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What is terrifying to me is that I have been sharing this planet with people who are not willing to change anything to their mode of life and won't even vote fo

What is terrifying to me is that I have been sharing this planet with people who are not willing to change anything to their mode of life and won't even vote for parties that actually care and want to do something about the issue. Because those are also the parties that are for a better redistribution and allocation of resources. And I know the rich would rather rant all day long in their newspaper mouthpieces about communist dictatorship rather than being taxed/renouncing to take the plane for all their trips. The idea that I am going to die by starvation because someone liked to play golf and prefers driving around in an air conditioned metal boxes in concerete and tar hell is killing me. I have know about climate change since I was a teenager some twenty years ago. How some people may not have had the memo about impending doom is beyond me.

Workaccount2 4y ago
Part of the problem, likely a major part, is the first world has to go and stop the emerging world from emerging like they did. Europeans who clear-cut europe to industrialize into a first world society are having to go tell Brazilians "You must stop cutting down the Amazon!", preventing them from industrializing. Basically: Rich people telling poor people that they cannot do the things that make people rich.
- triceratops 4y ago
  Or rich people can pay for poor people to industrialize in a climate-friendly manner. It's going to cost a lot, but the alternative is worse.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Part of the Kyoto Treaty did exactly this. Seems to have been a bit of a mess for various reasons, China and USA opted out, the money from EU got diverted by a recession. I think overall, carbon fees and getting tech to cost parity via local subsidies, then ensuring corporations/kleptocrats don't conspire in developing nations may work better.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Correct. Because to do so threatens humanity and many other species. The solution then is to share the existing wealth and build better rather than go hands off, right? We can simultaneously support development without killing all future generations.
- short_sells_poo 4y ago
  I agree with you so much. Britain was basically stripped clear of wood and concerted recovery only began after WW2 because at some point there was a serious risk that there won't be any timber supply.
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
> their mode of life and won't even vote for parties that actually care and want to do something about the issue. The other issue is that boomer-style green parties in the EU are completely counterproductive as far as limiting CO2 emissions. Both EELV in France and the greens in Germany are responsible for raising our electrical carbon emissions from closing nuclear plants, when we have no practical solutions for using solar/wind with storage today (it’s fairly obvious to me now that I live in California, where the sun shines almost all the time). I really hope some of them are secretly paid by the oil industry because that’s basically what they have caused us to do, burn more oil and gas.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  It wasn't the greens. While you can indeed make an argument about shutting down nuclear power plants while there are coal power plants in operations, the green party was part of the government which targetted the mid-20ies for an end of nuclear energy in Germany - many power plants would have had to be shut down of age anyway. But they also set energy politics onto a trajectory which would have meant to mostly run on renewables by now. It was the Merkel government which first prolonged nuclear power plant run times and then cut it down quicker than the initial plans after Fukushima. All of that could be rationally argued, but not that they mostly killed the deployment of renewables. If they had pushed that properly, we still would be fine. Still, Germany managed to get to 50% renewables in the electricity mix. But indeed, we now have to push hard to take up speed of deployment and fortunately we have now the greens in power to push for that.
  - thatfrenchguy 4y ago
    > Still, Germany managed to get to 50% renewables in the electricity mix. But indeed, we now have to push hard to take up speed of deployment and fortunately we have now the greens in power to push for that. I live in California, we have 59% renewables. The last 31% is exponentially harder as you actually need electricity sources that are reliable. Nuclear is reliable / suitable for base loads, wind/solar aren't. There are zero grid that use solar/wind as base load today.
  - teakettle42 4y ago
scottLobster 4y ago
Those parties you mention are often just as unserious as our current crop of "leaders", which can be seen from the lack of support for nuclear and the lack of acknowledgement that to complete the green transition we need MORE fossil fuels in the short term, not less. What do they think is going to power the factories/infrastructure that make all the solar/wind/battery/nuclear stuff at the scales required? Where do they think plastic comes from? We also need a lot more mining. We need more lithium, more cobalt, more copper, more aluminum, among others. It's not a matter of "just pay for it", the material inputs for a GLOBAL green transition do not presently exist at any price without more mining. But mines are environmentally damaging and require fossil fuels to get started, so those same parties often ignore the need. Hell the good people of Maine recently voted down a measure to import clean hydroelectric power from Quebec because they didn't want to destroy a small stretch of forest to build the transmission lines. That bullshit FernGully flavor of environmentalism has to go extinct If we're going to be serious about de-carbonizing the economy, then we need to purge the various environmental factions of their nature-worshiping ideologies and focus on the dry, economic, technological, sometimes nuclear, localized-nature-destroying methods that will actually do it.
- southerntofu 4y ago
  Not that i have any faith in political parties, but i disagree with your analysis entirely. Green capitalism is not gonna get us out of this dire situation. For the reasons you point out, techno-utopist solutionism is actually making the situation a lot worse (extraction/refinement of more minerals, more overall industrial activity to achieve the transition, extra hardware we don't know how to recycle). The more we try to make it look like industrial society can be green, the more everyone is going to consume and that's not sustainable in the long run. We need actual degrowth now, if not yesterday. And i'm not saying we global northerners should moralize countries like Brazil or India about their industrial practices: no, we need to develop our own self-sustenance for food, housing, and medicine in the here and now... and stop pillaging/exploiting the 3rd world as our industrial backyard where all chemical atrocious pollution is permitted. Nuclear is part of the tech pipe dream that the oligarchy is promising us, of an ever abundance of free/clean energy. But the reality on the ground, from mining sites to storage facilities, looks very different. And who cares where your electricity comes from if even the most mundane devices come with electronics and batteries? Can't i buy a fucking car without having at least a 100 micro-controllers inside?! If you want to save the environment, make it a criminal offense to sell a product without having at least minimum 50y warranty/service. That's how you change things: the planet doesn't care if your energy has more or less carbon if you keep on producing disposable phones that's gonna be broken/obsolete two years from now. We have to stop this madness. The same goes with the housing industry and many other industries, believe it or not: the Romans and the Aztecs built low-tech structures that will outlive us all, and multi-billion dollars corporations can't even build stuff that stays in decent shape for more than 10 years (or rather, they won't for financial reasons). So fine, be angry all you want at people like me who promote actual environmentalism. Maybe we're too much "nature-worshipping" to be heard by the psychopaths in power who already ruined everything. I personally have zero faith in the system and structures that have taken us so far, and have made sure that every attempt to diverge from the worst possible timeline has been sabotaged. I come from France, where the Rainbow Warrior was sunk by secret services, and the COP21 mass demonstrations were all canceled using the indecent pretext of so-called "terrorist" attacks and State of Emergency... The people in power will never help us save the planet: we have to make them.

Workaccount2 4y ago

Part of the problem, likely a major part, is the first world has to go and stop the emerging world from emerging like they did. Europeans who clear-cut europe to industrialize into a first world society are having to go tell Brazilians "You must stop cutting down the Amazon!", preventing them from industrializing. Basically: Rich people telling poor people that they cannot do the things that make people rich.

triceratops 4y ago
Or rich people can pay for poor people to industrialize in a climate-friendly manner. It's going to cost a lot, but the alternative is worse.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Part of the Kyoto Treaty did exactly this. Seems to have been a bit of a mess for various reasons, China and USA opted out, the money from EU got diverted by a recession. I think overall, carbon fees and getting tech to cost parity via local subsidies, then ensuring corporations/kleptocrats don't conspire in developing nations may work better.
tomrod 4y ago
Correct. Because to do so threatens humanity and many other species. The solution then is to share the existing wealth and build better rather than go hands off, right? We can simultaneously support development without killing all future generations.
short_sells_poo 4y ago
I agree with you so much. Britain was basically stripped clear of wood and concerted recovery only began after WW2 because at some point there was a serious risk that there won't be any timber supply.

thatfrenchguy 4y ago

> their mode of life and won't even vote for parties that actually care and want to do something about the issue. The other issue is that boomer-style green parties in the EU are completely counterproductive as far as limiting CO2 emissions. Both EELV in France and the greens in Germany are responsible for raising our electrical carbon emissions from closing nuclear plants, when we have no practical solutions for using solar/wind with storage today (it’s fairly obvious to me now that I live in California, where the sun shines almost all the time). I really hope some of them are secretly paid by the oil industry because that’s basically what they have caused us to do, burn more oil and gas.

_ph_ 4y ago
It wasn't the greens. While you can indeed make an argument about shutting down nuclear power plants while there are coal power plants in operations, the green party was part of the government which targetted the mid-20ies for an end of nuclear energy in Germany - many power plants would have had to be shut down of age anyway. But they also set energy politics onto a trajectory which would have meant to mostly run on renewables by now. It was the Merkel government which first prolonged nuclear power plant run times and then cut it down quicker than the initial plans after Fukushima. All of that could be rationally argued, but not that they mostly killed the deployment of renewables. If they had pushed that properly, we still would be fine. Still, Germany managed to get to 50% renewables in the electricity mix. But indeed, we now have to push hard to take up speed of deployment and fortunately we have now the greens in power to push for that.
- thatfrenchguy 4y ago
  > Still, Germany managed to get to 50% renewables in the electricity mix. But indeed, we now have to push hard to take up speed of deployment and fortunately we have now the greens in power to push for that. I live in California, we have 59% renewables. The last 31% is exponentially harder as you actually need electricity sources that are reliable. Nuclear is reliable / suitable for base loads, wind/solar aren't. There are zero grid that use solar/wind as base load today.
- teakettle42 4y ago

scottLobster 4y ago

Those parties you mention are often just as unserious as our current crop of "leaders", which can be seen from the lack of support for nuclear and the lack of acknowledgement that to complete the green transition we need MORE fossil fuels in the short term, not less. What do they think is going to power the factories/infrastructure that make all the solar/wind/battery/nuclear stuff at the scales required? Where do they think plastic comes from? We also need a lot more mining. We need more lithium, more cobalt, more copper, more aluminum, among others. It's not a matter of "just pay for it", the material inputs for a GLOBAL green transition do not presently exist at any price without more mining. But mines are environmentally damaging and require fossil fuels to get started, so those same parties often ignore the need. Hell the good people of Maine recently voted down a measure to import clean hydroelectric power from Quebec because they didn't want to destroy a small stretch of forest to build the transmission lines. That bullshit FernGully flavor of environmentalism has to go extinct If we're going to be serious about de-carbonizing the economy, then we need to purge the various environmental factions of their nature-worshiping ideologies and focus on the dry, economic, technological, sometimes nuclear, localized-nature-destroying methods that will actually do it.

southerntofu 4y ago
Not that i have any faith in political parties, but i disagree with your analysis entirely. Green capitalism is not gonna get us out of this dire situation. For the reasons you point out, techno-utopist solutionism is actually making the situation a lot worse (extraction/refinement of more minerals, more overall industrial activity to achieve the transition, extra hardware we don't know how to recycle). The more we try to make it look like industrial society can be green, the more everyone is going to consume and that's not sustainable in the long run. We need actual degrowth now, if not yesterday. And i'm not saying we global northerners should moralize countries like Brazil or India about their industrial practices: no, we need to develop our own self-sustenance for food, housing, and medicine in the here and now... and stop pillaging/exploiting the 3rd world as our industrial backyard where all chemical atrocious pollution is permitted. Nuclear is part of the tech pipe dream that the oligarchy is promising us, of an ever abundance of free/clean energy. But the reality on the ground, from mining sites to storage facilities, looks very different. And who cares where your electricity comes from if even the most mundane devices come with electronics and batteries? Can't i buy a fucking car without having at least a 100 micro-controllers inside?! If you want to save the environment, make it a criminal offense to sell a product without having at least minimum 50y warranty/service. That's how you change things: the planet doesn't care if your energy has more or less carbon if you keep on producing disposable phones that's gonna be broken/obsolete two years from now. We have to stop this madness. The same goes with the housing industry and many other industries, believe it or not: the Romans and the Aztecs built low-tech structures that will outlive us all, and multi-billion dollars corporations can't even build stuff that stays in decent shape for more than 10 years (or rather, they won't for financial reasons). So fine, be angry all you want at people like me who promote actual environmentalism. Maybe we're too much "nature-worshipping" to be heard by the psychopaths in power who already ruined everything. I personally have zero faith in the system and structures that have taken us so far, and have made sure that every attempt to diverge from the worst possible timeline has been sabotaged. I come from France, where the Rainbow Warrior was sunk by secret services, and the COP21 mass demonstrations were all canceled using the indecent pretext of so-called "terrorist" attacks and State of Emergency... The people in power will never help us save the planet: we have to make them.