5 ms·

(+1, insightful) 100% agreed. Along these same lines, the endlessly demoralizing narrative around climate change is likely another big factor. I think many

(+1, insightful) 100% agreed. Along these same lines, the endlessly demoralizing narrative around climate change is likely another big factor. I think many more people need to read and internalize things like Hannah Ritchie's book "Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet". Highly recommended.

jplusequalt 3y ago
"How we *CAN* be" is doing a lot of lifting there. Boomers, GenX, and older Millennials all had ample opportunities to do something before we arrived here.
- fhd2 3y ago
  Didn't downvote you, but that's not a hopeful attitude. If the damage is done, figuring out who to blame doesn't repair it. Sometimes we gotta clean up somebody else's mess or nobody will. As programmers, quite routinely I suppose :P
  - viraptor 3y ago
    But it sure is useful to figure out what policies and who did that... considering those are basically still the people in power. For any world-wide change you need to either change them or wait for them to die.
- skinkestek 3y ago
  We / they did a lot. We actually took steps and saved the Ozone layer. Invented and made the solar panel economically viable. Electric cars aren't exactly designed by the youngest generation either. We / they have taken big steps to stop trade in tropic hardwoods. The generation before us built the systems and societies that we today take for granted. To the best of their abilities, very many of them worked very hard to give something better to us than they got themselves. Go further back and they actually stopped the most well oiled war machine that has ever existed, the nazis. Later they stopped the Soviet by outcompeting them. Hindsight is 20/20. But a little humility should be mandatory I think. And ironically, we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load (and also several times less
  - triceratops 3y ago
    > we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load Ask yourself why environmentalists succeeded in shutting down nuclear power, the one viable alternative to fossil fuels, when they failed at literally everything else. That might lead you to who was actually responsible.
    - skinkestek 3y ago
      Because of Chernobyl. And they did not fail at everything else. They succeeded in a lot of cases. For a rather large win, as I mentioned, the Ozone layer was saved. Another big one was banning of DDT and introduction of regulations on everything from new pesticides / herbicides to emissions (or fuel saving as we used to refer to it until recently).
  - fulafel 3y ago
    This blaming the environmentalists for nuclear's failures is quite a tired argument. In addition to being false (environmentalists didn't have the political capital for it in the critical decades) the enormous public subsidies towards nuclear power in the past 80 years were an opportunity cost away from renewables. If we had spent even a small part of that on renewables r&d investment starting in the same timeframe (40s/50s) we could have transitioned from fossil fuels decades earlier.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but I don't think so. All the sociopolitical difficulties that hinder solutions today were just as, if not more, insurmountable for all those generations. And the technological landscape is much more promising today than at any point since this problem was identified. And people from all the generations you listed are strongly represented among the people who created and began scaling those technologies. No generation has been better positioned to contribute to solving this problem than the one entering adulthood today. It will be a damn shame if most of them but into doomerism and let it keep them from taking their shot.
- fulafel 3y ago
  The "don't look up" mindset practiced by generations both current and previous reaches a new height of cognitive dissonance. The interesting question is that why such a thing didn't cause more widespread mental health problems before (though it did for many).
sanderjd 3y ago
This is fundamentally why I find the technology / media narratives fairly compelling. I tend to agree that the first order issue is that people seem to increasingly subscribe to "demoralizing narratives". But not just climate change. I see the same phenomenon, just with different narratives among my more "right wing" loved ones. Instead of the demoralizing narrative being climate change, it is that society is crumbling due to the decline of religion, or because men aren't manly enough and women aren't womanly enough, or because people like them are being censored into oblivion, etc. But why is it that all these different kinds of doom narratives seem to be spreading so much and getting so much traction now, when they didn't seem to in the past? I have trouble seeing what else has changed significantly enough to cause this, if the explanation is not mass adoption of a new kind of media.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  I think blaming it on the phones themselves though is incredibly useless. Yes, the phones and networks permitting the construction of these echo-chambers are a problem that does warrant attention, but it doesn't change the fact that there are numerous, wide scale, huge problems that we are just not dealing with as a society. Is it healthy to have those problems shoved in your face non-stop? No, of course not, but it's arguably even more unhealthy to pretend they don't exist, especially when many of these are existential threats to us as a species. Basically: Climate doomerism is a problem, yes. But climate change is also a problem, one that our power structures seem completely unwilling to address. And in such an environment, Climate doomerism is kind of a logical outcome: we know there's an issue, scientists have known since the 70's, yet we do precious little about it and fundamentally our leaders seem content to ride out the collapse of the biosphere and cash their checks. Of course that's fucking depressing.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Collectively, we might do more about climate change (and other problems) if we weren't spending all our time and energy on our phones...
    - 3y ago
bee_rider 3y ago
I wonder what it feels like WRT climate change, for the next couple generations. For millennials, it was really depressing because the previous generations left this giant problem for us, but at least there was the slight mitigating factor that, while the situation was pretty well understood by scientists, at least it wasn’t totally obvious to the whole population. Our parents might have been gullible but that’s a non-malicious failing. We’ve also done sweet fuck-all about global warming though. We can say it is because we haven’t been able to grab the reins, but we’re hitting our 40’s pretty soon. We owed the next generation a revolution but we seem to be taking a “maybe I’ll get promoted” approach to things. It wasn’t enough. I wonder if all we managed to do was kill the hope that “awareness” is actually going to accomplish anything.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Fauntleroy 3y ago
    We can't really ignore Climate Change, as it is something that is currently occurring and unlikely to stop. Also, it is slowly but surely having disastrous effects on society at large.
    - datadrivenangel 3y ago
      Odds are decent that if we ignored climate change it would cause billions of people to die and create massive disruptions in the lives of those who live over the next several centuries. It would only be catastrophic, not existential. We should work hard to reduce the risks and mitigate the impacts, but the species will go on even if we ignore it. And, almost everything is getting better faster than anyone predicted. There's a strong case for climate optimism, and a future that we can improve by continuing to take action and put in the hard work of fixing the world.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      You personally can because you have no control over it. Unless you become the next ruler of China, India and Russia plus control three houses of US government what you personally do won't matter. So stop living in terror, not sleeping at night, thinking the world is hopeless. The cold war was more serious and things worked out unexpectedly. World War I and II were more serious and they ended different than how everyone thought. Landfills filling up was the concern now it's used for power generation. ACID rain.. holes Ozone layer. We fixed them. Carbon in the air will be used to generate food as we find new ways to 3d print food. You will see. Our future problem will be not enough carbon
underlipton 3y ago
The narrative around climate change, i.e., that it's happening and that we need to do something about it, is not demoralizing. What's demoralizing is that the people with the power, money, and influence to take the biggest steps refuse to do so. Someone has figured that the only way to get them to care is to badger them with the facts until they do, and a lot of us are okay with that. It's preferable to the alternative, which is ecoterrorism. Trying to sweep the situation under the rug while things become more troubled and people become more desperate just makes the latter more likely. In this case, the opposite of mopey and depressed isn't optimism, it's rage.

jplusequalt 3y ago

"How we *CAN* be" is doing a lot of lifting there. Boomers, GenX, and older Millennials all had ample opportunities to do something before we arrived here.

fhd2 3y ago
Didn't downvote you, but that's not a hopeful attitude. If the damage is done, figuring out who to blame doesn't repair it. Sometimes we gotta clean up somebody else's mess or nobody will. As programmers, quite routinely I suppose :P
- viraptor 3y ago
  But it sure is useful to figure out what policies and who did that... considering those are basically still the people in power. For any world-wide change you need to either change them or wait for them to die.
skinkestek 3y ago
We / they did a lot. We actually took steps and saved the Ozone layer. Invented and made the solar panel economically viable. Electric cars aren't exactly designed by the youngest generation either. We / they have taken big steps to stop trade in tropic hardwoods. The generation before us built the systems and societies that we today take for granted. To the best of their abilities, very many of them worked very hard to give something better to us than they got themselves. Go further back and they actually stopped the most well oiled war machine that has ever existed, the nazis. Later they stopped the Soviet by outcompeting them. Hindsight is 20/20. But a little humility should be mandatory I think. And ironically, we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load (and also several times less
- triceratops 3y ago
  > we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load Ask yourself why environmentalists succeeded in shutting down nuclear power, the one viable alternative to fossil fuels, when they failed at literally everything else. That might lead you to who was actually responsible.
  - skinkestek 3y ago
    Because of Chernobyl. And they did not fail at everything else. They succeeded in a lot of cases. For a rather large win, as I mentioned, the Ozone layer was saved. Another big one was banning of DDT and introduction of regulations on everything from new pesticides / herbicides to emissions (or fuel saving as we used to refer to it until recently).
- fulafel 3y ago
  This blaming the environmentalists for nuclear's failures is quite a tired argument. In addition to being false (environmentalists didn't have the political capital for it in the critical decades) the enormous public subsidies towards nuclear power in the past 80 years were an opportunity cost away from renewables. If we had spent even a small part of that on renewables r&d investment starting in the same timeframe (40s/50s) we could have transitioned from fossil fuels decades earlier.
sanderjd 3y ago
I'm sorry, but I don't think so. All the sociopolitical difficulties that hinder solutions today were just as, if not more, insurmountable for all those generations. And the technological landscape is much more promising today than at any point since this problem was identified. And people from all the generations you listed are strongly represented among the people who created and began scaling those technologies. No generation has been better positioned to contribute to solving this problem than the one entering adulthood today. It will be a damn shame if most of them but into doomerism and let it keep them from taking their shot.
fulafel 3y ago
The "don't look up" mindset practiced by generations both current and previous reaches a new height of cognitive dissonance. The interesting question is that why such a thing didn't cause more widespread mental health problems before (though it did for many).

sanderjd 3y ago

This is fundamentally why I find the technology / media narratives fairly compelling. I tend to agree that the first order issue is that people seem to increasingly subscribe to "demoralizing narratives". But not just climate change. I see the same phenomenon, just with different narratives among my more "right wing" loved ones. Instead of the demoralizing narrative being climate change, it is that society is crumbling due to the decline of religion, or because men aren't manly enough and women aren't womanly enough, or because people like them are being censored into oblivion, etc. But why is it that all these different kinds of doom narratives seem to be spreading so much and getting so much traction now, when they didn't seem to in the past? I have trouble seeing what else has changed significantly enough to cause this, if the explanation is not mass adoption of a new kind of media.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
I think blaming it on the phones themselves though is incredibly useless. Yes, the phones and networks permitting the construction of these echo-chambers are a problem that does warrant attention, but it doesn't change the fact that there are numerous, wide scale, huge problems that we are just not dealing with as a society. Is it healthy to have those problems shoved in your face non-stop? No, of course not, but it's arguably even more unhealthy to pretend they don't exist, especially when many of these are existential threats to us as a species. Basically: Climate doomerism is a problem, yes. But climate change is also a problem, one that our power structures seem completely unwilling to address. And in such an environment, Climate doomerism is kind of a logical outcome: we know there's an issue, scientists have known since the 70's, yet we do precious little about it and fundamentally our leaders seem content to ride out the collapse of the biosphere and cash their checks. Of course that's fucking depressing.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Collectively, we might do more about climate change (and other problems) if we weren't spending all our time and energy on our phones...
  - 3y ago

bee_rider 3y ago

I wonder what it feels like WRT climate change, for the next couple generations. For millennials, it was really depressing because the previous generations left this giant problem for us, but at least there was the slight mitigating factor that, while the situation was pretty well understood by scientists, at least it wasn’t totally obvious to the whole population. Our parents might have been gullible but that’s a non-malicious failing. We’ve also done sweet fuck-all about global warming though. We can say it is because we haven’t been able to grab the reins, but we’re hitting our 40’s pretty soon. We owed the next generation a revolution but we seem to be taking a “maybe I’ll get promoted” approach to things. It wasn’t enough. I wonder if all we managed to do was kill the hope that “awareness” is actually going to accomplish anything.

ipaddr 3y ago
[flagged]
- Fauntleroy 3y ago
  We can't really ignore Climate Change, as it is something that is currently occurring and unlikely to stop. Also, it is slowly but surely having disastrous effects on society at large.
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    Odds are decent that if we ignored climate change it would cause billions of people to die and create massive disruptions in the lives of those who live over the next several centuries. It would only be catastrophic, not existential. We should work hard to reduce the risks and mitigate the impacts, but the species will go on even if we ignore it. And, almost everything is getting better faster than anyone predicted. There's a strong case for climate optimism, and a future that we can improve by continuing to take action and put in the hard work of fixing the world.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    You personally can because you have no control over it. Unless you become the next ruler of China, India and Russia plus control three houses of US government what you personally do won't matter. So stop living in terror, not sleeping at night, thinking the world is hopeless. The cold war was more serious and things worked out unexpectedly. World War I and II were more serious and they ended different than how everyone thought. Landfills filling up was the concern now it's used for power generation. ACID rain.. holes Ozone layer. We fixed them. Carbon in the air will be used to generate food as we find new ways to 3d print food. You will see. Our future problem will be not enough carbon

underlipton 3y ago

The narrative around climate change, i.e., that it's happening and that we need to do something about it, is not demoralizing. What's demoralizing is that the people with the power, money, and influence to take the biggest steps refuse to do so. Someone has figured that the only way to get them to care is to badger them with the facts until they do, and a lot of us are okay with that. It's preferable to the alternative, which is ecoterrorism. Trying to sweep the situation under the rug while things become more troubled and people become more desperate just makes the latter more likely. In this case, the opposite of mopey and depressed isn't optimism, it's rage.