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This has become a very popular opinion lately. The mainstream skepticism of if climate change exists has been replaced with it. But it's false. If we can't adap
by locallost 3y ago
This has become a very popular opinion lately. The mainstream skepticism of if climate change exists has been replaced with it. But it's false. If we can't adapt to consuming or driving less how are we going to adapt to e.g. cycles of droughts and floods?
It's become such a popular opinion that I wonder if it's being pushed.
- ivalm 3y agoI think it’s kind of obvious. We can’t adapt to consuming less because there is no immediate cost. We can adapt to droughts because it would force migration of people away from areas without water because those that won’t will either not have access to water or spend a lot for water (a direct cost). Mitigation might be cheaper, but disasters that already happen have more clear incentives.
- locallost 3y agoI'd say it's "we think we can adapt to climate change".
- ivalm 3y agoAt the end of the day, earth will not become entirely uninhabitable. The rich portions of humanity will have to migrate and pay expensive mitigation, the poor portions will suffer and many will die. It’s terrible that we aren’t addressing issues early but it’s hard to see how we fail to adapt. At worst I think we see total excess deaths around two billion (which is a lot! but basically let’s us discount most of Africa and a few hundred mil from Asia and Americas).
- 2000UltraDeluxe 3y agoIt's easy to say when others feel the same way, but I'd like to believe it's mostly a matter of adapting expectations to reality since there's no realistic way to get 8 billion people agree to what the proper way forward is. We have less than 100 million people living a lifestyle that 7900 million people try to achieve. A few prominent people on the top blames it on the 1500 million or so, that have managed to achieve what most of us call basic decent living. Yes, the bar has gone up the last 30 years. Significantly. Yes, many would be fine on 1990-levels. Many wouldn't. The next 5 billion or so work hard to catch up regardless, and they're offsetting anything the smaller part does, by the sheer amount of growth. The poorest 1½ billion that's left are mostly trying to survive. The rest of us could have done _something_, but it's the ones who are worst off that'll take the worst blow. I'm over 40, and learnt about this in school over 30 years ago. My grandparent's generation knew, and did nothing. My parent's generation are still struggling with basic things like throwing glass and metal in a separate container for recycling. The time for solving this with wonderful technological innovation has come and gone. We _could_ try to force some kind of return to sustenance farming, but previous attempts at such social engineering have ended in near-genocide. And so, all that is left is to deal with the consequences of deciscions that were taken long ago. The good thing is that more and more people agree about climate change being real. We might have screwed up preventing disaster, but at least we still have a chance to dampen the impact.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoConsidering the oil economy is literally the hub around which all global finance revolves I'd say there's both motive and finance available for unlimited astroturfing.
- CalRobert 3y agoWe can't even convince people not to drive monster trucks from suburban homes to jobs in a city.
- fulafel 3y agoMonster trucks are a localized failure of regulation.
- fulafel 3y agoIt's the easy way, going straight from disbelief to declaring defeat relieves you from the impetus to take a stand, make life changes etc.