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The vast majority of people, at best, think climate channge is something that'll be a problem for their grandchildren or great grandchildren. Many still believe
by ryanmercer 7y ago
The vast majority of people, at best, think climate channge is something that'll be a problem for their grandchildren or great grandchildren. Many still believe it is a made up thing the news/politicians created.
Many people don't care about long-term stuff either. Look at how many people have no qualms throwing trash out their car window. Look at how many people have no qualms about taking vacations flying all over the place racking up tons of CO2 personally.
Even YC created http://carbon.ycombinator.com http://carbon.ycombinator.com as they acknowledge it's an issue (to some extent anyway) yet they still fly hundreds of people out to the Bay Area for in-person interviews each year to select founders for funding, which could instead be done via video chat and used kilograms of CO2 at worst instead of many tons (on average, a plane produces a little over 53 pounds of CO2 per mile. This can be somewhat higher or lower depending upon the type of aviation fuel).
And then take people that truly realize how much of a problem is like I do.
- I have to go to work, it is not practical for me to walk to work so I have to drive a car to work.
- It is not practical for me to not use electricity, living in an apartment I have to use it to cook, to dry my clothes even if I chose to wash them by hand, to run the air conditioning a good chunk of the year to keep the humidity down to prevent mold, to run the heat in the winter because it gets down to -12F/-24C a few days of the year
- I can't walk around naked and both natural fibers and synthetic fibers rely heavily on oil to manufacture
- I can't go buy food from my neighbor or grow my own in a garden, so my food is trucked across the country or even shipped from halfway around the world
So people like me go "nothing I do on a personal level is going to make a damn bit of difference, why bother" and you sit there watching Netflix knowing that every gigabyte you stream is probably another 100-300 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere.
And you sit there depressed - knowing you are breathing in microplastics, knowing you are eating and drinking microplastics, knowing those microplastics and other air pollutants are likely increasing your risk of cancer considerably, knowing that 30 something cities with populations over 1 million people have run out of clean water (or water entirely) including India's 6th largest city by population, knowing that it's probably unwise to have children because sooner or later in their life the world is going to become a largely shitty and miserable place when food/water wars start, knowing that global insect biomass has considerably reduced in your short 34 years on earth, knowing because you are barely in the lower middle class you're probably going to be one of the ones to starve at some point because you'll lose your job and have a hard time finding another and a crop failure or three will cause food prices to go up 200%, 300%, 1000% or more in your lifetime and you'll get to experience what life is like for people in North Korea when you're eating whatever you can get your hands on.
The shareholders, the C-level employees, don't care because they aren't feeling the impacts already. They have fancy houses, fancy cars, take fancy vacations, they wear nice clothes and have more money than they need. The bulk of them have never filed bankruptcy or worried regularly how they're going to put food on the table, the majority of them have never known real struggle. They aren't concerned about climate change because they think the money will always be flowing in and they'll always have stuff.
Look at the articles over the past few years about the rich buying land in New Zealand like Peter Thiel did.
- malvosenior 7y agoIf it makes you feel better, by almost every metric the vast majority of humanity is living the best they have in all of human history. If you live in the west it’s even better because we haven’t had any local wars in nearly 80 years. I think a lot of people need to study history a bit more to understand how great things are now for most of the global population.
- kjsbfkjbf 7y agoGreat if you ignore the exported suffering and rape of the Earth.
- adrianN 7y agoIt's always best just before the party is over, right?
- malvosenior 7y agoNo?
- imtringued 7y agoThe problem is that it won't be great for much longer.
- malvosenior 7y agoThere are no signs that technological progress is slowing (the driving factor behind our success).
- toofy 7y agoI definitely agree with you that things are better than they’ve ever been. However, much of that security, it hinges on a delusion that this security will go away if we address climate change, which is of course mostly untrue. If we address this soon, it’s a matter of scaling back on a few luxuries while keeping other luxuries and the basics which keep us healthy and fed. One example of many, how many suburban homes in the US touch much of their space more than once or twice a year? How many have multiple completely unused heated and air conditioned bedrooms? How much of suburban home’s storage is used by stuff which is bought and never gets touched again? My house currently, about 2/3rds of the space is rarely touched, the storage in the garage and closets is full (organized, i’m not a hoarder lol) but full of projects and stuff which was bought because it seemed like a fun idea at the store, and all of that space is heated and cooled all year long. The thought processes which go into the type of “need” for this much wasted space is just a norm readjustment which on a fundamental level mostly won’t impact our daily safety issues and still allow actual important luxuries. If we wait, well, that’s when difficult decisions will have to be made, many of which will greatly impact fundamental life changes.