3 ms·

It's worse than that. There is very determined political will, across much of the globe, to stoke global heating further for short-term benefit. In my country

It's worse than that. There is very determined political will, across much of the globe, to stoke global heating further for short-term benefit. In my country (Australia) we had a federal election last year. The climate issues were very clearly laid out, and most citizens here accept the science, and have some understanding of the severity of the issue. Yet they voted very decisively against any further action to reduce emissions. Most of the electorate here simply will not countenance changes from business as usual. Of the world's more significant population centres, Europe is the most realistically ambitious but is too fractious & bureaucratic to rapidly make the necessary big decisions, the US is weighed down with a sclerotic political system and a huge proportion of the population with dogmatically anti-scientific attitudes, China is backpedalling due to economic worries, and India has enough troubles of its own. We're toast - this must be clear to everyone at this stage.

clarry 7y ago
> Europe is the most realistically ambitious but is too fractious & bureaucratic to rapidly make the necessary big decisions I think EU is the only significant region to have actually decreased CO2 emissions over the past few decades: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fossil_carbon_dioxide_emissions_six_top_countries_and_confederations.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo... That's not to say they couldn't have done more, but it's kinda sad that everyone else is drawing a flat line or going up. EU alone is not going to save the planet, even if they somehow stopped emissions altogether.
- crispinb 7y ago
  Agree the EU is in better shape than much of the world. There's a lot of technical arguments about how well it's doing in practise. But even the fact that it's at issue shows that at least it has some chance of meeting its 40%-cut-by-2030 Paris target. And it has a fairly solid consensus about the dimensions of the problem, lacking the fake polarisation corruptly injected by the fossil fuel industry into the US and Australia's political systems.
titzer 7y ago
> We're toast - this must be clear to everyone at this stage. Yeah, unfortunately you are more right than you know. Like, right all the way to the bottom of the human soul. Climate change is both too fast and too slow for us to deal with effectively. In the past, humankind was never united in a global economy powered by fossil fuels and fed by financial markets driven by AI. It could never grow at a very large exponent. Now, fueled by massive population growth and even more massive economic growth, we've entered into a very steep exponent indeed. Running on theories generated by thousands of economic PhDs and underwritten by national monetary policies, the machine is finally eating the world. Literally. Capital is flowing everywhere for economic development, from vast palm oil plantations across southeast Asia, to Lithium mines in South America, to cattle farms in Brazil, to vacation homes in every picturesque spot on the planet, we're chopping it all down. And that's just the sheer physical digestion of nature. We're pumping out our waste products at record rates, and thirsty for more, we equate energy consumption with quality of life. And worst of all, we will not stop nor even let our foot off the gas. We're locked in the patterns of international struggle for dominance even as we are locked in interpersonal struggles for sexual competition. He who makes the most money, touts the biggest consumer markets, the greatest exports or GDP or most powerful weapons...that person is crowned king of a smouldering planet. We cannot right this ship. We are just apes, ffs. We can't evolve past our basal instincts and our antibiotics and satellites are no witness to the betterment of the human soul. We reached the apex of better angels of our nature and greed and corruption and the brutal mathematics of a game theoretic dilemma where every last human stands more to gain from defecting than cooperating. We're gonna smash this motherfucker against the wall as hard as she will go. And the greatest irony of it all is there written in the bibles that evangelicals clutch to their chests as they gnash their teeth for more prosperity as god promised. And that was the simple wise truth, that cuts to the core of all that is today's sin: the love of money is the root of all evil.
- thulecitizen 7y ago
  > We are just apes, ffs. > every last human stands more to gain from defecting than cooperating. Is it human nature, or is it the design of money? [1][2] [1] The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer [2] http://ceptr.org http://ceptr.org
- 7y ago

clarry 7y ago

> Europe is the most realistically ambitious but is too fractious & bureaucratic to rapidly make the necessary big decisions I think EU is the only significant region to have actually decreased CO2 emissions over the past few decades: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fossil_carbon_dioxide_emissions_six_top_countries_and_confederations.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo... That's not to say they couldn't have done more, but it's kinda sad that everyone else is drawing a flat line or going up. EU alone is not going to save the planet, even if they somehow stopped emissions altogether.

crispinb 7y ago
Agree the EU is in better shape than much of the world. There's a lot of technical arguments about how well it's doing in practise. But even the fact that it's at issue shows that at least it has some chance of meeting its 40%-cut-by-2030 Paris target. And it has a fairly solid consensus about the dimensions of the problem, lacking the fake polarisation corruptly injected by the fossil fuel industry into the US and Australia's political systems.

titzer 7y ago

> We're toast - this must be clear to everyone at this stage. Yeah, unfortunately you are more right than you know. Like, right all the way to the bottom of the human soul. Climate change is both too fast and too slow for us to deal with effectively. In the past, humankind was never united in a global economy powered by fossil fuels and fed by financial markets driven by AI. It could never grow at a very large exponent. Now, fueled by massive population growth and even more massive economic growth, we've entered into a very steep exponent indeed. Running on theories generated by thousands of economic PhDs and underwritten by national monetary policies, the machine is finally eating the world. Literally. Capital is flowing everywhere for economic development, from vast palm oil plantations across southeast Asia, to Lithium mines in South America, to cattle farms in Brazil, to vacation homes in every picturesque spot on the planet, we're chopping it all down. And that's just the sheer physical digestion of nature. We're pumping out our waste products at record rates, and thirsty for more, we equate energy consumption with quality of life. And worst of all, we will not stop nor even let our foot off the gas. We're locked in the patterns of international struggle for dominance even as we are locked in interpersonal struggles for sexual competition. He who makes the most money, touts the biggest consumer markets, the greatest exports or GDP or most powerful weapons...that person is crowned king of a smouldering planet. We cannot right this ship. We are just apes, ffs. We can't evolve past our basal instincts and our antibiotics and satellites are no witness to the betterment of the human soul. We reached the apex of better angels of our nature and greed and corruption and the brutal mathematics of a game theoretic dilemma where every last human stands more to gain from defecting than cooperating. We're gonna smash this motherfucker against the wall as hard as she will go. And the greatest irony of it all is there written in the bibles that evangelicals clutch to their chests as they gnash their teeth for more prosperity as god promised. And that was the simple wise truth, that cuts to the core of all that is today's sin: the love of money is the root of all evil.

thulecitizen 7y ago
> We are just apes, ffs. > every last human stands more to gain from defecting than cooperating. Is it human nature, or is it the design of money? [1][2] [1] The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer [2] http://ceptr.org http://ceptr.org
7y ago