I’m sure it has nothing to do with the billionaire pedophiles not giving a fuck.
Of course not. It’s not enough people recycling their grocery bags.
Not to say you shouldn’t recycle.
Of course not. But it does feel a little silly when there are town-sized data centres being built in every direction and billionaires are just “choosing” to break all laws. Meta’s got gas turbines running to power theirs and they just said they’re gonna do it for another year. Who’s gonna stop ‘em? Everyone is too busy working and trying to survive to stop them from pretty literally torching our futures and especially our children’s futures.
Things will need to get pretty bad before we see any kind of justice or change of direction, I fear ☹️
Unfortunately we’ve been duped, a lot of it sadly ends up in landfills.
Yeah, I’ve become something of a refuse-police everywhere I go.
It pisses me off that you can just put whatever in the bin and it gets disappeared and you’ve done a great job caring for the planet.
Most of it is just plain not recyclable. Never was. Some can theoretically be downcycled into expensive ugly park benches that no one wants so no one bothers to do that. Only PET can be “re” cycled, but plenty isn’t.
Glass and metals are recycled pretty frequently, but yeah pretty much everything is just garbage
In some less advanced countries, like the United States of America.
Billionaires do give a fuck. They just don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves, and maybe close family/friends to some extent.
If I were to hazard a guess I’d guess billionaires fall into 3 camps regarding climate change. Those that still don’t believe in it or that their will be any consequences. They are probably in the minority of billionaires (I do believe most of them believe climate change is real at this point, but their unbridled greed won’t allow them to admit it in public).
Then you’ve got the billionaires who do believe in climate change split into 2 more camps. Those that are so old that they predict they won’t live long enough to see the large scale consequences effect them, and thus don’t care. Finally, those that are young, but believe they can save themselves, without having to help save the world. Those are the billionaires building underground bunkers and compounds. Planning to ride it out from their private utopias.
In any case the power factions’ agendas combined have the effects of accelerationism
Gotta make them dollas. /s
‘Sharp acceleration’ meaning 75% faster warming in the last decade compared to the 40 years previous, and blowing past the 1.5° target in 3-4 years. No speculation was given, but I think it’s likely we’re seeing the limits of oceanic absorption of co2 and heat. The ocean’s latent heat capacity has flattened the curve for more than a century, and it’s very hard to predict when that will run out, but sea surface temperatures spiking all over have been good evidence that we have passed a major tipping point in the last few years.
They also banned sulphur oxide in ship fuel which would have had a cooling effect, that was hiding the full extent of the damage and is slowly dissipating
Won’t be long until we start doing that again on purpose
Good news is cloud seeding is viable? Bad news is we’re probably gonna need it.
How great fixing pollution with more pollution.
🎵 The solution to pollution is…more pollution? 🎵
Actually it’s kinda good news as it shows we can make direct impact to the climate. Just with a substance actually made for it.
Don’t take it too seriously, there is an effect but it’s not that large. And anyways, the change in maritime fuel standards happened in 2020, while this trend goes back to 2015. A geoengineering project is just going to cause more problems, we don’t know nearly enough about how the world works, truly.
Geoengineering is the only thing that can really blunt this at this point…
Delaying the collapse of civilization by changing the chemistry of the atmosphere further will only serve to hurt the entire ecosystem to allow a few more years of our planet-wide rape. Decarbonizing was the only hope for both human civilization and Earth to survive together. Our choice now is to accept that or possibly kill everything in desperation.
Death from overheating the entire earth < Death from near constant acid rain?
Acid rain is not that big of a deal, the amount of sulfur over oceans isn’t really a problem. Acid rain is only an issue in certain areas. Sulfur emissions aren’t global.
I’ve read that the models used to predict the rate of change were too optimistic or an assumption about them was too conservative and thus not very realistic. Now we have data showing the models under-predicted the rate of change, so one argument is that we were already on this path since decades ago, we just didn’t model it right.
In any case, we’re all fucked so who gives a shit anyway no?
Is there a name for when we know what the right thing to do is but we keep not doing it?
Great Filter.
No way in hell we’re facing an extinction event. Unimaginable human suffering, probably, but humanity will persist.
Isolated pockets in relatively protected areas. Global society won’t survive it. Most of the places we grow food won’t be able to grow food, that’s already accelerating. Ocean acidification kills that food source. Blue ocean event accelerates runaway heating leading to massive hurricane force continental storms. Amoc shuts down and Europe ices over. Humanity may persist but civilization won’t.
Vast current areas become arid but vast areas in Siberia and Canada become arable. Very bad but not extinction for humans. Likely extinction for many species though.
None of that thawed soil will be worth a damn for growing at any scale. Like yeah there will be areas that are more or less hospitable but large scale agriculture will not recover
We are driving 200 species extinct a day and that figure is increasing every year. Eventually we run out of nature and we go with it.
The temperature on the planet has never in its history changed so abruptly, which means plants and animals don’t have enough time to adapt.
that’s also not true! vast current areas become
aridtropical. see the tropical rainforest. it’s the hottest and simultaneously wettest regions on earth.
Humanity may persist
Yes, that’s what I said
Most of the places we grow food won’t be able to grow food
that’s just not true! higher temperature makes food grow better, not worse.
Not if it includes lots and lots of drought. Besides of course that lots of the now commonly used crops definitely have an upper limit where heat is beneficial.
Not if it includes lots and lots of drought
yeah but typically, the hottest regions on earth (tropical rain forest, directly on the equator) are also the wettest regions on earth at the same time.
that the sahara and arizona are dry, has nothing to do with the solar irradiation itself, but instead with the wind patterns.
We are adaptable creatures with command of technology. So we’ve got that going for us. We also have temperature limitations in which we can live, and so do our food sources. Then there’s the issue of potable water.
It really depends on how far we’re pushed the planet’s ecosphere. It could do like before (most recent is the PETM) and hover high, then eventually equalize back into something not the same as we had, but similar. It’s done this before, albeit after millions of years. Or it could find a new equilibrium in another state, aka hothouse. Not Venus-like, as some media has spun it, but its own version of feedback to retain a lot more heat than now. Not great for anything that evolved in this climate.
Fun fact: the PETM was the most recent heating event, 56 million years ago. Some species went extinct, others were able to adapt and survive as they evolved into smaller forms. The fun fact is that they adapted because the rate of heating change was over a large amount of time, many hundreds of thousands of years. Now look at us, a spike on the geological temperature graph in (looks at data) less than a 100 years (a few decades, really). So what kind of inertia does a more rapid acceleration usually give compared to a slower one? But hothouse Earth is just a speculation, just a guess. We don’t know how far this will go.
Really depends on what happens with phytoplankton; if they can adapt well enough to survive the excessive heat. Some of them can but others are dying out. If we lose all of them, then everything that breaths oxygen is extremely fucked since they make ~70-80% of that oxygen. Then we only have plants and forests like the amazon to make O2 (and we all know how that ones going), and then we would also have to deal with the gasses produced by all the oceans on the face of the earth dying and everything in them rotting… if they’re not par-boiled.
But will that subsequent civilization get to space again?
The Great Filter doesn’t necessarily mean we need to go extinct as a species. Destroying our capability of advanced technology is enough. Which it certainly will.
I’ve often wondered… What if we are way wrong about the level of danger, and ultimately climate change will turn Earth into another Venus, and we only find out once it’s too late?
History has taught that humanity wont stop until it has gone too far.
Is there a name for when we know what the right thing to do is but we keep not doing it?
Hubris.
All of the climate models have adjustable parameters. We are still within the bounds of the worst case scenarios but scientists are always afraid to claim too much. An academic’s reputation is a lot less recoverable than a pop star or politician in the sense that they, and their colleagues, actually take their words and predictions seriously. I don’t want to completely dismiss the effect of lobbying and corruption toward the downplaying of global warming, but making smaller-than-necessary claims is a common sight in most academic fields.
I think it’s mostly in fields with exponential outcomes, which experiences the too conservative estimates.
We as a species has a really hard time understanding exponential/accelerant movement, we expect the next decade to change as much as the previous one. Despite every decade has been changing more than the previous one did
Sometimes I open up nullschool and just stare at the El Niño on the southern pacific. Looks like a gaping wound.
We’re all trying to find who did this
“When after all, it was you and me”.
Turns out, the real treasure is the global catastrophe we made along the way.
And by “we” I mean the ghouls running the world.
We have had the technology to completely switch to sustainable energy for at least 20 years, but we haven’t because it wouldn’t be profitable to the capitalist class. This problem isn’t caused by us, it’s caused by them.
Pleased to meet you, hope you’ve guessed my name!
… Capitalism. My name is capitalism.
Especially if “you and me” includes corporations
1.5°C Threshold Could Be Exceeded Before 2030
Come to Europe one of these days. We’re at 2.3°C.. Come and see our cities getting closer to temperatures of Phoenix, or the many forest fires, the droughts, powerplants shutting down because of a lack of water, transportation issues. The idiots saying more CO2 being good for plants can ask the farmers how things are going. We’re not having a good summer.
Anecdotally, just the other day, I roamed around a little and realized that the large rapeseed fields around my city are all totally
burned. EDIT: meant to write: shriveled up. Dry as bone.
Just… gone.
There is some hope if we chip at it as much as we can. No action is too small:
- less travelling. Life is fun near home. Happiness isn’t tied to an airplane and a beach far away
- eat less animals. You ll get used to whatever diet in a few weeks. It doesnt have to be vegan or nothing. Also, beans are delicious:)
- bamboo toilet paper. Grows fast, renewable.
- plant bushes, trees. Look up local resilient species. I’ve been planting everywhere I can. You can call your local municipality, they have regreening programs.
- buy less stuff. Available tech is already good enough.
- vote with your wallet. This is the only real power we have over corporations, imo. Lots of great easy to repair brands. Fair trade, etc.
If we convince ourselves we are screwed, we ll give up. Be the hero of your own story. YOU DO NOT NEED TO GET IT 100% RIGHT. Any improvement is improvement. We all live different lives, and the economy is hard on alot of us.
I believe:)
Edit: I get that industries/billionaires represent a majority of this issue. I also believe that change starts home. We gotta tackle this at every level, even if it seems lost. The alternative is watching it happen and wait for the others to change. This is a prime “tragedy of the common” problem. You drink filtered tap water? Well those plastic bottles dont get made, thrown away. Do this a lifetime and those bottles represent a hill of waste that never existed.
I m rooting for you, for us!
Unfortunately, you missed the mark. The individual is not the problem and will not make an iota of difference.
Billionaires are the enemy. They are useless. They are pitting the average citizen against one another. There is no good billionaire.
If we dont support billioniares business’, and turned “the individual” into an organized mass, it would work.
I dont know if this opinion, to change using amazon and the other big retailers, will ever come though. I saw someone legit promoting aliexpress for a product not too long ago, and I was surprised no one gave them shit for it.
If Working for and using, for example, amazon, was suddenly shamed and everyone stopped using it, it would stop making the billionaire at the top money. If no one buys the product, no one is willing to work for the company, the company would disolve. bezos still wouldnt be broke, or held to account, but this revenue stream would stop.
Will it happen though? I feel like a nhilist for saying, I dont think so.
deleted by creator
The kys comedy is too low hanging fruit nowadays. Do better.
deleted by creator
12% of global emissions are individual car drivers alone. The individual is a sizable portion of the problem, and we need a multi pronged approach that attacks corporations outsized impact and reduces certain emissions from individuals as well.
There are over a billion cars on the road. Individually it is nothing and 12% is a small percentage. Where is the other 88. I’m sick of this blame the individual when companies are doing most of the polluting. We could stop driving all cars today and it wouldn’t help. But anything to keep arrow going up. Only thing people can really do is consume less but that is a hard ask for Americans who consume far more then other countries.
and yes, more putting the onus on us, when all of our individual yearly pollution barely amounts to a day of pollution released by average industry.
You know it was industrial propaganda that started the whole personal responsibility thing to begin with right? to shift blame away from themselves and onto you and me.
I mean, yeah, you can make yourself feel good by reducing, but its doing fuckall compared to industrial release.
I understand the sentiment, but doesn’t “the industry” essentially produce things that are for “us”, even if indirectly?
Factories don’t exist for their own sake, they exist to make an end product for people. So if you want to change that, we do need to consume less, like the parent you replied to said.
CEOs burning tons of fuel riding luxury jets does nothing for us. AI data centers clamoring for more electricity will do nothing for us.
I get what you’re saying. It’s a both are true type of thing in my opinion. Our impact pales in comparison to the ultra wealthy. What gets left out of the conversation is that the AI data centres, factories, and transport trucks exist because there is demand. Each and every one of us is part of that demand and by significantly changing our lifestyles we can change our demands.
Your argument is valid though, the wealthy need to be the first to reduce their demand and by the most. Also that they’re not going to do that without the threat of state violence, just like we’re obligated to be lawful on the threat of state violence. It’s just that we’re not absolve of our contribution to climate change because the ultra wealthy have contributed more.
The point I poorly made, is that it’s capitalists/capital interests, the uber rich and techno-fascists that are clamoring for AI. It’s not “EVERYONE.”
Demand for a thing doesn’t mean that the poor and rich are demanding the thing equally.
The point I poorly made was the uber rich, and their greed are driving global warming far more than your average person.
I recycled like a good little soldier through the 80’s, 90’s, 2000’s, 2010’s and early 2020’s, only to find out that much of our plastic waste was just sold to third world countries rather than ACTUALLY being recycled. I’ve eliminated plastic everywhere I can in my life, and reuse it until it degrades and it’s got to be tossed.
I keep my thermostat set at 62 in the winter, and 78 in the summer to reduce my demand for electricity, even though these aren’t comfortable temperatures, they are tolerable. I already eat a primarily vegetarian diet, not because I want to, but because I am being priced out of meat. I repair my shoes and clothes to get a second life out of them. I don’t own a car and ride a bicycle. (Before I moved closer to work I’d average 45 miles a day between commute and errands on the way home.)
Corporate interests have actively hampered transitions to greener energy and public transportation, and bicycle infrastructure, (at least in the USA where I am.)
The point I am trying to make here is that the poor, and lower middle class don’t have large footprints to begin with, and have reduced consumption due to inflation and shit pay. Corporate interests and the uber wealthy are the biggest drivers of climate change.
I understand the sentiment, but doesn’t “the industry” essentially produce things that are for “us”, even if indirectly?
No. They produce for income. For brand imaging. To keep shelf space and maintain market presence.
And they do that by producing significantly more than the market requires. More than customers would ever want to buy.
They do it by making low quality slop products that they specifically engineer to be as unrepairable as possible, to fail as soon as they can get away with it, to force consumers to buy replacements more frequently than they would ever want to.
Do you go to the store and go “Wow, I wish this brand would generate more waste to take up shelf space so (competitor) cant have it?”
Do you look at a brand and go “I will only support this company if it fills the landfills every 3 months with perfectly usable products?”
Do you go “Wow, I wanna pay 500 dollars for this device thats gonna fail in 18 months and need to be replaced, because repairing it is gonna cost so much that its better just to get a new one again”?
Do you go “god, I like this product, I really hope entire communities lost their access to clean water to cool the AI’s that generated the design?”
No?
Neither do I.
Because they don’t serve the interest of the customer. They serve the market, which has taken a life of its own (which is especially apparently with the AI scam bubble, where companies keep making promises to buy future products from each other with the same imaginary trillion dollars that keeps getting passed around, generating endless imaginary value without producing anything… and when the AI bubble pops, its going to crash harder than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs)
If they served the interests of the customers, they’d keep prices low, and pay high, and produce quality goods that people would have the money to buy.
By putting the burden on the end consumer for climate change and pollution, they are escaping blame, and are allowed to continue to pollute and accelerate the decline of our climate. Its like blaming you for growing a tomato, while ignoring the industrial farm that mowed down 2 million acres of south american rainforest to produce alfalfa for saudi horses.
If people stop buying a thing, any company that wants money is going to stop making that thing.
They have no financial incentive to pay the cost of manufacturing if they can’t sell their widget.
No. They produce for income
I never said they were altruistic. I’m saying: at the end of the line, there is a consumer buying the stuff they polluted for.
PREACH. Can I get a hallelujah!
I don’t think you should think about it in terms of blame, I think that’s a big part of the propaganda. Seeding of anger, frustration, and apathy. Rather than allowing empowerment, organizing, and hope.
Blame should only be reserved for those that act with careless disregard. And doing things that are good for the environment shouldn’t be seen as ‘paying back’. You are actively doing more than you should and letting your actions speak louder than your words. And those actions can (and should) be part of building the collective that will force those truly responsible from stopping.
That’s my one wish for lists like OP posted. It should always contain that the only lasting change is organizing.
This sounds like some empty corporate focus tested “Don’t blame us, its not our fault” BS.
Did you respond to the wrong person?EDIT: Okay, you’re responding elsewhere, so you’re just not going to respond to leaving a nonsensical but also kind of vile comment? Crazy, considering I was mostly agreeing with you, other than saying you shouldn’t accept the propagandized idea that people are or should be doing something to make up for some perceived guilt. Rather than doing it to empower themselves and foster collective action.
industry doesn’t need to pump out so much product if we consume less
Industry doesnt need to overproduce so much product right now, but it does, and sends tons of it to landfill every quarter
So if its already doing it, what makes you think they’ll stop doing it if sales reduce a few % points.
deleted by creator
Where did I even allude to that?
I very clearly laid out where the problem is that we have to deal with. Which is the actual drivers of climate change. Not you choosing to drive to work instead of walking 8 miles in the heat.
deleted by creator
No worries.
If people didn’t consume so much corporations would have to change. But people need the latest phone, car and whatever else.
If that was true landfills wouldnt be filled at the end of every season with perfectly usable goods.
Individual action was a myth designed by FF companies to shift responsibility
This is true but individual action is still necessary. Just because it’s important that we hold corporations and the wealthy accountable and curb industrialized pollution doesn’t mean that the average person isn’t needing to make significant changes. We can’t both maintain a consumer mindset and abdicate individual responsibility while also demanding sweeping societal changes.
We can consume the wealthy and abdicate them of the responsibility of carrying on and also demand change. Especially if we consume them while they’re still alive, as a mob, and do it with dull forks.
The survivors will be far more willing to listen.
We can’t both maintain a consumer mindset and abdicate individual responsibility while also demanding sweeping societal changes.
And you think it’s the “demanding sweeping societal changes” that has to go?
Maybe we need to start with the individualism and “consumer mindset”?
And you think it’s the “demanding sweeping societal changes” that has to go?
Not even slightly. I’m just trying to point out that neither of them “have to go;” shouting down someone advocating for either form of action helps no one.
And this stance betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the relative scale of damage each causes.
bamboo toilet paper. Grows fast, renewable
The bidet gang would like a word with you.
(Seriously though: I agree that every action counts, but I also think that, even if the majority of the population followed that list perfectly, the globalized corporate structure would still be operating in such a way that the personal impact wouldn’t be noticeable. When agriculture produces more than what’s sold, they have no issue dumping the items that don’t sell into the ground. Clothing outlets will shred unsold merch instead of giving it away. The waste is built into the system and a structural change is needed NOW if we are to survive.)
If there was a decline in consumption of climate harming products, large enough that these companies could see it in thier financial reports, I cant believe it wouldnt have any effect on the market.
Youre points are valid, and I agree with them, but if a majority wanted to (ideally, and I dont think they will) I think “voting with our wallet” would work, it is simple, but not practical because humans seem to love convience.
Correct. Convenience is just too important. Also status symbols because people just want to be seen as big/successful/important/… regardless if that damages things.
The population grew 4 billion in the last few decades. Climate damaging corps that undercut the cost of responsibly produced products will still win out unless there’s regulation that forces them to be responsible. Snapple shifted from glass to plastic bottles. It’s simply cheaper to ship plastic with less damages, as an example.
You could have half of the world population buying responsibly, but these companies will still do large scale damage from the other half.
Plastic bottles are a good example. They are much lighter, so far less handling and transportation cost. Having multiple shapes for various products/companies makes it harder for collection etc. of glass. And glass simply takes a shit ton of energy (natural gas) to produce and recycle. So the climate cost is not simply “yes glass is better for the climate”. It only is when it gets refilled a ton of times and the transportation is only short distances (so when there is a high population density)
Anyway, when halve stop buying cheap shit they don’t even need, we will not only save that many resources but also avoid all of the trash that it inevitably ends up being a few years later. Companies would not continue production of the things.
Anyway, when halve stop buying cheap shit they don’t even need, we will not only save that many resources but also avoid all of the trash that it inevitably ends up being a few years later. Companies would not continue production of the things.
I doubt half will make them stop production. They’d shift to another wasteful market.
The faster fix would be for companies to purposefully stop producing the garbage that isn’t needed, and to improve the goods that are needed so they aren’t as harmful.
Sure, we can do that, but keep in mind that unilateral individual actions will not make the difference, all you can do is trying to create more broad awareness, form coalition and support for tighter laws and regulation, in order to have meaningful effect.
Also avoid blaming or moralizing individuals for their own choices, this will cause fatigue and infighting, which will distract from focus on policy change.
If we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide today, crashing the world economy in the process, we would still have to deal with the same temperature levels we have right now. We not only need to reduce emissions, but we now have to reverse it. Nothing short of an immediate global transition to nuclear power and/or nuclear fusion coming online will stop what is happening.
Nothing short of immediate global transition to
nuclear power and/or nuclear fusionrenewable energy + storage coming online will stop what is happening.ftfy
Also, nobody alive today will see the effect of any reversing we do in our time, even if we manage to find something and start tomorrow. But it’ll get much worse if we do nothing.
"If all human emissions of heat-trapping gases were to stop today, Earth’s temperature would continue to rise for a few decades as ocean currents bring excess heat stored in the deep ocean back to the surface. Once this excess heat radiated out to space, Earth’s temperature would stabilize. Experts think the additional warming from this “hidden” heat is unlikely to exceed 0.9° Fahrenheit (0.5°Celsius). With no further human influence, natural processes would begin to slowly remove the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and global temperatures would gradually begin to decline.
It’s true that without dramatic action in the next couple of decades, we are unlikely to keep global warming in this century below 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Celsius) compared to pre-industrial temperatures—a threshold that experts say offers a lower risk of serious negative impacts. But the more we overshoot that threshold, the more serious and widespread the negative impacts will be, which means that it is never “too late” to take action."
And you trust an American government website… Why?
It just showed up at the top on search results. Sems totally legit, with references to scientific studies. Must be pre-Trump.
Considering they’re talking about possibly passing 1.5 by the end of the century, and that we haven’t blown past it in the last 5 years, I would take it with a grain of salt.
No way… billionaires with yachts and private planes releasing more carbon in an afternoon then I use in a lifetime and I’M the one you think should wipe his ass with bamboo… get the fuck out of here. Eat the rich then tell me I’m not doing enough because I eat a burger and use proper toilet paper
less travelling
Lol. I don’t think anyone reading this is going to stop the minimal traveling they do in the short breaks from The Grind that they get while dipshit rich people are yachting and jetting all over the planet. And they shouldn’t. Average people shouldn’t have to give up any travelling whatsoever because their budgets prevent them from doing enough to actually cause significant harm anyway. We need to use force to make the real culprits adjust their habits.
Other than that I fully agree.
If you kill a cat a day going forward and your neighbour kills two cats a day, you’re not exempt from blame and responsibility for the cats that you kill.
What you’re doing is feeling sorry for yourself and shirking responsibility for the harm that your leisure plane travel does to the climate and in extension to the environment and biodiversity.
Look up the numbers of how much CO2 emissions each person can be afforded to keep climate change and temperatures steady. Now try to factor in plane travel and eating beef while also living with basic amenities. Please get back to me, if you find a way to do those things while also not exceeding the emission threshold per capita, ie. not doing evil and contributing to our apocalypse in glacier speed.
No. Just no.
This is not an “individual action will solve this” case anymore. WE can’t do jack about it, individually. If we get the corporations to stop doing harm, and the rich cut down traveling in their superjets, maybe then. But some schmuck driving a Toyota corolla a few hundred miles on a vacation, or taking a commercial passenger jet on a vacation with 100-some-odd people isn’t the problem here.
Significant parts of the global climate usage are directly tied to individual actions. 12% is consumer car driving alone. So yes, the schmuck driving a Toyota Corolla is making a significant impact. The sooner you realize that the better, we need action on both corporation and end users.
There are about 1.5 billion of total cars + buses + trucks in this world. Even if we assume only 1 billion of them are consumer cars (which is already a VERY conservative estimate), all of them combined make 12% impact, so that schmuck driving a Toyota Corella would contribute less than 0.000000012% of the global climate change.
Significant my ass.
Climate change is a phenomenon happening on planetary scale, so the impact of individuals are always going to be astronomically small. This is a crisis that requires nation-state or mega-corp scale of efforts, and blaming individuals for the failure of nation-states and mega-corps on what they should be held responsible for, is extremely disingenuous.
Consuming less would effect the corporation a though.
It’s disingenuous to suggest that governments and companies are not run by individuals, and it ignores that real change doesn’t mean life continuing as the same.
Every single person is part of the problem. Some more, some less. Corporations do not harm the environment because they are inherently bad. They do it because people (all of them!) love stuff.
They do so because of perverse incentives. They socialize the costs and privatize the gains. This is a fundamental design flaw of Capitalism and in turn Corporations.
Humans harm nature in EVERY form of society.
This is a bit of a cop out though. At the moment a very small number of humans do a very large amount of the harm because there is no cost to doing so.
Your first point is so huge IMO. If you can’t enjoy being at your own home then trying to have some kind of fulfilling life is going to be a steeper uphill battle than it already was.
Look at it like the Buddhists and stoics. Thinking your happiness is out there waiting on some beach, or in some fancy car or McMansion, is only going to perpetuate your suffering in the actual real now.
Or put another way, if you decide to find happiness and fulfillment in your home and your local community, and it works, then THEY can’t stop you. Whoever that is in your case.
Your first point is so huge IMO. If you can’t enjoy being at your own home then trying to have some kind of fulfilling life is going to be a steeper uphill battle than it already was.
Been on the dating apps recently. The number of people who present “travel” as their entire personality is unsettling. Every photo somewhere exotic, every prompt answer is about traveling. It makes me wonder what they’re all running from. I don’t disagree that vacationing can be enjoyable, but there’s more to life.
And don’t get me started on the people who try to say that “traveling” is different from “vacationing” and that what they’re doing is travelling and not vacationing. Egads.
I bet it’s some of what you said, and maybe some of the well-known “buy experiences, not things” saying.
I’m not suggesting that saying is wrong, but I think people can mechanically go through the process of acquiring fancy-looking experiences because that is what you’re SUPPOSED to do, just like people can collect fancy-looking posessions on auto pilot because that’s what it means to be a successful person.
The last thing you said about people who claim they are “traveling” and not “vacationing” just REEKS of a hollow charade trying to prove that they are part of the upper crust of society.
The catch in all this is that we all have our own individualized needs, and a big part of the self-care work we need to do is figuring out what those things are. Like traveling and having fun vacations is awesome, but for most of us it’s not going to be some instant key to life fulfillment. In my case, have always loved nature in general and aquatic life in particular. Some of my best vacation memories are swimming in little pockets of the ocean that looked like giant aquariums full of colorful fish and corals. But that’s a rare occurrence and I will also never want to live somewhere tropical. Solution? I built a nice koi pond in my little back yard (in addition to all the other pets my family has). And in addition to the whole “caring for and interacting with water critters” angle, I got to do a lot of learning about chemistry and biology that are nowhere near my professional field, and I got to do a lot of DIYing, and I got a lot of exercise and fresh air out of it too! It helped much more than just my brain.
Prolly they all live in a big city. And living in a big city sucks ass, but most people have no choice because that’s where the jobs are. I luckily live outside a big city in small village with forests and fields around me. But still near enough a medium-sized city so that I don’t have to commute for ages. But I see that not everyone can live in places like mine, so the big city it is, where it is loud and full. Kinda understandable that u want to get away from it, then. But yeah, it doesn’t mean that u need to fly to other side of the earth to do vacation, usually your own country has enough pretty spots to spend ur vacation.
I appreciate you. Thank you for posting that thoughtful and insightful comment.
You’re awesome.
Taylor Swift’s jets alone cancel out any benefit all of your steps might have for a few million or hundreds of millions of people.
It’s wonderful to want to try to do something about this, but the only real way we have to do something about it is to stop the people and corporations who are the actual biggest contributors to the issue.
I’m thinking less along the lines of voting and more along the lines of stabbing.
Come on. You’re off by multiple orders of magnitude. No, a single private plane is not offsetting millions or hundreds of millions of people living more sustainably. I’m genuinely not sure if you’re this clueless or just trying to manipulate opinions.
Plus, emissions are additive, so you can avoid your own emissions, while doing what you can to keep billionaires in check.
I tend of assume someone being off thousands of orders of magnitude about something is using hyperbole. You didn’t even mention the possibility. Seeing one example of an incorrect ratio and leaping clear to being torn between deciding if the person who said it is a complete idiot or some insidious evil force manipulating folks is enough to qualify you to wear a cape.
And vote. Pay attention to issues and vote. Don’t get caught up in a single issue, or voting with emotions or spite: vote for your future
vote with your wallet
“I don’t think I’ll super size it after all”, I saw as I drive past the MegaCity One GigaChad data center.
The judge dredd universe is better then ours. The government has actually taken steps to address the housing crisis.
What a show of willful misunderstanding in comments. Thank you, and I am rooting for you too
Individual action won’t fix systemic issues like major polluters being almost exclusively from industry but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take the suggested actions in any case. Just don’t fool yourself that it is enough.
The thing that doesn’t get called out enough is that many greenhouse gasses have a lag time before they actually start causing heat. CO2 for example takes about 20 years if I recall correctly. So we are seeing the results of what was emitted years ago… not necessarily the current emissions.
Really? I’ve never heard of this, and I’m a climate scientist… Not saying it’s definitely wrong, but a citation would be good.
Edit: Huh, seems it’s true: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/031001 although that is for large pulses of CO2, I don’t know how that translates into a constant stream of emissions…
Well greenhouse gases are often described as a blanket and a blanket doesn’t immediately get warm, it take time. I doubt the trickling effect is much different in lag time than sudden pulses, its just gradually increasing the blanket rather than pulling it all on at once. Its still gonna take time for more solar energy to accumulate by bouncing off the trickling in CO2.
In the book plows, plagues, and petroleum, the author uses several factors of humans history to argue that man made climate change was slowly having an impact much before the industrial revolution, which is the common “starting point” for most people and scientists. Althought not as drastic as this sudden increase in fossil fuel burning, they argue that impacts such as deforestion and burning of cropland in early human settlements had a measureable impact on carbon sinks and carbon releases, still enough to start skewing the natural rate of climate change.
Yeah… realising I was not making a distinction between greenhouse effect (e.g. increased rate of warming), and the result (e.g. actual increased heat content/temperature. I think the rate of warming increase is basically instant, but yes, it takes some time for the temperature levels to catch up.
I don’t know if I was explicitly taught it at uni, buy I have always understood as a climate scientist that GHG emissions started before the industrial revolution (albeit small). I think that’s common knowledge in climate science.
How fucked are we?
My intuitive answer is that the collapse of globalised industrial society seems fairly likely (as a result of the end of cheap liquid fuel if nothing else). What that looks like is highly dependent on how we respond - it’s not a climate problem, it’s a social problem.
I don’t think humans are going to go extinct, but a population crash seems likely. And we’re taking out a tonne of other species.
I would hazard that the the extintion of Mankind really depends on the innevitable water and food wars escalating out of control in the nuclear era or not.
A lot of this shit (you also see it in Economics, as Inequality explodes and Social Mobility grinds to a halt) can escalate out of control via the reactions of Human Societies to it (just look at the rise of the Far Right in response to the above mentioned trends in Inequality and Social Mobility).
As I see it, people’s and countries’ reaction to the problems caused by Climate Change are were the nastiest of nasty shit can come out from.
Yep, plausible, but again, that’s a social problem. It’s super interesting, but not something a climate scientist can really speak to.
I would say that the ultimate impact on Mankind of Climate Change is itself outside the scope of Climatology by itself - by its own nature it would be an interdisciplinary effort involving at the very least Climatologists, Sociologists and Economists.
That said, anybody can, as non-expert, mention some possibilities, though obviously not claiming any authoritativeness on the subject. (That’s what I tried to do, hence why I began by saying it was just my “hazarding”).
Yep, agree! That first paragraph is where I’m at now, trying to work with social scientists, business people, economists, who ever is keen. That interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary work is suuuuper interesting and fun and fucking hard.
Also I’m just opinionated in general, you know? 😅
They may be thinking of the half-life of C02, around 120 years … or the delayed effect of temperature uptake by the ocean. I’m not a clime scientist.
I edited in a reference - it’s a thing aparently
Apologies I should have linked a source in that claim. I only had a rough understanding of it and had read an article on phys.org that mentioned that previously. Arguably still a big concern since we could not be seeing the actual warming done in present day 2026 for another decade or more.
Not true at all. Compare:
“lag time before they actually start causing heat” and
“the timing between an emission and the maximum temperature response is a decade on average”
A “start” and a “maximum” are completely different. IR absorption starts immediately and increases over years to a maximum.
I don’t think that last bit is right, see my other comment to FireRetardant’s reply. I think the increase in warming rate is basically instantaneous (maybe a few months for atmospheric mixing), it’s the peak of temperature/heat that is delayed (agreeing with your 3rd paragraph)
Sadly we’re now at the “I told you so” phase of global warming and much sooner than expected. Now it’s a case of how bad are things going to get.
We still haven’t even peaked in terms of global emissions per year, let alone meaningfully reduced them. Then even after reducing from the peak, we really need to get to net 0, which seems impossible right now.
I’ve been in spectator mode for a while now once I realized the trend. Act locally, know your neighbors, become as self-sufficient as you can. Not much else you can do that will have actual effect.
That won’t have any effect. That’s precisely what the billionaires will come up with. Sort of individual peasant responsibility. We’ll be the ones on a carbon allowance, collecting plastic bottles while they can just buy their carbon credits and burn even more private jet fuel. Congrats on playing right into it.
Like blaming the guy behind bars for not trying something to get out.
I get it - don’t give in, change the world, and hold those responsible accountable. All great goals. But without a plan to do so and leadership/infrastructure, you’re just as bad as me saying to help oneself first. Maybe worse, since at least I’m doing something instead of victim blaming. If you want to rally the peasants to storm the castle, go ahead, but you aren’t going to do that by blaming peasants who aren’t doing it solo.
I also get your point on shifting responsibility. I was there when recycling and the rest was marketed to us. That doesn’t make recycling or its forgotten sisters reusing and repairing useless. It just shouldn’t end there, and shouldn’t be an excuse for other things we do as if there’s some balancing of credits. So if being more self-sufficient is some playing into their scheme, well, at least it’s less that they can control.
100% with you mate, posting revolutionary hopium on Lemmy isn’t doing anything. We have to affect what we can reasonably touch. It starts with talking to friends and neighbours, and making sure you have some security and certainty first.
Yeah, seriously, the whole thing with generalizations in the face of suggested individual action is just so silly. We all know we need to hold billionaires/corporations accountable for their bullshit, energy subsides for fucking oil need to go away like yesterday, citizens United needs to be overturned by legislation, members of congress taking bribes from plastic and energy companies and making legislative decisions as a result need to straight up go to prison, etc. But wtf is the normal, everyday person actually gonna do about it? Call their representatives that may or may not listen because they’re a partisan hack? Good one.
The cliché of getting involved locally is the correct course of action. It’s not throwing molotovs in DC, it’s getting to know your local farmers and getting food from them instead of shipped around the globe five times at some supermarket owned by a giant corporation. Get more trees planted in your neighborhood. Start some butterfly sanctuaries. Start a movement to ban egregiously wasteful lawns in your municipality. Get a coalition of people who pay attention and can mob city hall if/when the city council tries to pull some bullshit deals about yet another fucking data center. Establish better water conservation with your neighbors. This is what the actual, real, legitimate revolution looks like. It doesn’t start with “AND I TOOK OUT MY GUN AT THE GUBMINT!”, it starts with “My neighbors and I started our own little kinda country. ¯_(ツ)_/¯”
Acting locally, means the people hired to handle private jets… Can handle locally. I suppose if you’re rich enough for a private jet, you can pay everyone enough to retire after 5 years. But I doubt they do, so go ahead mechanics. Do your part to keep planes grounded
But at least we made a bunch of grotesque genocidal pedophiles obscenely wealthy.
“Data centers fix this” -billionaires probably
And then AI says the should reduce emissions and they order some engineers to fix that clearly broken model 🙄
I wonder if this have anything to do with moving quickly from “we must all limit our energy consumption” to “we must burn as much energy possible for no real purpose”.
I guess we’ll never know /s
we should ask AI!
Fire up the natural gas generators, this baby isn’t grid tied yet!
Lol natural gas? What, do you like, hate America? We need diesel trucks transporting coal to burn on site
Since it started in the mid 2010s, it’s probably not AI related. That will be an extra addition…
Crypto farming, feeding the ai bubble, large scale wars of aggression, commuters replacing cars with trucks, buying throwaway junk has never been easier. That’s the relatively new completely unnecessary hubris that I can think off atm. These should be the low hanging fruits to just not do, but apparently we’re going to continue doing them anyways. If we can’t address the low hanging fruits, then tackling the harder challenges will remain a pipe dream until it’s too late. Climate stability is fucked, and we’re in for a rough ride.
The real “low hanging fruit to not do” is blaming individual choices for societal issues. Capitalism is the one and only reason for anthropogenic climate change. Ending capitalism is the one and only way to solve it. There is no individual action you can take that is effective, we have to reorder society in such a way that it is impossible to profit from environmental destruction.
the only real solution to climate change is renewable energy, and solar energy in particular. capitalism or no capitalism basically doesn’t matter.
Human nature is the reason. Regardless of the system we live in. People want more, better, etc. and feel important/strong/rich/… It has always been like that. Heck, even monkeys display such things.
Like 3/5 things that poster mentioned were not individual choices. The 2/5 that are individual choices are real issues. It is an issue, not just societally but also environmentally and in terms of public health, that the world is polluted by plastic because people wanted momentary convenience. Capitalism has to end and it incentivizes those choices of convenience, but people are still simultaneously responsible for making those choices unless they have no alternative… in which case it’s not really a choice.
I have difficulty accepting that corporations did this and therefore we should all keep going with the status quo. Although an individual’s choices don’t amount to enough in and of themselves, the choices of masses of individuals drive the consumer market. The more disposable shit we buy, the more disposable shit corporations make.
We as a society have normalized be everyone individually owning 17 appliances that are used 0-2 times per year, having 53 outfits made by overseas slave labour, and accumulating gigabyte after gigabyte of data that must be managed. And if you tell someone this, they will say it’s all necessary - what the pandemic taught me is the degree to which people cannot identify the difference between essential services and non-essential, as everything becomes justifiable based on niche situations and the blanket defense of mental health.
If we all forever point the finger and say that someone else is actually responsible, and therefore we refuse to make changes, then nobody is ever going to get started. Much like on a national scale how the US simultaneously blames climate change on China and India (“we shouldn’t bother doing anything, they’re bigger!”) and Canadian forest fires (although by the previous logic, a country with 1/8 the population should be incapable of changing their climate).
What? And stop indiscriminately slaughtering babies? You monster!
Meanwhile, my workplace just announced RTO, starting next year. It’s a moderately large, 100% white collar office site.
Gotta drive those CO2 numbers up, baby!Even if you ignore anything else, just speak to ANY mountaineer, and they’ll all tell you that glaciers are drying up
yeah, back when i was young and had energy there was this 12 mile run up a mountain to the glacier (or where it was) and back i’d do once or twice a year. last time i saw the glacier was like, 20 years ago.
Conservatives in the US (at least as a platform, not so much down to the individual) have mostly given up pretending that the climate isn’t changing, they are just refusing to take responsibility for it. They are currently pretending it’s an act of God/ nature and that it’s laughable for man to be able to influence it.
You don’t hace to be a mpuntaineer, i can see the glacier going away from my window.
Oh damn that’s gotta suck. Do you have to deal with flooding or anything like that?
Lakes in Minnesota are frozen something like 30 days less per year on average than they were in 1975.
Climate change deniers are either stupid, greedy, or both.
My family would always go skiing in the nearby mountains every Christmas. We are starting to have the conversation of changing that plan, given how bad the snow has been the past two years, and predictions for the future are only getting worse.
Yearly average global mean surface temperature from five data sources, in two versions: (top) unadjusted, (bottom) adjusted for El Niño/Southern Oscillation, volcanism, and solar variation. All are aligned so that the average from 1991 to 2020 equals 0.88°C, to approximate warming since pre-industrial.
i mean that curve is pretty clear. were the scientists they were talking to expecting a linear model?
They weren’t expecting a linear model. Did you read the article?
The increase in acceleration is something theyve noticed since 2013, as reported in the article (of about .35 per year instead of .2). There was also an unusual increase in 2023 and 2024.
These are all important things scientists should be measuring and reporting on, even if it seems obvious by random lemmy user looking at a graph (graph that was made by scientists measuring and reporting on their observations).
Did I read the article from science faily? No. I’ve read enough from that rag where they drew the opposite conclusion than both the data and author were saying, so why should I trust them to get this right?
Then why not read the actual journal article published by the researchers? I’m not opposed to going direct to the source, but it seems awful silly of you to make assumptions about what the researchers think without first seeking any information whatsoever.
We tried capitalism in a hundred different ways and we are all out of ideas.
I wish we had tried it in a hundred ways. Best we can do is try it in two ways: monopoly consolidation, followed by oligarchy
If we’re good little consumers we can have some trickle down crony capitalism for dessert.
