3 ms·

"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.

"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).

"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).