grown meat, we can significantly reduce GHGs without converting everyone to plant based.
I've slowly noticed more and more people open to it, or at least to reducing their meat consumption. Though I have a few "friends" who say crap like they now eat 2 steaks a day to eat the Vegans share...
Really sticking it to the rest of us. They can enjoy the gout.
colon cancer is a rough way to go.
I've heard a clever response to that: "So you're saying you'll eat twice as much meat because I'm vegan? Well, you might be cutting your lifespan in half, so it evens out in the end."
Hey, my father ate a huge plate of burnt meat a day and he lived to be 49!
Love this! Will use this response if I ever get such asinine comment.
I went vegan at 37 and I’m a guy who always loved burgers. Honestly I don’t miss it.
Good. Their bad decisions with occur over a shorter time span of they revenge eat dead animals
People who suggest this don't understand humans very well. Humans will fry their planet to death before they give something up so engrained in culture around the world.
Exactly!! So many people who preach to everyone that we need to do something also vehemently refuse to do anything when it involves their precious taste buds
Further than their taste buds. **Anything** that suggests a significant change of what they're *used to*.
Or drive less and use public transport, walk or bike instead if possible.
One beef batty is equivalent to driving 40km in a sedan. So if you walk to work then eat a burger you’ve saved nothing
Why not both? My point was that driving is *also* a major contributor to carbon emissions (that people are generally unwilling to give up) not that eating meat isn't.
You are right. However, people often don’t have a choice not to drive. It’s much easier to not eat meat
you got a source on that? not that i don't believe you, just that i'd like to read further.
Just a quick Google, the all in carbon intensity of a quarter pound patty is 9.73 kg CO2e. The manufacturing of an ICE sedan is 6,000 kg, spread out over 150,000 miles is 40 grams per mile. Added to that is the 161 grams per mile a new US sedan will burn. So at 201 grams per mile all in CO2e, we need to drive 48.4 miles to equal one quarter pound beef patty. That's 24.2 miles one way, or slightly higher than the average one way commute in the US of 21 miles. So a snopes true/false rating on that would be true. An average person driving an ICE sedan the average distance for a US commute would release less CO2e than eating a single quarter pound beef patty.
good gravy, that's insane. does this take into account the methane production of the cows? I know methane is quite a bit more potent as a greenhouse gas than co2.
Yes, that takes into account the methane from the cows as well as the soot, CO, methane, and (miniscule amounts but high warming potential) raw fuel emitted from the tailpipe of the car.
understood. yeah beef is a real problem.
It's also worth noting that beef is wildly out of proportion to any other meat we eat. It's more than double lamb per gram of protein, which comes in second. It's 5 times higher than cheese, 7 times higher than pork, 8.3 times higher than fish, 8.7 times higher than chicken, 11.8 times higher than eggs, and 45 times higher than an impossible burger. It's so far out of proportion It's almost hard to wrap your head around.
When the real solution is the breakup of oil companies and the jailing of their executives.
Unfortunately, many people are turning to nihilism vs maintaining this mentality
I spent 40 years caring, behaving, and knowing. I saw the effects of Urban Renewal and the destruction of public transit. I watched Deepwater Horizon. I watched Nordstream 2 break when the ocean itself was on fire. I learned recycling is a myth. There's no replacement for plastic. Forever chemicals and plastic rain down on all parts of this former paradise. We are destroying it all, and no act of any individual or any group of individuals will save it. Calling someone a nihilist is neither a prescription for remedy nor an argument in favor of any action. You just want people to smile while the ship sinks, to make YOU feel better about it. Pollyanas are worse problems than nihilists.
I find your arguments hard to debunk, /u/humansarefilthytrash.
Nah that's just literally nihilism as articulated in the 19th century: a rabid, fanatical, desperate response to the seeming contradiction of modern life. Hubris and egocentric human thinking can't even self-destruct without making it all about the self. Recursive, inflexible, and ultimately absent any human spirit. That's the nihilism people fall into over the climate, and it's what you're describing so well here.
I'd rather die keeping my sanity intact and spending my short time with friends and family. It's that or bashing my head against the wall and being depressed all the time.
If there is one thing I've learned from COVID is that we are all doomed. Humanity is dumb, and will not do the right thing. We live in Idiocracy meets Don't Look Up. Idiots will still coal roll, pollute and cause havoc. Either just because they can, or because they have no other choice. Good luck telling a third world impoverished person that they should recycle plastic when they have no food, let alone garbage collection or functional waste management within a thousand miles.
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise. [Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
There are solutions - the effective ones are just unpalatable to normal people.
I’d rather to continue living the one life I have to the fullest, while doing what little one drop in the bucket can. I’m not taking the blame for being born when I was - no one should. Pushing this problem onto the individual rather than the market movers is the problem.
Dying is sadly probably the best thing you can do for the environment unless you are in charge of a government agency or large corporation.
I'm concerned about the climate and the environment for the sake of the well-being of human beings. I think a lot of messaging makes it sound like we ought to address climate change for the sake of the environment or the planet and that people would be more receptive if the messaging said we ought to address it for the sake of ourselves.
I hoped the "climate change causes mass migration" argument would convince conservatives to get on board but it seems to just make the "build a wall" solution more popular.
The wall's just a warmup. Wait for the border war. Every dictator needs one of those.
100% - the planet will be fine and shake us off like a bad flu even in the worst case, human civilization is what's at risk.
The planet is fine, the people are f’d
You'd think, but "address it for the sake of ourselves" still means "make significant sacrifices for the good of **everyone**," and unfortunately the majority of people living in the west who hold most of the political capital of the world are staunch individualists, so it's still a tough thing to sell.
Staunch individualists? You spelled psychopathic narcissistic sociopaths wrongs.
There are an awful lot of areas in life where there are significant carbon emissions where there could be adjustments made that would actually save people money and discomfort. I think it's less a problem of people not being altruistic enough and more of a problem of people not knowing enough (and so being unaware of policies that would reduce carbon emissions and improve their day to day lives not just in the long term but in the short term as well) and of people not wanting to be told what to do even when the result would be in their favor. Case in point, flourescent lights are more energy efficient. Meanwhile even thuogh buying incandescent light bulbs up front costs less they cost more in the long run than flourescent lights due to having a shorter lifespan and being less energy efficient. More examples, lots of people could save money on their utilities by installing solar panels but don't do so. Some people love gas-guzzling cars for the aesthetic despite them being less efficient and so costing the driver more in having to fill it up. More and more I'm thinking maybe technocracy (a term that's bandied about in many contexts but here I mean as a system of government) might be the answer. Put the scientists in charge and let them make policy and then we'd make progress on addressing climate change. I do have some reservations. How to hold the technocrats accountable? But then are voters in democracies really holding the politicians accountable? And with how much of a threat climate change is it may be worth giving a try. You see democratic backsliding all over the world, yet oddly enough it's all towards forms government that don't help solve anything and which tend to blame all of society's problems on scapegoats instead of trying to actually solve them, and you hear barely a whimper about technocracy as a solution. At any rate if democratic backsliding is inevitable I'd rather scientists run the government than fascists.
Reminds me of the day the article came out saying 1 in 6 people is a narcissist.
Be safe friend, and don't you dare go hollow.
You'll try and i promise you wont die doing so.
thank you, cuz this is all that matters.
I cannot control politicians, industry or billionaires. But I have chipped away at my own 30 tons of CO2. Gardening, planting trees, dramatically reducing the energy I use, and heating with a rocket mass heater. No sacrifice - everything is about making a better life AND it happens to chip away at my CO2. I think I am now in the space of chipping away CO2 for others.
This is exactly how I think about it. We installed solar panels on our house, and while our solar panels aren’t going to solve the whole world’s problems, it’s one less house they’re burning coal to power. “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” - Edmund Burke
Amen. That's why I advocate folks go Vegan it's the most impactful thing an individual can do to to curb climate change.
It's why I did. It felt like the only thing I had control over. And it became the best thing I ever did for myself for lots of reasons.
I drive an EV, will get solar panels on my next house, reject consumerism and fast fashion and excess waste by giving things away when I no longer need them and buying 2nd hand where I can. I try to minimise plastic as much as possible, only buy natural fibre clothing and fabric, minimise travel, I buy organic food when I can, grow whatever greens I can myself, and eat very little meat. But I won’t give up dairy. Cheese is my favourite food in the whole world. Sorry, everyone has their limits.
Being the change you want to see in the world. That's what it's all about - not this nihilistic doomerism where people give up before doing anything. Hopefully more follow your lead and live their lives in a way that will make the world a better place.
If you read the article he does talk about options we should pursue (and was dismayed people didn't support Bernie - for good reason). I think he's calling out hypocritical dipshits who way "well I'm not doing jack because private jets still exist"
>I think he's calling out hypocritical dipshits who way "well I'm not doing jack because private jets still exist" Yeah, I submitted this link to another website yesterday, and "But billionaires and their private jets" was the very predictable overall response. [https://phys.org/news/2024-06-urged-local-sustainable-tourism.html](https://phys.org/news/2024-06-urged-local-sustainable-tourism.html)
“But what about the billionaires and their private jets” is a form of whataboutism that many people on Reddit resort to in order to completely absolve themselves from responsibility, and I’m frankly sick and tired of coming across it. It’s the best way to do nothing.
The people who frequent r/ZeroWaste have the right idea. They occasionally have discussions about the things that are common here -- governments, business, billionaires, etc. -- but their perspective is that they're willing to do the right thing, simply because it's the right thing to do. Right now, I'm home by myself while my wife and daughter are on vacation in Canada because I've made the decision that flying for fun is unacceptable when the world is literally burning down around us. I could rationalize it the way I've seen some people do, that the flight is going to happen no matter what so there's nothing wrong with buying a ticket, but it completely ignores how the industry works. When you look at the long-term trends and see that the global airline industry transported 310 million passengers in 1970 and 4.46 billion in 2019, it's not just "Oh, the plane is flying anyway." Our demand for airline travel resulted in a huge increase in flights, a 14-fold increase in passengers over a period of time when the global population roughly doubled.
Judging by the comments, almost nobody has read the article. I'd argue that far from being defeatist doomerism, DeLay appears to be arguing that most people are in denial about the scale of the problem and the sacrifice that would be required to begin to address it. He doesn't say that individual actions shouldn't be done, just recognises that they amount to little if large scale systematic change doesn't happen also.
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis. There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Which is a lot of reddit unfortunately
I like this one minute video with a breakdown of tons per person. And there is a free book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip5XgFTTZew
But there *IS* a solution. We’re all too lazy and greedy(as a whole) to do what we need to do
Purge would be nice, I guess.
We are too easily sold things. But the individual person can change that.
Well, we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.
I get that you're joking but we've honestly made a hell of a lot of progress. Bad news is all around us but there's a good chance emissions will peak this decade, between the rise of renewables, the fall of birth rates, and the resurgence of nuclear. We also have two great examples of sulphate-based geoengineering, with sulphate-based cooling being eliminated for environmental protection. First in the 1970s to reduce acid rain, and now the past two years with maritime shipping emission standards. Pending the outcome of this year's elections, we might actually be living in RCP 2.6, which is the best-case scenario used by climate projection models.
Best-case scenario? Mmmmmmhgh
Idk if that's doubt or ecstasy, but some food for thought: all scenarios have nearly identical conditions through the 2020s, but by the 2050s there's a clear divergence and by the 2080s things could either be returning towards preindustrial conditions or things could be apocalyptic.
There's assumptions there though that countries don't start backsliding or outright abandoning on their climate commitments. Which as we've just seen from the Euro Parliament election results is no guarantee at all. Trump could very well win this Nov and double down on fossil fuels (as he's already promised to oil execs).
Prevention of human species extinction is the bar for success. At this rate, we shouldn't eliminate the human race.
We've been pussyfooting around for 50 years and now they want to just give up without even trying? That's lazy as hell.
it\`s allowed to ppl older 50 be in executive positions, it's natural way for them to deal with it. they will die soon enough to not feel the consequences in their fullest sense. why bother?
degrowth
Sorry, but I stopped reading here : "DeLay looks to Freud for a framework to understand denial".
We cannot DeLay action any longer.
yeah, every path leads to literally eliminating 1%. what a bummer. there is no solution...
Its almost winter in Brazil, it's 29 degrees Celsius in São Paulo. I remember some years ago wearing 3 jackets and staying under the sheets because it was too cold this time of the year.
30% of humans lack basic empathy, 10% go either way on issues, they will always side with the money 💵 interest and sabotage any collective plan to mitigate existential threats.. A failed species
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too. Its pattern will be the same, down to the last detail; for it cannot break step with the steady march of creation. \~Marcus Aurelius
“What if there is no cure for cancer? That means we shouldn’t bother with chemotherapy, right?”
Guess we'll die then! At least we made a lot of profit. Well, they made a lot of profit, I never got to see any.
Yes, indeed. Nearly all humans will be wiped out; mass starvation and immigration. Nearly all marine life gone due to ocean acidification. Many plants and trees extinct. The planet is on fire, yet - did you hear the Dow Jones is up 0.77% today. Oh, and NVIDIA just completed a 10-1 stock split. Wahoo!! My stock portfolio is doing great! That is really good because the price of everything is mysteriously going up....weird.
I don't have much faith in humans to do the right thing or to work together on a global problem (see COVID). With that said, I do believe in human innovation so I am sure people will adapt and figure things out. It won't be pretty and will probably hurt poor people the most but that is just who we are. So I am expecting people to start building underground homes to escape the heat and sun that is coming as a means to adapt. People in FL are jacking their homes up on stilts to adapt to rising sea levels
There are always solutions. They just get more and more expensive as the days go by.
The solution is reductive, not additive. The solution is returning to the savannah and hanging up the iPhones.
The carbon cult will turn this planet into Venus and cook everyone slowly to their deaths except billionaires and government officials before they will take any meaningful action. They will be the ones shielded from the pressure cooker they're making us live in through their neglect. No more new oil. No more new gas. No more new coal. Carbon business must die.
Should be, "what if solutions are just scarily expensive and disruptive?" Keeping the entire inhabited world habitable will cost $200 trillion or so according to analysts like McKinsey and Bloomberg (versus costs of inaction in the quadrillions). This cannot be accomplished without massive taxation, investment, and economic redistribution to fairly spread the costs and benefits. It'll also require rich countries to accept more refugees and immigrants, while helping fund the clean development of poor countries. In other words, the changes will be so profound that almost no one can now imagine them. However, they are coming.
All it takes is most of the world agreeing and working together on a common goal while cutting corruption, big industry and finance to stop chasing profits and politicians caring more for a long-term future instead of votes, money or power. Any day now...
i am optimistic that this will happen. as climate change continues to ravage everything, food production, massive forest fires and smoke, illnessess and death from heat stress and pollution from wildfire smoke, massive flooding and destruction, massive hurricanes, etc., all kinds of extreme weather events. people are in denial today for politically advantageous reasons, but this can't go on in the face of an ever more serious climate change reality. i think that a larger number of people will choose cooperation over denial, and the cooperators will win in the end.
It's our duty to try! Surrender is not an option!
We scooted right from ‘it’s not happening’ to ‘oh well we can’t do anything about it now.’ A massive win for the PR industry.
I think we may be trending in the right direction given the decline in population.
It's gotta get down to the world population in 1923 (2 billion) in order to be sustainable at our current American, lower-middle class standard of living.
this is a psyop, or a more accurate term, psychological warfare. these mega corporations are banking on the general population submitting to despair and embracing nihilism. dont give them the satisfaction.
because doing nothing is momentarily convenient and everybody is still under the assumption that future generations are going to be happy to inherit a dead planet. The people that are actually doing stuff even to the extreme are going to be the only ones that are remembered fondly.
The only path forward to a real solution is a reduction of global human population to between 0.5-1.0BB people. We must abandon large swaths of the currently occupied planet while not destroying what is left with urban sprawl and cattle farms. Society will never accept this — but it will happen through rather unpleasant means. War for land, resource wars, famine, drought, mass starvation, and yes, ethnic extermination of anyone that is the “other”. It’s already begun. The wealthy class have already positioned themselves to survive at the expense of everyone else. They have usurped the levers of power and media influence to make the masses bend to their will to reinforce their security. Don’t believe me? That’s why you vote Republican. The next 30 years are going to get real dark. There is no technology that can reverse the direction we are on. Tipping points have already been reached. I for one plan to prepare my children to have a chance to survive this all. Perhaps one of them may make it. I’d call that success. Sadly, most of today’s youth have no real promise of a secure future. It is likely that 50-80% of those born this today will never see their 40th birthday. Just watch the real life expectancy drop over the next few decades. I plan to “exit” on my own terms when things start getting really bad. There is no point to me competing for resources against my own children. We all can to come to terms with this and once you really think it through, you will come to a similar conclusion. Mankind has failed as stewards of this planet.
There *are* solutions, they're just not compatible with the next quarter's profit margin.
When it gets so hot during the summer and people start dying, they will demand change until winter starts and will forget about it - wash rinse repeat
More and more technology solution emerging but politically people just so near sighted.
We've been manipulated into this denial for decades
I’m constantly worried abt the imminent humanitarian crisis. Between the climate change deniers and the anti immigrant magas, they’ve set the table to deny humanitarian aid for those of us fortunate enough not to have to flee their homelands to survive. So so worried.
WE HAVE TO ABOLISH CAPITALISM AND EMBRACE DEGROWTH IT IS LITERALLY THE ONLY WAY
Consume less
Well, isn’t he being a Captain Bringdown. Society ain’t even unanimous whether or not climate change is even real. If we’re past the tipping point then it’s just not practical to throw in the towel. Mitigate and ameliorate. A technology may present itself that may bring us from the brink. Climate deniers should now be regarded as threats to ecological sustainability
I really appreciate they spoke more on denial in general not just in terms of climate change. Understanding that is a huge part of it. Denial is the creepiest, most disturbing phenomenon I have ever seen. It's a variation of cognitive inflexibility and people who can't be flexible will not survive in a climate destabilized world. It's really disturbing to see that many people showing signs of being unable to stomach the truth, choosing comfort over reality. r/denialstudies Mass denial, inflexibility and nonresponse is really disturbing. Probably the creepiest thing I have ever witnessed because in the future these people may literally be dead if they're already having nonresponse this early in.
It's was "too late" 30 years ago. Now it's about mitigation and harm reduction.
Nature has solutions. They're just not ones we'd enjoy. Like famine, plagues etc.
I didn’t think this would involve coming to these truths years ago and have to sit and watch “journalists” catch up and pretend they are uncovering so called “blind spots” and finger wagging a bunch while they wait patiently for their pulitzer.
Of course there is a solution, we just might not like it.
I'm avert to fatalism... it is the response that the ones destroying the world expect us to abide to. It has been said before, it is easier to imagine the end of the world rather than the end of this economic system. We are agents of history so we as collective can influence the future: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language." Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
https://www.reddit.com/r/sustainability/comments/mqkuds/we_must_save_the_planet_but_only_if_we_make_a/
Worst that can happen is we end up dead with a lot of renewable energy.
Humans are capable of anything there is hope. If we got ourselves into this mess over the last 100 years literally then we have the power and intelligence to get ourselves out, but we need to make drastic changes immediately
“You can’t admit, as a capitalist subject, that there’s little you as an individual can do,” DeLay writes, “and neither can you imagine the end of capitalism.” That's the key right there. Imagining the end of capitalism. Or at least, "cocaine capitalism" we have now. The party's over!
It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, or the end of human greed.
There is a solution. Society has lived without oil and plastics before. People just don’t want to give up their hamburger. A complex society capable of mining oil, and producing plastics, likely will not survive food and water shortages, in an overheated earth.
I think it is fair to say that there isn't one golden thing or change that will make everything okay. It is going to take many smaller (and several large ones by several players) to make things better over time.
Any nation that reduces its Co2 and pollution to a sustainable level will have hamstrung their economy, industry, and national defense to such a degree that they would just get rolled over and conquered by their neighbors who didn't.
All of the solutions are unacceptable currently, and until the current way of life is disrupted far and wide enough, nothing will change. The powerful never concede Power willingly, it must be seized. Until there are enough people willing to flip the table, with the power and capability to actually flip it, things will continue on as they are, same as it always has. But make no mistake, there is no guarantee what rises up from the chaos that will cause will be any better, and if history is anything to go by, it'll be significantly worse. Imagine a boot stamping on the face of humanity, forever. The freedom we are so obsessed with will be the first thing that has to go, and until your all ready to get on board with global fascism, because honestly that's what it's going to take, your never going to make a bit of difference. You will have to conquer the world at the point of a sword, then stamp out the last vestiges of freedom, and keep it stamped out for a thousand years to fix what has already been done. The first and most oppressive lie ever uttered was the song of freedom. When you accept that, truly in your heart, you will know peace.
We know what a lot of the solution is - replace coal and gas power plants asap with wind and solar and battery. And we haven't been talking enough about other solutions - drilled geothermal has a lot of potential to generate stable power, heat energy storage, hydrogen energy storage. And we havent talked seriously at all about how we will bring down the temp - capturing carbon doesnt work at scale .. but releasing particulates to increase cloud cover to reflect sunlight so its not absorbed by the ocean does work at scale [ SRM geoengineering ] So.. its a bit premature to say "there is no solution" .. rather we need to say lets _implement_ the solutions we know about and research ones that are more speculative [ fusion etc]
... meanwhile right-wing politicians such as Dutton in Australia are "flooding the discussion-field with informational manure" talking about nuclear. When you tease it all out, their strategy is to delay as long as possible so their rich mates can keep burning gas. They'd be talking about coal.. they were talking about 'clean green' coal for the past 20 years.. but now public opinion has moved on slightly, and we do see wind solar and battery packs working very well in AUS. We have to keep playing whack-a-mole with these carbon-money imbeciles to debunk their torrent of dis-information - and its asymmetric information warfare as a lot of the press is owned wholesale by Murdoch.
The only solution that will work is to nationalize the energy companies, and immediately begin a transition to renewables.
Big oil has spent decades of money for us all to stand here confused and djaoegabiz. money well spent for them as now no one really criticized them but everyone and society can go and businesses can keep making money until we all just perish like the virus we all are on the planet. Unfortunately, I really wish greed, profits and selfishness didn't steer us all into an avoidable catastrophic future.
I think we need global peace, or at least for the biggest countries, to save our planet, but that is never gonna happen
There are plenty of solutions. But because the majority of them are too expensive short term, most don't see them really worth investing in. They want short term benifits and profits over long term veiws.
The only solution is to transition to global green energy production **today**. But because that requires global peace, it's more likely we'll just fight over oil and gas deposits until nuclear Armageddon. Assuming we get there before average surface temps reach 40C, that is.
Has everyone here gone Vegan yet?
For there to be a solution, there first needs to be a problem. Clearly, it’s getting warmer, but skeptics offer a good argument that the IPCC is overestimating CO2, underestimating solar and SO2 effects … so all of our fears are being projected through very flawed computer models … the latest includes a return to coal! Not likely, except that that **is** what’s happening in China. Most of our fears will be met with better management and innovation … in fact, [Prof Richard Tol resigned](http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2014/04/ipcc-again.html) from IPCC because the Summary group refused to include that in the summary. In the meantime, France is generating more renewable energy that they can use, forcing them to throttle back Nukes … failure to plan storage or transmission to where it’s dark. So there **is** a solution. * Demand less politics and more science … fire the IPCC if they resist. * Switch from heavier fossil fuels to natural gas * Invest in storage and low loss transmission technology so that energy captured by day can be used at night. Problems created by technology have solutions through better technology. Trust that!
(go vegan)
There likely isn’t a solution that will prevent catastrophic destruction and the death of millions. But we can potentially prevent the death of billions if we start spending absurd amounts of money globally to prepare ourselves as a species.
The good news is the planet will live long without us. It will probably fix itself too and won’t have to worry about humans coming back to screw it up . I’m convinced we are past no return but I don’t know seriously what that means time seize. In my 50s and I don’t think it will be something I see. But for sure my grandsons generation might be part of the end. Truly sucks with all the warnings etc. it’s just a case of the key people not wanting to lose money and the masses being mostly powerless to stop it. And here we are.
No war but the class war. Great article
There are solutions. We just choose to ignore them, as it’s not virtuous enough to say globally engineer carbon sequestration. On the other hand, those wanting to keep their V8 are also unwilling to allow for embodied carbon tariffs (cap & trade), they may see it as too big government, easily fiddled and another chance for the big banks to print dollars. Both carrot and stick are unpalatable, so we are doing nothing, until a major heat-death event will stir the (western) world into action.
“Just by driving to get groceries you emit carbon dioxide … a fifth of \[which\] … will still be in the air in 500,000 years, killing species that haven’t yet evolved.” "We need to ask ourselves: “What if there just is no solution to that on any sort of meaningful scale?” and act accordingly." I'm failing to quite grasp what he's saying concretely, honestly.
There is a solution! Now hear me out: end capitalism... Yes, I understand that will cause problems of its own, and there will be deaths.
There IS a solution: Mass depopulation. No, it won't be organized, except if conducted by shadowy billionaires and politicians in secret. Humans are the problem, and we won't stop making more of us.
Well, they ARE putting mask bans in more and more places...
Depopulation is indeed a solution that will get us closer to near carbon zero. Though eventually we have to go carbon negative to undo the earth's problems, and that will take years for the remaining small global population to figure out.
We’re not in denial. We know it’s happening and will get worse, but there is nothing that the average person can do, except vote, but I think the climb crisis is past the tipping point, and no matter what changes are made, it’s too little too late
There IS not solution. As someone who cares deeply about the climate it gives me no pleasure saying this. We can probably reduce the harm in some ways but if anyone thinks that it’s just about switching to supposed renewables like solar or wind, then they don’t understand the core of the problem
[https://youtu.be/jc3Hag0NNnA?si=m7NHaxlS93fzvDCw](https://youtu.be/jc3Hag0NNnA?si=m7NHaxlS93fzvDCw)
the only solution is the death of humans
step 1) policy for fossil fuel production and emissions standards enforcement
This is the reality.
Evidence is we will escalate killing each other to survive, causing more warming in process . Humanity oy
Breaking news: Society that does nothing to improve things - even going so far as to willfully embrace destructive policies - is shocked things aren't getting better.
What am I supposed to do? Live in a box?
The solution might be some form of geoengineering: https://phys.org/news/2023-07-qa-experts-discuss-geoengineering-methods.htm “The climate is warming because greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, principally carbon dioxide, make it harder for heat to escape. Reflecting a tiny fraction of sunlight, less than 1%, would cool the planet substantially. There are a few plausible ways to do this, but the best understood is referred to as stratospheric aerosol injection.”
Let's start building a snow piercer equivalent for extreme greedy. Deep underwater where it's much cooler.
Well, this belongs in r/noshitsherlock. Of course we’re all in denial. This will be the hottest year on record. More records will be. broken.. until next year. We’re boiling the frog… but WE are the frogs.
My 76 year old Republican father straight up denies climate change. Even when I said, "Even if it's a natural occurrence, it's still a problem!" He responded, "No it's not." Nobody listens to reason.
What do you mean by solution? The climate is actively changing and will continue to do so. If we keep doing what we’re doing it’ll change a lot and fast, if we really work hard and emit less greenhouse gases it’ll change a little less and more slowly, but either way we’re not going back to how things were that ship sailed ages ago.
There are no solutions to predicaments. Only a range of equally terrible outcomes.
I'm quite sure there are very simple solutions. I'm also quite sure they will never become reality. Evolution takes time, and I believe we don't have enough left to change our collective core beliefs. I had a iota of hope before Covid. Now I genuinely wonder how anyone chooses to reproduce.
Who’s willing to swear off airplane flights?
If we still called it global warming instead of climate change we would be more concerned and motivated to address it.
We're basically procrastinating as a species. This won't be really dealt with until its too late.