But the fact that people can be so easily manipulated like this is also part of reason why I said I've lost faith in humanity. The rise of Nazi Germany has shown us all that people can be duped into hating and committing heinous atrocities against one another with just the right amount of persuasion, and the fact that people can just let someone like Hitler come into power terrifies the hell out of me. — Mr Bee
What is needed is a bloody technological revolution! Can we do it? Necessity is the mother of invention. — Agent Smith
A bad workman blames his tools (machines)
We are certainly experiencing the consequences of some people's actions. Yes it does seem futile; yes it is hard to be optimistic; yes some people have lost faith in humanity. — Bitter Crank
Are the people to blame for this? The power imbalance corresponds to level of responsibility, in my view -- and the imbalance is very, very skewed towards the wealthy. — Xtrix
It seems we're getting ever closer to the real cause of all our problems viz. ourselves; some call it human nature I believe. — Agent Smith
But today, it at least feels, time has run out on this humanity. — boethius
to say there's still hope to avoid disaster is to say the pile of bodies we already have doesn't count, and we'll start counting later for some reason. — boethius
But in terms of evaluating prospects, certainly seems to me now that we'd need a miracle to preserve anything remotely resembling "normal" — boethius
I'll be dammed if I'm contributing any further. — Benkei
Nothing ever comes as gifts from above. Ever. When our institutions and our leaders fail, we work harder to circumvent them and create a crisis for them. I don't see any alternative beyond giving up and guaranteeing the worst case happens. — Xtrix
Once the number of Homo sapiens on the planet is severely reduced due to the consequences of climate change -- as is bound to happen in the coming decades or at best centuries -- the forces driving CC will then progressively abate. — Olivier5
There are no short term solution that I can see. — Olivier5
There are plenty of solutions, and people working very hard at those solutions -- and making progress. All while being told that there "are not solutions," that we're already doomed, that there's nothing we can do except continue with the status quo because leaders won't listen and corporations are too powerful, etc. The typical defeatist, hopelessness-encouraging bullshit you can see daily in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.
So sure, we can go with your narrative and thus justify doing nothing. — Xtrix
Another tactic that gets deliberately perpetuated is the sense of hopelessness and helplessness. "I can't do anything; It's too big; nothing will change anyway; it's already over." — Xtrix
This is true not only of climate change but of many other issues; it was true for women's rights and civil rights and gay rights. — Xtrix
I'm not trying to "justify doing nothing". — Olivier5
A miracle may still happen, I guess. — Olivier5
hoping for the best of course — Olivier5
Recognising the damage already done and also baked in, is not a "I can't do anything". — boethius
What I'm not wasting time on anymore is trying to move politicians and rich assholes to do what is necessary. The idea of global warming is finally landing but 20 years too late and the solutions are still non-solutions. Anything not embracing degrowth will fail. — Benkei
However, denying the scale of the horror once it happens is not useful either, and certainly has an emotional impact. — boethius
I'm in favor of de-growth, but there's no reason to believe anything short of that will fail. Might as well make the claim that anything short of the destruction of capitalism will fail. Sure, if that's the case then it's very unlikely -- but we should fight for it still. — Xtrix
For humanity, having a footprint smaller than the planet's biocapacity is a necessary condition for sustainability. After all, ecological overuse is only possible temporarily. A country that consumes more than 1.73 gha per person has a resource demand that is not sustainable world-wide if every country were to exceed that consumption level simultaneously. Countries with a footprint below 1.73 gha per person might not be sustainable: the quality of the footprint may still lead to net long-term ecological destruction. If a country does not have enough ecological resources within its own territory to cover its population's footprint, then it runs an ecological deficit and the country is termed an ecological debtor. Otherwise, it has an ecological reserve and it is called a creditor. — Wiki
Beg your pardon, but it reeks of defeatism. I realize you feel it's 'realism,' but the truth is that things can turn around very quickly indeed, and even heal. The window is shutting, true -- so all the more reason to do something. — Xtrix
I don't see much recognition of real actions and solutions. — Xtrix
I wish people would stop pretending science will solve everything, which is something other people do, after all, so they have an excuse not to make the necessary sacrifices themselves, which we're all going to have to do. — Benkei
I mean good luck with that, but there are a lot of people out there who are dead set on making sure that we don't do anything at all. At first the line was that climate change wasn't happening, so we shouldn't do anything at all. Then they accepted the existence of climate change but now deny that it was manmade, so again, let's do nothing at all. Now it's a combination of "renewables bad", "China should do something first", or "some climate people fly in private jets", all with the implication that we should, you guessed it, not do anything at all. — Mr Bee
Unfortunately our (human) nature got in the way - we drink until we pass out, we eat until we die of heart ailments, we drive past the speed limit and die in a collision, you get the idea. — Agent Smith
I know this thread is about global warming but it's a bit idiotic to decouple it from what really is the point, which is extracting more than nature can sustain. — Benkei
Why don't you get a go at it? What are these real actions and solutions? — Olivier5
After decades of decline in the United States, unions may be poised for a comeback.
Every month seems to bring more promising news for organized labor. Workers at Starbucks have organized roughly 100 stores from coast to coast since last fall. REI employees formed the outdoor retailer’s very first union. Amazon employees defied all the odds and won an 8,000-worker union election in New York City. And an Apple Store in Towson, Maryland, became the first to unionize last month.
Just 1 in 10 U.S. workers now belongs to a union, down from roughly 1 in 3 in the period following World War II. Yet the labor movement is showing more muscle now than it has in years. Emboldened by a tight labor market and two years of toiling through a pandemic, workers are succeeding in organizing companies that have staunchly resisted unionization, and many of them are doing it practically on their own.
The party has largely moved beyond denying the existence of climate change but continues to oppose dramatic action to halt it, worried about the short-term economic consequences.
One hundred million Americans from Arizona to Boston are under heat emergency warnings, and the drought in the West is nearing Dust Bowl proportions. Britain declared a climate emergency as temperatures soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and parts of blistering Europe are ablaze.
But on Capitol Hill this week, Republicans were warning against rash action in response to the burning planet.
“I don’t want to be lectured about what we need to do to destroy our economy in the name of climate change,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.
One Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, last week blocked what could have been the country’s most far-reaching American response to climate change. But lost in the recriminations and finger-pointing is the other side of the aisle: All 50 Republicans in the Senate have been as opposed to decisive action to confront planetary warming.
Few Republicans in Congress now outwardly dismiss the scientific evidence that human activities — the burning of oil, gas and coal — have produced gases that are dangerously heating the Earth.
But for many, denial of the cause of global temperature rise has been replaced by an insistence that the solution — replacing fossil fuels over time with wind, solar and other nonpolluting energy sources — will hurt the economy.
In short, delay is the new denial.
Overwhelmingly, Republicans on Capitol Hill say that they believe that the United States should be drilling and burning more American oil, gas and coal, and that market forces would somehow develop solutions to the carbon dioxide that has been building in the atmosphere, trapping heat like a blanket around a sweltering Earth.
So it has gone with the Republican Party, where warnings of a catastrophe are mocked as hyperbole, where technologies that do not exist on a viable scale, such as “carbon capture and storage” and “clean coal,” are hailed as saviors. At the same time, those that do, such as wind and solar power and electric vehicles, are dismissed as unreliable and overly expensive. American leadership on a global problem is seen as a fool’s errand, kneecapping the domestic economy while Indian and Chinese coal bury America’s good intentions in soot.
“When China gets our good air, their bad air’s got to move,” Herschel Walker, a former football star and now a Republican candidate in Georgia for the Senate, explained last week. “So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we’ve got to clean that back up.”
I completely reject that view of human beings. It's silly and simplistic, and for some reason chooses to elevate our vices and paint all of "human nature" by them. — Xtrix
but if we agree the less powerful could easily unite and topple the elites at any moment ... then collectively the less powerful have more responsibility. — boethius
the blame game is irrelevant — boethius
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