6 ms·

No point in reading any of this because there’s literally nothing you can do about it.

by Group_B 4y ago

xwdv 4y ago
We can get our affairs in order and prepare for human extinction.
brohoolio 4y ago
We solved the ozone hole, we can solve this, it just takes leaders who aren’t bought by existing fossil fuel interests.
- throwaway6734 4y ago
  In the US it's the voters not the leaders.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    Two-party system makes it really tough to vote for the party that can do what you think is right, no? Either party is the enemy and basically the justification for the existence of the other, and as long as they throw back and forth petty issues those who want power and money get to keep it.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    What are you talking about? An entire party is basically accelerationist, and the other one largely just waffles about.
    - DFHippie 4y ago
      Imagine you are made one of the politicians in the waffling party. Say you find the politician whose stated preferences most closely match your own. They step down. You take their place. What will you do now to ensure the wafflers stop waffling? The problem isn't that they choose to waffle, but that their power is on a knife edge when they have any power at all and they disagree about what to do.
    - aperson_hello 4y ago
      I'd claim one party is accelerating the fire, while the other is secretly stacking firewood next to the fire while also complaining that the other is using it. That said, human ingenuity and economic forces are starting to stem the global warming tide, despite what governments are doing.
    - throwaway6734 4y ago
      Voters want cheap carbon and will vote against anyone that makes prices go up. Look at the current political situation in the US, it's dominated by the cost of gas and groceries. Nothing else really matters.
  - DFHippie 4y ago
    Really it's both. The leaders find stories the voters respond to, which gives them power. The leaders find and exploit a flaw in the voters which the voters are happy to expose. The leaders should speak truth and act in the common interest. The voters should love the truth rather than lies, and should be mature enough to own their mistake rather than seek fairy tales in which their selfishness is good, even heroic. Also, the voters in the US aren't uniquely bad. It's just that there's a deep cultural fissure in the US which is ripe for exploitation. It's easy to make the voters prefer punishing their neighbors over any other goal.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- oneoff786 4y ago
  The ozone problem was relatively easy.
hkt 4y ago
I think when cataclysmic events start happening, people will start to get agitated. It is worth them (and you) knowing the causes, and the culprits.
myshpa 4y ago
With plant based diets we could reverse the warming [0], deforestation [1] and mass species extinction [2], while making the population healthier [3], too. [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10464793/Total-elimination-meat-production-save-planet-study-says.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10464793/Tot... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-graphic-1536x971.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene [3] https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/plant-based-diets/ https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/plant-based-diets/
Gigachad 4y ago
It’s going to take some more radical action. I very much respect the protesters who risk their freedom to disrupt coal mining operations in Australia or deflating oversized SUV tires in the UK. It’s going to take everyone actively blocking the activities causing this problem.
aperson_hello 4y ago
US and EU emissions are down a quarter in the past 15 years. And world emissions have likely peaked (or at worst are in the process of doing so). If the world does nothing more proactively, warming will be limited to less than 3C, based on best estimates. That's still bad for many people and places, but it's probably not world-ending bad. Governments taking further action will further mitigate the problem and might save places like Miami. That's the opportunity here that humanity isn't really taking advantage of.
- vimy 4y ago
  Before someone will counter with “we outsourced our emissions to China”, this is wrong. Even when we take this into account US and EU emissions have been dropping for years.
  - aperson_hello 4y ago
    Exactly. And most of the emissions outsourcing happened in the 80s and 90s. If anything, there's been a move towards reshoring in recent years
  - PheonixPharts 4y ago
    Care to post the citation for this claim? I've read plenty of papers on this but the ability to track "imported CO2" is fairly limited. The most obvious place that's usually missing in capital gained from foreign investments. If, in a hypothetical example, an investment firm make a billion dollars running a foreign oil company, then put that money into a US startup, this wouldn't count as "imported emissions", but clearly if you worked at that startup your job and all the money you spend would have come from exported emissions. The second place these studies tend to fail is how long of a trail of CO2 they follow. If one of the reasons it's cheaper to build a product in China is because the factory is closer to a carbon intensive raw material producer this not counted. If the energy to keep your low cost workers is cheaper and that's part of why they are low cost, that's not counted. It's not the fault of these reports that they can't track all of this, but it's not a great argument for green technology reducing emissions. If also doesn't matter if the US and EU reduce emissions, it matters if we do globaly. I can also promise you that if we forced China to reduce emissions we should feel that impact pretty dramatically in the west Economically. The best proxy globally to economic development is energy production, we live in a global economy, we all share that energy.
throwaway787544 4y ago
You could start a nonprofit to pay people around the world to plant trees. Nothing's impossible if you get off your butt and work at it.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Where would the trees be planted? A recent study showed that just to offset _the yearly increase_ in CO2 emissions we would need to plant an entire continent of trees every year. And then ensure that they get adequate quantities of water. Human CO2 emissions are so far off the scale of anything that has ever happened naturally that nature as she evolved on Earth has no way coping.
  - throwaway787544 4y ago
    I'm not sure what that means, as forest/jungle density varies greatly as well as species and their absorption of CO2. Did the paper take into account the rest of the ecosystem changes that could capture even more CO2? Regardless, this is only one of potentially thousands of ways we can make an impact. We won't solve the problem without cooperation, but we also don't even have to cooperate at all to start. All of us can start right now and the combined effort will lead to results.
  - myshpa 4y ago
    Source please?
  - reitanqild 4y ago
    Wait a bit Disclaimer up front: I live as if human caused climate change is real, haven't traveled by plane for years, went on holiday abroad three times since I'm old enough to remember - and this includes honeymoon, I buy used, repair etc etc. So please read me out instead of shouting "JAQ" at me. This cannot be true, can it? I have a simple thought experiment here: Take a globe. Or imagine one. Look at the areas where the oil fields are. It should be small areas outside the Norwegian coast. Small areas in the middle east. Small areas in Ukraine and Russia. Small areas in US, in the Mexican Gulf, outside Brazil etc. Then compare with a single continent. Feel free to reason about it and tell me why I am wrong. Because I am actually interested in the answer, because I live like it matters and it would be great not to have to convince myself to care. And, if your calculations change, feel free to stop demotivating people from trying to help. PS: If you take this as a defense for senseless consumption you are misreading. For those who have given up already I give you another reason: Very often the things I do makes very good sense economically too. I think I have a better, more enjoyable life because I don't waste my money on buying new crap all the time and instead prioritize long lasting goods and experiences and prioritize maintaining what I already got.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
The most important thing you can do is vote. But after that, an EV, solar panels and heat pump heating are 3 steps that will eliminate hundreds of tons of CO2 vs alternatives, and will increase your standard of living since they're cheaper over the long term. Going vegetarian and eliminating flying also would have a big impact, but that involves real sacrifice, unlike the above options.
- tzs 4y ago
  > The most important thing you can do is vote In the US, where in most places the general election is preceded by a "primary" election for the parties to select candidates for the general election and in which you can only vote for candidates from your party, I'd suggest one other thing when it comes to voting. If you live in an area where one party pretty much always wins in the general election, register for that party so that you can vote in their primary. That way your vote does actually have some influence on the outcome. It won't change which party wins the general election, but it can help move the winning party toward the center. Primaries are usually lower turnout than the general election, which can make it easier for an extremist candidate to win them because the people who vote for the extremists tend to be more enthusiastic and thus more likely to actually vote in the primary. If you are in an area where both parties have a good chance of winning the general election, but one party seems more susceptible to extreme candidates winning their primary, consider registering for that party to try to move them more toward the center. It means giving up influencing the other party, but if that party usually picks OK candidates your vote is probably better used trying to help get rid of extremists.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    Bernie Sanders was operating on all cylinders in this last primary. There is a documentary on all the efforts by his own party to stop his progress. In the end, the turnout was superb but it still was not enough because the older generation did not want take a chance on the radical policies that Sanders proposed. So no the idea of a primary challenge is a lost cause and the younger generation internalized it this past election. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAfMn2l3yAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAfMn2l3yAA
natly 4y ago
I'm gonna get downvoted but this is the same perspective I've taken as well. I can only have paralyzing anxiety for so many years before I just have to stop caring and get on with my life.

No point in reading any of this because there’s literally nothing you can do about it.

xwdv 4y ago

We can get our affairs in order and prepare for human extinction.

brohoolio 4y ago

We solved the ozone hole, we can solve this, it just takes leaders who aren’t bought by existing fossil fuel interests.

throwaway6734 4y ago
In the US it's the voters not the leaders.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  Two-party system makes it really tough to vote for the party that can do what you think is right, no? Either party is the enemy and basically the justification for the existence of the other, and as long as they throw back and forth petty issues those who want power and money get to keep it.
- masklinn 4y ago
  What are you talking about? An entire party is basically accelerationist, and the other one largely just waffles about.
  - DFHippie 4y ago
    Imagine you are made one of the politicians in the waffling party. Say you find the politician whose stated preferences most closely match your own. They step down. You take their place. What will you do now to ensure the wafflers stop waffling? The problem isn't that they choose to waffle, but that their power is on a knife edge when they have any power at all and they disagree about what to do.
  - aperson_hello 4y ago
    I'd claim one party is accelerating the fire, while the other is secretly stacking firewood next to the fire while also complaining that the other is using it. That said, human ingenuity and economic forces are starting to stem the global warming tide, despite what governments are doing.
  - throwaway6734 4y ago
    Voters want cheap carbon and will vote against anyone that makes prices go up. Look at the current political situation in the US, it's dominated by the cost of gas and groceries. Nothing else really matters.
- DFHippie 4y ago
  Really it's both. The leaders find stories the voters respond to, which gives them power. The leaders find and exploit a flaw in the voters which the voters are happy to expose. The leaders should speak truth and act in the common interest. The voters should love the truth rather than lies, and should be mature enough to own their mistake rather than seek fairy tales in which their selfishness is good, even heroic. Also, the voters in the US aren't uniquely bad. It's just that there's a deep cultural fissure in the US which is ripe for exploitation. It's easy to make the voters prefer punishing their neighbors over any other goal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
oneoff786 4y ago
The ozone problem was relatively easy.

hkt 4y ago

I think when cataclysmic events start happening, people will start to get agitated. It is worth them (and you) knowing the causes, and the culprits.

myshpa 4y ago

With plant based diets we could reverse the warming [0], deforestation [1] and mass species extinction [2], while making the population healthier [3], too. [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10464793/Total-elimination-meat-production-save-planet-study-says.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10464793/Tot... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-graphic-1536x971.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene [3] https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/plant-based-diets/ https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/plant-based-diets/

Gigachad 4y ago

It’s going to take some more radical action. I very much respect the protesters who risk their freedom to disrupt coal mining operations in Australia or deflating oversized SUV tires in the UK. It’s going to take everyone actively blocking the activities causing this problem.

aperson_hello 4y ago

US and EU emissions are down a quarter in the past 15 years. And world emissions have likely peaked (or at worst are in the process of doing so). If the world does nothing more proactively, warming will be limited to less than 3C, based on best estimates. That's still bad for many people and places, but it's probably not world-ending bad. Governments taking further action will further mitigate the problem and might save places like Miami. That's the opportunity here that humanity isn't really taking advantage of.

vimy 4y ago
Before someone will counter with “we outsourced our emissions to China”, this is wrong. Even when we take this into account US and EU emissions have been dropping for years.
- aperson_hello 4y ago
  Exactly. And most of the emissions outsourcing happened in the 80s and 90s. If anything, there's been a move towards reshoring in recent years
- PheonixPharts 4y ago
  Care to post the citation for this claim? I've read plenty of papers on this but the ability to track "imported CO2" is fairly limited. The most obvious place that's usually missing in capital gained from foreign investments. If, in a hypothetical example, an investment firm make a billion dollars running a foreign oil company, then put that money into a US startup, this wouldn't count as "imported emissions", but clearly if you worked at that startup your job and all the money you spend would have come from exported emissions. The second place these studies tend to fail is how long of a trail of CO2 they follow. If one of the reasons it's cheaper to build a product in China is because the factory is closer to a carbon intensive raw material producer this not counted. If the energy to keep your low cost workers is cheaper and that's part of why they are low cost, that's not counted. It's not the fault of these reports that they can't track all of this, but it's not a great argument for green technology reducing emissions. If also doesn't matter if the US and EU reduce emissions, it matters if we do globaly. I can also promise you that if we forced China to reduce emissions we should feel that impact pretty dramatically in the west Economically. The best proxy globally to economic development is energy production, we live in a global economy, we all share that energy.

throwaway787544 4y ago

You could start a nonprofit to pay people around the world to plant trees. Nothing's impossible if you get off your butt and work at it.

dotancohen 4y ago
Where would the trees be planted? A recent study showed that just to offset _the yearly increase_ in CO2 emissions we would need to plant an entire continent of trees every year. And then ensure that they get adequate quantities of water. Human CO2 emissions are so far off the scale of anything that has ever happened naturally that nature as she evolved on Earth has no way coping.
- throwaway787544 4y ago
  I'm not sure what that means, as forest/jungle density varies greatly as well as species and their absorption of CO2. Did the paper take into account the rest of the ecosystem changes that could capture even more CO2? Regardless, this is only one of potentially thousands of ways we can make an impact. We won't solve the problem without cooperation, but we also don't even have to cooperate at all to start. All of us can start right now and the combined effort will lead to results.
- myshpa 4y ago
  Source please?
- reitanqild 4y ago
  Wait a bit Disclaimer up front: I live as if human caused climate change is real, haven't traveled by plane for years, went on holiday abroad three times since I'm old enough to remember - and this includes honeymoon, I buy used, repair etc etc. So please read me out instead of shouting "JAQ" at me. This cannot be true, can it? I have a simple thought experiment here: Take a globe. Or imagine one. Look at the areas where the oil fields are. It should be small areas outside the Norwegian coast. Small areas in the middle east. Small areas in Ukraine and Russia. Small areas in US, in the Mexican Gulf, outside Brazil etc. Then compare with a single continent. Feel free to reason about it and tell me why I am wrong. Because I am actually interested in the answer, because I live like it matters and it would be great not to have to convince myself to care. And, if your calculations change, feel free to stop demotivating people from trying to help. PS: If you take this as a defense for senseless consumption you are misreading. For those who have given up already I give you another reason: Very often the things I do makes very good sense economically too. I think I have a better, more enjoyable life because I don't waste my money on buying new crap all the time and instead prioritize long lasting goods and experiences and prioritize maintaining what I already got.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

The most important thing you can do is vote. But after that, an EV, solar panels and heat pump heating are 3 steps that will eliminate hundreds of tons of CO2 vs alternatives, and will increase your standard of living since they're cheaper over the long term. Going vegetarian and eliminating flying also would have a big impact, but that involves real sacrifice, unlike the above options.

tzs 4y ago
> The most important thing you can do is vote In the US, where in most places the general election is preceded by a "primary" election for the parties to select candidates for the general election and in which you can only vote for candidates from your party, I'd suggest one other thing when it comes to voting. If you live in an area where one party pretty much always wins in the general election, register for that party so that you can vote in their primary. That way your vote does actually have some influence on the outcome. It won't change which party wins the general election, but it can help move the winning party toward the center. Primaries are usually lower turnout than the general election, which can make it easier for an extremist candidate to win them because the people who vote for the extremists tend to be more enthusiastic and thus more likely to actually vote in the primary. If you are in an area where both parties have a good chance of winning the general election, but one party seems more susceptible to extreme candidates winning their primary, consider registering for that party to try to move them more toward the center. It means giving up influencing the other party, but if that party usually picks OK candidates your vote is probably better used trying to help get rid of extremists.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  Bernie Sanders was operating on all cylinders in this last primary. There is a documentary on all the efforts by his own party to stop his progress. In the end, the turnout was superb but it still was not enough because the older generation did not want take a chance on the radical policies that Sanders proposed. So no the idea of a primary challenge is a lost cause and the younger generation internalized it this past election. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAfMn2l3yAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAfMn2l3yAA

natly 4y ago

I'm gonna get downvoted but this is the same perspective I've taken as well. I can only have paralyzing anxiety for so many years before I just have to stop caring and get on with my life.