this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
168 points (99.4% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5189 readers
462 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think we will be saved just in time by nuclear fusion and nobody will learn from this, just like nobody learned from COVID. The majority will probably shrug and go "see, wasn't that bad".
I wish I shared your optimism. A deus ex machina solution is extremely unlikely. It would be more effective to attempt to forcibly sieze control of the mechanisms of pollution than to hope for surprise salvation. When you are being actively killed, sometimes violence really is the answer.
Yep, "violence is never the answer" are words of those who will end up dead at the hands of violent people. Violence is the last option and should only be used when all other avenues have been exhausted, but to say it's never an option is just naive.
Even if we did develop fusion, how long would it take to switch to it and would it even be economical? A ton of places still use coal and other fossil fuels simply because they're cheap or were already built. It's hard to make assumptions about how much fusion would cost when we still don't have it. Nuclear fission's fuel is cheap (cause so little is needed), yet nuclear is still insanely expensive because building the plants is a difficult task mired in red tape and the general public is afraid of it (on that note, I'm not sure how many people even have a concept of fusion beyond perhaps what Spiderman 2 made them believe).
There's also the divide in the world. Even if the rich western countries got fusion, would everyone? The west also got covid vaccines early while much of the rest of the world had to wait. And further drawing on the covid analogy, some countries pretended there wasn't an issue, which already is going on with climate change.
If we haven't learned by the time we get fusion that climate is global and should be tackled globally, we deserve extinction.
Maybe God will save us.
Thots and prayers
Good one.
He will sort us out