this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
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This image is wrong. 2016 was only 8 years ago. Yet our current temperature is well over +1C.
And I read somewhere that current ocean temps are more indicative of +3℃ of warming.
Like, most politicians are still f**king around like +1.5℃ is still decades off. We’ve already passed that point by most any reasonable, rational, and non-politically-farked standard.
Oh yeah. But what can you do? People prefer their comfort to the survival of their own children. Which is doubly worse because the boomer and X generation literally enslaved their own children, so, not only the newer generations will likely die out of famine, overheating, or violence from their own peers, but in the meanwhile they also have a terrible time.
It's convenient to blame the people at large for what's happening, and of course to some degree we all have a responsibility to do what we can, but it's also important to look at where the CO2 is coming from, who is making efforts to reduce it, and who is making efforts to prevent any limitations from being crafted. This is obviously something that ties heavily into capitalism, big business, and corrupt governments.
To put it another way, you can't recycle your way out of global warming. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
Yeah, absolutely, but just like with major tragedies can be traced back to only a few meaningful people (holocaust, Cambodian genocide, Bangladesh genocide, Circassian genocide, Armenian genocide, Greek genocide, Rwandan genocide, Assyrian genocide, Chechen genocide, Hutus genocide, Isaaq genocide, Guatemalan genocide, Libyan genocide, the NKVD "Polish operation", the great Chinese famine, Soviet famine of the 1930s, ...; to only mention some from the past century), the participation of enough people is necessary to enact anything. And the inaction of most of the remainder.
As the famous unattributed adage says:
Point is: mass consumption is necessary to enable the abusers to such degree.
This ties into enabling any government to mindlessly mass-produce CO2. As it turns out, the current capitalist degeneration we call "the economeh" puts megacorporations in charge, and lets them "trade" their "pollution allowance". Such practice exacerbate the problem, and are completely insane.
But unfortunately the mass production of CO2 is not limited to capitalism and western societies. Any human development needs energy, that is how we transform what is around us. Using "fossil fuels" is several orders of magnitude more potent than not. Lemme rephrase that: generating this amount of CO2 is what enables our lifestyle.
The only viable alternative is using nuclear energy, and the vast majority of the population is terrified of it, so it realistically is not going to happen anytime soon.
Anyhow, such lifestyle (cars, new clothes twice a year, meat at every other meal, 20C in the house at all times, a constant internet connection on the go, comfort services, etc) is what the overwhelming majority of humans want, and that is the actual problem.
TL;DR: capitalism, or at least our inbred redneck version of it, makes matters a lot worse. But the problem is with uncontrolled human "development", and letting people consume mindlessly.
You vote with your wallet, and humanity has voted for climate change.
This isn't about recycling. Recycling at the scale we are envisioning it is utter gaslighting. It barely works, and when it does, it produces CO2 as well. If we wanted to have an impact, we should only accept products that last several decades, reuse and repair.
No, the mass-pollution that is causing the 6th extinction event has been entirely, totally, completely, unequivocally, and unreservedly enabled by us.
Let's stop hiding behind those "big bad capitalist baddies". They are absolutely despicable assholes, but we enabled them.
And by "we" and "us" I mean "those of us, relatively to their buying power". Which brings me to the point I was making above: the older generations, that accumulated riches, and monopolized ownership, funneled all the money, and decided to invest (the part of this money that they didn't greedily accumulate or reuse to further their monopoly) into comfort and status consumption, which, in turn, are responsible for enabling the industrial actors to pollute as much.