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The appearance of firefighters minutes later and his own heroic efforts saved the entire neighbourhood from being reduced to cinders. Like many, Rizos believes
by DoreenMichele 5y ago
The appearance of firefighters minutes later and his own heroic efforts saved the entire neighbourhood from being reduced to cinders.
Like many, Rizos believes the climate emergency will only get worse. “We’re ecologists, we love nature in my family and we want to protect the environment, not install air conditioners that will destroy it. But with temperatures of 45C, that’s going to be hard. We have to adapt. For sure, I’ll be replacing pine trees with other trees that don’t burn so easily.”
We need more people thinking like this. I don't know how we get people to take things seriously and act.
It needs to be local. It needs to be wise more than smart. We need more small solutions to push back against the effects of our top-heavy world where money and power and the like often sweep in with no respect for local traditions just because they can.
I don't know how we get there from here. I know it doesn't help to presume it is a foregone conclusion that we can't make a meaningful difference at this point and we are simply doomed.
- alexose 5y agoI hear you, but it's not possible to mitigate our way out of this. It's simply happening too fast. Of all of the carbon that's been released into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, half of it has come in the last 30 years. Over the course of a millennium, sure, maybe even a couple of centuries. But we're looking at a single generation to get this done. And that's without burning a huge amount of oil to make it happen.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago“While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.” -- Helen Keller My incomplete BS is in Environmental Studies. I have trouble believing we are doomed to failure and there is no point in trying. If you don't bother to try, that sounds like self-fulfilling prophecy to me, not proof that we couldn't have accomplished something if we had tried.
- alexose 5y agoFor sure! For the record, I do think there's a path to success here (see my prior comments), but it's fairly top-down in its approach. Still, everyone has a role to play in demanding that their governments take immediate action. Some mitigation is absolutely necessary. But mitigation alone can't prepare us for 3°C. Billions of people will die.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoTop down is part of how we created this monster. Seems unlikely to be the solution. "When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." Edit: Please see some old comment by me. I probably need to leave this discussion for various reasons. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19843507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19843507
- jacquesm 5y agoThat's exactly the problem. Every potential solution starts with either one of the following assumptions (1) some technology that we do not have access to (either at the required scale or even at all), (2) unlimited funding, (3) unlimited energy that does not somehow make the problem worse, (4) unlimited time. We have none of these, I can think of a possible solution but you're not going to like it.