How bad do we let things get? Should we wait until the planet can’t sustain life anymore? Should we wait until it’s 100 degrees F in the Artic? Until wildfires blanket entire continents or the last glacier is gone? Should we wait until fascist billionaires take even more from us? Until there are Flock cameras at every mail box? Maybe we should wait until the wells run dry or the tornadoes never stop. When is it going to be enough? I’m so tired of seeing things getting worse. Every. Single. Day. I’m ready. I’ve been ready. How about you?
How do we coordinate? How do we look after each other? What is the signal? If we don’t work together then we are just continuing our slow march to destruction to the drum of the parasitic billionaires. Please, for us, for the cats, the dogs, the birds and trees. The fish and the whales, the beatles and the centipedes. Please tell me it’s worth it to you, that you’re willing to get uncomfortable, that you’re willing to fight. There are more of us than them, and we are rapidly running out of time to make that mean something.
You want to riot to fix climate change? Ok, let’s say you will get everyone to riot, abolish the government and kill the elites. What will you do next to solve climate change?
Ban* cars? People will be against it. Ban beef? People will be against it. Ban air travel? You guessed it, people will be against it. Majority of people support measures that they think will not affect them like carbon taxes and renewable energy but if you look at actual, consumer level changes you will see a big drop. Only 34% of drivers support ban on ICE cars.
Look how much people bitch about paper straws. You think they will agree to actually limiting CO2 emissions by using less energy, traveling less, eating less meat and buying less useless stuff? The problem are not just the the elites and the billionaires. WE are the problem.
10% richest people account for half of the emissions. To be in the top 10% you have to make over $30k a year. To stop climate change pretty much everyone on lemmy would have to agree to big sacrifices. Are you ready to significantly lower your quality of life or you just want to riot because you think it will help you save it?
*By ban I mean limit by making more expensive.
I think you’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head here, most people don’t want to sacrifice what they have for the “greater good”, even if they intellectually know it is necessary to avoid losing even more.
As I see it, there are two ways of dealing with this; either the government forces people to make those changes, which would be massively unpopular, and probably lead to the government falling, or we find ways to make the necessary changes without people having to make massive sacrifices. This would probably involve things like a worldwide push to renewable energy sources, replacing ICE based transport with electric, likewise replacing industrial processes with non-emitting versions, finding ways to grow meat protein in an industrial process rather than farming it, and miriad other big changes.
It would be a massive endeavour, involving international coordination, major infrastructure projects, and a certain amount of state imposed industrial planning, but I think it would still be easier than getting everyone to give up the things they like.
EU is pretty much doing what you’re describing: it has some (weak but still) EV transition plan, it’s pushing hydrogen (to de-carbonize industries), it’s installing a lot of renewables. I would say they doing as much as people and industries are letting them. Push any harder and industries will move, people will lose their jobs and you will see even more discontent. And doing more would cost money which would mean higher taxes or less investment which people would also not like. We could tax the rich but this also isn’t very likely as there will always be a place for them to hide their money in (if not US than Russia or Argentina).
This is how it’s going:
This is what “best effort” gets us right now. Even if by some miracle all other countries started doing the same (and as we know US for example is doing the exact opposite) we would see 50 more years of emissions. This is obviously not going to happen so we’re pretty much fucked. Rioting will definitely not change any of that.
Kind of true, but industries are working to slow the transition down like working against modernising the electric grid.
So it’s time for best effort, without quotation marks.
Of course industries are trying to slow down the process but I don’t think overcoming them is as easy as trying harder. As I said, they do employ a lot of people so you have to modernize them without destroying them. It’s a slow process and you have to fight lobbyist and corruption on every step.
Then we have to keep thinking. It’s worth finding a way to overcome corruption and other obstacles to transform in years and not decades.
Effective leadership is necessary to accomplish these things. People didn’t like it when leaded gas was banned, or asbestos. People hated seat belts and life jackets. Sometimes the government has to operate against the will of some people for the good of all people.
No one was rioting for or against seat belts. It was a simple policy that some people didn’t like but it wasn’t opposed by the majority. To solve climate change the people you want to riot would actually have to sacrifice something.
“Some” people? Sure. Majority? I don’t see it. We’re seeing so little progress on climate change because ordinary people oppose most of the solutions. No one is going to riot to get something they don’t want.
oil/gas already pacified protests, demostration agains global warming for a while now. they funded all these companies so they dont have to , plus they fund the protests themselves that vandalize publicproperty to get the public to side against them.