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What would the world look like if we had won the fight? I've been hearing about this fight for my entire life. People are extremely passionate and self-righteo

What would the world look like if we had won the fight? I've been hearing about this fight for my entire life. People are extremely passionate and self-righteous about it and have science to back up everything they believe, so why was there never a single unified plan with a single unified movement behind it?

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
There is one unified plan which is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and switch over to more sustainable energy sources.
- yupitsme123 1y ago
  Those are goals, not a plan. Is there a plan that scientists and activists agreed on that I should be supporting?
  - alganet 1y ago
    No, there is no masterplan. Not enough of the population was properly educated on the risks, and therefore a solid plan was never even conceived. We needed lots of people thinking about it in order to do that, while most people just discussed it superficially and were easily provoked, manipulated or distracted.
    - yupitsme123 1y ago
      I never understood why the entire population needed to be involved. It's not a referendum. A handful of smart people just needed to get together and come up with a solution. Then the governments of the world implement it. I understand that the second part is difficult. But did the first part ever happen?
      - alganet 1y ago
        > A handful of smart people just needed to get together Things don't work this way, unfortunatelly. This kind of thinking just pushes the problem to someone else do deal with, which only serves to shift up blame. Small groups are vulnerable to corruption, or distractions, or silly power plays. We needed _lots_ of people with good education and reasonable awareness of the risks, it was the only way to have a chance to develop a more solid plan. However, you got your way. There are small groups of smart people working on these issues. But many, many of us know that their chances are slim (due to the shortcomings mentioned earlier). Unfortunatelly, not that many to form a critical mass.
        yupitsme123 1y ago
        Things do in fact work that way. Here's a list of things that a small number of people changed without the consent of the public, all before we got a single workable plan for climate change: The internet, cell phones, social media, fracking, AI, the fall of the Soviet Union, war in Iraq, changes in attitudes towards family, sexuality. Just to name a few. All of these things just kind of happened without the public having asking for them. Why then has a slight, gradual reduction in greenhouse gases been so hard?
        alganet 1y ago
        Because climate change is more similar to erradicating polio than selling cellphones or toppling leaders. In the whole human history, only one disease was erradicated: smallpox. It took centuries, countless smart people, reasonable awareness of many counter-intuitive ideas, and we almost failed. Going to the moon was easier.
        queenkjuul 1y ago
        What small number of people influenced societal shifts in views towards family and sexuality?
      - Tadpole9181 1y ago
        "Just" does so much work in these comments. I mean... Why do the smart people not "just" develop a perfect economic plan? Or "just" end world hunger? Or "just" stop global conflicts? Anyway, there have been multitudes of plans and strategies and actions to chip away at the problem. All of them require sacrificing political capital, raising taxes and the costs of products, and effort. And you get nothing substantial in return. So while the entire scientific community tried pushing education and solutions galore, the political and corporate establishment fought tooth and nail against any aspect that did not immediately profit them. To the point that now an entire party in the richest country on Earth that holds all three branches of government uses opposition to solving the problem as one of the core tenants of their platform.
        yupitsme123 1y ago
        Smart people are doing those things. Just in a way that benefits them and not necessarily you or I. Anyway, what is the solution that the scientific community proposed and that was killed by the political and corporate establishment? What is the plan that the non-US countries have implemented to eliminate the problem?
        jochem9 1y ago
        Solution: reduce CO2 emissions to carbon neutrality. This has been agreed multiple times, most notably the Paris agreement of 2015, which set deadlines for countries to achieve carbon neutrality. The plan failed in e.g. the US because politicians didn't follow through. Trump literally withdrew from the Paris agreement. All but 3 countries in the world participate in the Paris agreement. This includes all big CO2 emitters, like China, US (now withdrawn), India and EU countries.
        yupitsme123 1y ago
        That's a goal more so than a plan.
        alganet 1y ago
      - xboxnolifes 1y ago
        Lots of smart people came together in different solutions. The missing piece is that there is opposition. The opposition won.
        yupitsme123 1y ago
        Who were these people and what were the solutions? Who was the opposition and when was the battle decided? If you're going to tell me it was the Democrats vs the Republicans, then please explain why countries outside the US haven't made it happen yet. China is a country full of scientists and engineers and the opposition there is non existent.
        xboxnolifes 1y ago
        Most of the opposition is the industries that renewable energy threatens and those who have vested interests in it.
      - queenkjuul 1y ago
        Any solution involves less money for oil shareholders and thus would be opposed tooth and nail
  - morkalork 1y ago
    Blame for lack of a plan is not on the shoulders of scientists. They do science. They are not a government whose responsibility is policy and governing. And apparently our politicians ay best play lip service to, and at worst don't believe in, these problems. Consequently, there is no plan to reach those goals for anyone to rally around.
    - yupitsme123 1y ago
      Coming up with a plan would be squarely in the hands of scientists and engineers and passionate individuals. Perhaps the government and the public would help in enacting that plan, but not in creating it. I'm led to believe that the scientists and activists are all led by the same empirical research and share a broad consensus. So why then is there no plan or even a concept of a plan after 30 years of talking about all this?
      - hilbert42 1y ago
        Money. More is needed and no one wants to pay—even when proposals make sense.
        yupitsme123 1y ago
        How much? This is what I'm talking about. It's hard to get people to buy a narrative that says we need to spend infinite amounts of money on an as yet undetermined plan, or else life as we know it will end.
      - morkalork 1y ago
        Once again, scientists do science. Governments do governance. A scientist can do research and come to conclusions like "dumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere is bad mmmmkay" and tell you goals like "targeting x-degrees of warming will save us from the worst consequences". Politicians and governments should take those statements and goals and build plans around them and then we can vote for the ones who've got the best plan (or not). Expecting scientists to do the government's job is abdicating all responsibility and setting everyone up for failure.
  - jemmyw 1y ago
    Any plan should have been made between government and industry. The scientists aren't there to plan, they look at the data and try to figure out how the world works. Scientists told us long ago there might be a climate problem, and have steadily built up more and more data and models and evidence. Activists shouldn't have existed at all. Science informs government there's a problem, government informs the population and creates multiple policies to address the problem, industry works within those policies to adapt the economy. Actual people shouldn't have to feel guilty about their own carbon emissions or second guess the science with their own opinion, but should vote on the policies that they like the best, knowing fully what the consequences will be. That would be nice anyway. Instead just about every part of that chain tries to fuck with the other parts for money and power.
    - yupitsme123 1y ago
      Politicians don't come up with plans either. Even with the best intentions, they don't know enough to be able to come up with a plan. Experts need to do that. You also don't need the government if you want to enact change. We have an AI revolution because science and money got together to make it happen, and then consumers jumped on it. Not because the government passed a law to make it happen. So did the scientists and engineers with mountains of research ever figure out a solution for the rest of us to get behind?
      - jemmyw 1y ago
        Scientists aren't responsible for coming up with a plan. Not individually anyway. I think others have expressed that in this thread you've started. An actual plan would be hugely multifaceted and would require a government or large entity to fund it: think about the scope of what that would include, you'd need to bring together researchers and experts on pretty much every industry that exists. You're talking about planning across the entire global economy. We haven't exactly been that keen on planned economies. Saying that, governments have made policy and it has had an effect. Emissions in Europe and the US are on a steady downward trend.
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    The Paris Climate Accords were supposed to be this.
    - yupitsme123 1y ago
      Before that there was Kyoto. I get that the US is braindead and can't make things happen. But what about all the other countries?
      - AlecSchueler 1y ago
        What about them? You're moving the goalposts.
      - IAmBroom 1y ago
        To be fair, if all the world except the US and China change, we're still probably doomed.
jkmcf 1y ago
I'll bite. 1. There's too much money directly opposing the goals of fighting climate change 2. Humans aren't big on alignment. FFS, we still don't have good UX/GUI for Linux and it's mainly been stagnant* and divided into Gnome and KDE for 20+ years. * despite the impressive accomplishments, it's essentially true
- yupitsme123 1y ago
  1. Wouldn't there be even more money to be made by saving the human race? Putting aside profit, wouldn't people with money want to continue existing and therefore be aligned with the movement? 2. Your example isn't something life or death. Humanity has aligned on numerous things and changed significantly amd uniformly during the past 30 years without even trying. Why is it so hard to come up with a list of demands and reforms for everyone to agree on and march behind to save the world?
  - jkmcf 1y ago
    I don't understand why humans do what they do, consistently and repetitively, against their best interests, except for money, emotions, or a lack of understanding.
    - yupitsme123 1y ago
      Climate change is the only issue I'm aware of where "humanity" routinely gets implicated. Climate change has been a mainstream issue since the mid-90s. From then until now we've had massive material and ideological changes across the globe, none of which required the support or awareness of humanity or the voting public. The internet, cell phones, social media, fracking, AI, multiple wars, changes in attitudes towards family, sexuality, and marijuana usage have all occurred during this time period. Why then has a slight, gradual reduction in greenhouse gas reduction been so hard?
      - hilbert42 1y ago
        Because all the above depends on energy and it's still mostly produced from fossil fuels! Changing that cost money—and people resent having to pay more for change that they don't perceive will make much difference to their lives. Whether they're right or wrong doesn't alter that.
alganet 1y ago
There's no "fight". Any people being aggressive or overly passionate about it (or against it) are, in my view, compromised (provoked, used, manipulated). There has been a consistent attempt at getting everyone to consider the risks in a reasonable way. It has failed.
mytailorisrich 1y ago
It was impossible to "win the fight" because of the demographic curve (~1.5 billion in 1900, ~8.2 billion today)
jhanschoo 1y ago
> so why was there never a single unified plan with a single unified movement behind it? The UN and EU regularly publish evidence-based reports with multi-pronged recommendations. That seems to me as "unified" as you can get, in terms of multinational cooperation and holism in recommendations. But to have any concrete change you need political will, and that is obviously lacking. To get political will in democratic societies you need to convince people to elect their leaders on this and not taxes or pet special interests, which is why you have been hearing about this fight all your life.
- yupitsme123 1y ago
  First off, your's is a US-centric view. Other countries don't have those same obstacles but as far as I know their progress in eliminating CO2 has only been slightly better than ours. Second, I don't see why political will is necessary. Most of the big changes that have happened in our lives over the past decades have had nothing to do with laws being passed or voters voting for anything. On the contrary private interests basically do what they want and the government getting involvement is seen as a hindrance not a help.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    I mean did you not just answer your own question? Political will comes from private interests, who are more concerned with next quarters profits than the plight of humanity. I disagree with other commenters that the opinion of common people matters. Most Western political projects are tied to capital, not people.
  - jhanschoo 1y ago
    > Second, I don't see why political will is necessary. > Most of the big changes that have happened in our lives over the past decades have had nothing to do with laws being passed or voters voting for anything. I can agree with the latter without agreeing with the former. But political will and oil go hand-in-hand. Governments have been destroyed by foreign interests in oil. Governments hostile to their people have been maintained by foreign interests in oil. Governments giving great security to its people have been built from sovereign oil. Writing this response made me realize that you are right. Considering the means and methods of countervailing interests, democratic persuasion does not seem anywhere near sufficient, even though these are the methods being used by advocates. A surer path might involve highly militant and capable states willing to perform espionage, terrorism, and regime change to pursue environmental goals.
Voultapher 1y ago
Let's first define winning in this context, a stable population number of humans for the next 100k years. Pretty much every piece of evidence we have points towards this being utterly impossible with billions of humans, habitat destruction and food web damage is simply way too severe for such a large number to be sustainable. So probably somewhere in the 1-100 million, but realistically no one knows. All we know is that it would have to be drastically lower. Planes and cars are probably illegal, shared communal usage of resources is key. We strictly limit ourselves to materials that are proven to either decompose quickly or don't enter the food web like for example PFAS and micro-plastics do. We'd have to let go of a human supremacist world view, and rather see ourselves as a part in the community of life and the delicate balance it is in. Zooming out, one could argue that we are on a roller coaster and our complex brains give us the impression that there is a little steering wheel in front of us and that we get to decide the fate of humanity. Life can be viewed as a parasite, it invades every area on the surface and the oceans of this world, doing so with fractal depth. And over longer periods it is prone to mass extinction events, there have been five big ones so far. Who knows, maybe the sixth one isn't a 72 teratonnes impact event or giant volcanic eruptions, but rather this time it's an all habitat outcompeting population explosion by one species.
- Jensson 1y ago
  > Pretty much every piece of evidence we have points towards this being utterly impossible with billions of humans, habitat destruction and food web damage is simply way too severe for such a large number to be sustainable What are you basing this on? More land gets arable when the world is warmer, the earth is more lifeless today than at almost any point before due to the cold and lack of CO2 making plants not grow very quickly. Biodiversity will go down from this event, but temperate areas will be fine and earth will likely be able to support more people in 1000 years than it can today thanks to global warming. What people are afraid of are short term disruptions to current systems, but the long term livability of earth is going to be fine. The people who argue otherwise just hasn't looked at what earth was like when there were many times more CO2 than there is here now, that wasn't that many million years ago.
  - 1y ago
goalieca 1y ago
Because the world is made of independent countries acting in their own best interest or that of their leaders. There will never be a world government until all countries roughly align on a common set of values and political framework and then actually practice those. Most countries don’t share values and ideals.
- yupitsme123 1y ago
  The fact that there are so many countries should mean that at least one of them should have solved the issue by now, no? Meaning, there should be some country that has near zero greenhouse gas emissions. Have they?
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    Well you could spend 5 seconds on Google if you cared to https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/12/these-countries-achieved-net-zero-emissions/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/12/these-countries-achi...
  - goalieca 1y ago
    It only matters that all-countries (at least the bigger ones) get there. We share the atmosphere. It's also an inconvenient fact that if you import goods then you're externalizing your pollution.
AlecSchueler 1y ago
We live in a world driven by capitalism, not by logic. If global environmental collapse is more profitable for those making the decisions in the medium term then that's what we're going to get, their descendants be damned.
- nec4b 1y ago
  Which country not driven by capitalism is doing better in regards to environment?
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    There are no countries in this world where capitalism is not the dominant factor. This has been true for centuries. I said "we live in a world..." not "we live in a country.."
    - nec4b 1y ago
      >>There are no countries in this world where capitalism is not the dominant factor. That is certainly news for North Koreans or Cubans. >> This has been true for centuries. Soviet Union would like a word with you. What they did to their environment hasn't happened in any capitalist country.
      - AlecSchueler 1y ago
        North Korea is completely crippled because of the dominance of capitalist countries. The Soviet Union was also unable to escape capitalism because of its influence on global supply chains etc. It furthermore presented them with an outside factor which could dissolve their entire system if allowed to come in and flourish, forcing them into a state of semi isolationism. The same thing is true of North Korea. Pressure from capitalism eventually lead to the USSR's collapse. Think about it like someone with extreme immune issues who has to take multiple shots every day to avoid a certain disease. Your argument is that because they don't actually carry the disease it's not a dominant factor in their lives.

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago

There is one unified plan which is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and switch over to more sustainable energy sources.

yupitsme123 1y ago
Those are goals, not a plan. Is there a plan that scientists and activists agreed on that I should be supporting?
- alganet 1y ago
  No, there is no masterplan. Not enough of the population was properly educated on the risks, and therefore a solid plan was never even conceived. We needed lots of people thinking about it in order to do that, while most people just discussed it superficially and were easily provoked, manipulated or distracted.
  - yupitsme123 1y ago
    I never understood why the entire population needed to be involved. It's not a referendum. A handful of smart people just needed to get together and come up with a solution. Then the governments of the world implement it. I understand that the second part is difficult. But did the first part ever happen?
    - alganet 1y ago
      > A handful of smart people just needed to get together Things don't work this way, unfortunatelly. This kind of thinking just pushes the problem to someone else do deal with, which only serves to shift up blame. Small groups are vulnerable to corruption, or distractions, or silly power plays. We needed _lots_ of people with good education and reasonable awareness of the risks, it was the only way to have a chance to develop a more solid plan. However, you got your way. There are small groups of smart people working on these issues. But many, many of us know that their chances are slim (due to the shortcomings mentioned earlier). Unfortunatelly, not that many to form a critical mass.
      - yupitsme123 1y ago
        Things do in fact work that way. Here's a list of things that a small number of people changed without the consent of the public, all before we got a single workable plan for climate change: The internet, cell phones, social media, fracking, AI, the fall of the Soviet Union, war in Iraq, changes in attitudes towards family, sexuality. Just to name a few. All of these things just kind of happened without the public having asking for them. Why then has a slight, gradual reduction in greenhouse gases been so hard?
        alganet 1y ago
        Because climate change is more similar to erradicating polio than selling cellphones or toppling leaders. In the whole human history, only one disease was erradicated: smallpox. It took centuries, countless smart people, reasonable awareness of many counter-intuitive ideas, and we almost failed. Going to the moon was easier.
        queenkjuul 1y ago
        What small number of people influenced societal shifts in views towards family and sexuality?
    - Tadpole9181 1y ago
      "Just" does so much work in these comments. I mean... Why do the smart people not "just" develop a perfect economic plan? Or "just" end world hunger? Or "just" stop global conflicts? Anyway, there have been multitudes of plans and strategies and actions to chip away at the problem. All of them require sacrificing political capital, raising taxes and the costs of products, and effort. And you get nothing substantial in return. So while the entire scientific community tried pushing education and solutions galore, the political and corporate establishment fought tooth and nail against any aspect that did not immediately profit them. To the point that now an entire party in the richest country on Earth that holds all three branches of government uses opposition to solving the problem as one of the core tenants of their platform.
      - yupitsme123 1y ago
        Smart people are doing those things. Just in a way that benefits them and not necessarily you or I. Anyway, what is the solution that the scientific community proposed and that was killed by the political and corporate establishment? What is the plan that the non-US countries have implemented to eliminate the problem?
        jochem9 1y ago
        Solution: reduce CO2 emissions to carbon neutrality. This has been agreed multiple times, most notably the Paris agreement of 2015, which set deadlines for countries to achieve carbon neutrality. The plan failed in e.g. the US because politicians didn't follow through. Trump literally withdrew from the Paris agreement. All but 3 countries in the world participate in the Paris agreement. This includes all big CO2 emitters, like China, US (now withdrawn), India and EU countries.
        yupitsme123 1y ago
        That's a goal more so than a plan.
        alganet 1y ago
    - xboxnolifes 1y ago
      Lots of smart people came together in different solutions. The missing piece is that there is opposition. The opposition won.
      - yupitsme123 1y ago
        Who were these people and what were the solutions? Who was the opposition and when was the battle decided? If you're going to tell me it was the Democrats vs the Republicans, then please explain why countries outside the US haven't made it happen yet. China is a country full of scientists and engineers and the opposition there is non existent.
        xboxnolifes 1y ago
        Most of the opposition is the industries that renewable energy threatens and those who have vested interests in it.
    - queenkjuul 1y ago
      Any solution involves less money for oil shareholders and thus would be opposed tooth and nail
- morkalork 1y ago
  Blame for lack of a plan is not on the shoulders of scientists. They do science. They are not a government whose responsibility is policy and governing. And apparently our politicians ay best play lip service to, and at worst don't believe in, these problems. Consequently, there is no plan to reach those goals for anyone to rally around.
  - yupitsme123 1y ago
    Coming up with a plan would be squarely in the hands of scientists and engineers and passionate individuals. Perhaps the government and the public would help in enacting that plan, but not in creating it. I'm led to believe that the scientists and activists are all led by the same empirical research and share a broad consensus. So why then is there no plan or even a concept of a plan after 30 years of talking about all this?
    - hilbert42 1y ago
      Money. More is needed and no one wants to pay—even when proposals make sense.
      - yupitsme123 1y ago
        How much? This is what I'm talking about. It's hard to get people to buy a narrative that says we need to spend infinite amounts of money on an as yet undetermined plan, or else life as we know it will end.
    - morkalork 1y ago
      Once again, scientists do science. Governments do governance. A scientist can do research and come to conclusions like "dumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere is bad mmmmkay" and tell you goals like "targeting x-degrees of warming will save us from the worst consequences". Politicians and governments should take those statements and goals and build plans around them and then we can vote for the ones who've got the best plan (or not). Expecting scientists to do the government's job is abdicating all responsibility and setting everyone up for failure.
- jemmyw 1y ago
  Any plan should have been made between government and industry. The scientists aren't there to plan, they look at the data and try to figure out how the world works. Scientists told us long ago there might be a climate problem, and have steadily built up more and more data and models and evidence. Activists shouldn't have existed at all. Science informs government there's a problem, government informs the population and creates multiple policies to address the problem, industry works within those policies to adapt the economy. Actual people shouldn't have to feel guilty about their own carbon emissions or second guess the science with their own opinion, but should vote on the policies that they like the best, knowing fully what the consequences will be. That would be nice anyway. Instead just about every part of that chain tries to fuck with the other parts for money and power.
  - yupitsme123 1y ago
    Politicians don't come up with plans either. Even with the best intentions, they don't know enough to be able to come up with a plan. Experts need to do that. You also don't need the government if you want to enact change. We have an AI revolution because science and money got together to make it happen, and then consumers jumped on it. Not because the government passed a law to make it happen. So did the scientists and engineers with mountains of research ever figure out a solution for the rest of us to get behind?
    - jemmyw 1y ago
      Scientists aren't responsible for coming up with a plan. Not individually anyway. I think others have expressed that in this thread you've started. An actual plan would be hugely multifaceted and would require a government or large entity to fund it: think about the scope of what that would include, you'd need to bring together researchers and experts on pretty much every industry that exists. You're talking about planning across the entire global economy. We haven't exactly been that keen on planned economies. Saying that, governments have made policy and it has had an effect. Emissions in Europe and the US are on a steady downward trend.
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  The Paris Climate Accords were supposed to be this.
  - yupitsme123 1y ago
    Before that there was Kyoto. I get that the US is braindead and can't make things happen. But what about all the other countries?
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      What about them? You're moving the goalposts.
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      To be fair, if all the world except the US and China change, we're still probably doomed.

jkmcf 1y ago

I'll bite. 1. There's too much money directly opposing the goals of fighting climate change 2. Humans aren't big on alignment. FFS, we still don't have good UX/GUI for Linux and it's mainly been stagnant* and divided into Gnome and KDE for 20+ years. * despite the impressive accomplishments, it's essentially true

yupitsme123 1y ago
1. Wouldn't there be even more money to be made by saving the human race? Putting aside profit, wouldn't people with money want to continue existing and therefore be aligned with the movement? 2. Your example isn't something life or death. Humanity has aligned on numerous things and changed significantly amd uniformly during the past 30 years without even trying. Why is it so hard to come up with a list of demands and reforms for everyone to agree on and march behind to save the world?
- jkmcf 1y ago
  I don't understand why humans do what they do, consistently and repetitively, against their best interests, except for money, emotions, or a lack of understanding.
  - yupitsme123 1y ago
    Climate change is the only issue I'm aware of where "humanity" routinely gets implicated. Climate change has been a mainstream issue since the mid-90s. From then until now we've had massive material and ideological changes across the globe, none of which required the support or awareness of humanity or the voting public. The internet, cell phones, social media, fracking, AI, multiple wars, changes in attitudes towards family, sexuality, and marijuana usage have all occurred during this time period. Why then has a slight, gradual reduction in greenhouse gas reduction been so hard?
    - hilbert42 1y ago
      Because all the above depends on energy and it's still mostly produced from fossil fuels! Changing that cost money—and people resent having to pay more for change that they don't perceive will make much difference to their lives. Whether they're right or wrong doesn't alter that.

alganet 1y ago

There's no "fight". Any people being aggressive or overly passionate about it (or against it) are, in my view, compromised (provoked, used, manipulated). There has been a consistent attempt at getting everyone to consider the risks in a reasonable way. It has failed.

mytailorisrich 1y ago

It was impossible to "win the fight" because of the demographic curve (~1.5 billion in 1900, ~8.2 billion today)

jhanschoo 1y ago

> so why was there never a single unified plan with a single unified movement behind it? The UN and EU regularly publish evidence-based reports with multi-pronged recommendations. That seems to me as "unified" as you can get, in terms of multinational cooperation and holism in recommendations. But to have any concrete change you need political will, and that is obviously lacking. To get political will in democratic societies you need to convince people to elect their leaders on this and not taxes or pet special interests, which is why you have been hearing about this fight all your life.

yupitsme123 1y ago
First off, your's is a US-centric view. Other countries don't have those same obstacles but as far as I know their progress in eliminating CO2 has only been slightly better than ours. Second, I don't see why political will is necessary. Most of the big changes that have happened in our lives over the past decades have had nothing to do with laws being passed or voters voting for anything. On the contrary private interests basically do what they want and the government getting involvement is seen as a hindrance not a help.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  I mean did you not just answer your own question? Political will comes from private interests, who are more concerned with next quarters profits than the plight of humanity. I disagree with other commenters that the opinion of common people matters. Most Western political projects are tied to capital, not people.
- jhanschoo 1y ago
  > Second, I don't see why political will is necessary. > Most of the big changes that have happened in our lives over the past decades have had nothing to do with laws being passed or voters voting for anything. I can agree with the latter without agreeing with the former. But political will and oil go hand-in-hand. Governments have been destroyed by foreign interests in oil. Governments hostile to their people have been maintained by foreign interests in oil. Governments giving great security to its people have been built from sovereign oil. Writing this response made me realize that you are right. Considering the means and methods of countervailing interests, democratic persuasion does not seem anywhere near sufficient, even though these are the methods being used by advocates. A surer path might involve highly militant and capable states willing to perform espionage, terrorism, and regime change to pursue environmental goals.

Voultapher 1y ago

Let's first define winning in this context, a stable population number of humans for the next 100k years. Pretty much every piece of evidence we have points towards this being utterly impossible with billions of humans, habitat destruction and food web damage is simply way too severe for such a large number to be sustainable. So probably somewhere in the 1-100 million, but realistically no one knows. All we know is that it would have to be drastically lower. Planes and cars are probably illegal, shared communal usage of resources is key. We strictly limit ourselves to materials that are proven to either decompose quickly or don't enter the food web like for example PFAS and micro-plastics do. We'd have to let go of a human supremacist world view, and rather see ourselves as a part in the community of life and the delicate balance it is in. Zooming out, one could argue that we are on a roller coaster and our complex brains give us the impression that there is a little steering wheel in front of us and that we get to decide the fate of humanity. Life can be viewed as a parasite, it invades every area on the surface and the oceans of this world, doing so with fractal depth. And over longer periods it is prone to mass extinction events, there have been five big ones so far. Who knows, maybe the sixth one isn't a 72 teratonnes impact event or giant volcanic eruptions, but rather this time it's an all habitat outcompeting population explosion by one species.

Jensson 1y ago
> Pretty much every piece of evidence we have points towards this being utterly impossible with billions of humans, habitat destruction and food web damage is simply way too severe for such a large number to be sustainable What are you basing this on? More land gets arable when the world is warmer, the earth is more lifeless today than at almost any point before due to the cold and lack of CO2 making plants not grow very quickly. Biodiversity will go down from this event, but temperate areas will be fine and earth will likely be able to support more people in 1000 years than it can today thanks to global warming. What people are afraid of are short term disruptions to current systems, but the long term livability of earth is going to be fine. The people who argue otherwise just hasn't looked at what earth was like when there were many times more CO2 than there is here now, that wasn't that many million years ago.
- 1y ago

goalieca 1y ago

Because the world is made of independent countries acting in their own best interest or that of their leaders. There will never be a world government until all countries roughly align on a common set of values and political framework and then actually practice those. Most countries don’t share values and ideals.

yupitsme123 1y ago
The fact that there are so many countries should mean that at least one of them should have solved the issue by now, no? Meaning, there should be some country that has near zero greenhouse gas emissions. Have they?
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Well you could spend 5 seconds on Google if you cared to https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/12/these-countries-achieved-net-zero-emissions/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/12/these-countries-achi...
- goalieca 1y ago
  It only matters that all-countries (at least the bigger ones) get there. We share the atmosphere. It's also an inconvenient fact that if you import goods then you're externalizing your pollution.

AlecSchueler 1y ago

We live in a world driven by capitalism, not by logic. If global environmental collapse is more profitable for those making the decisions in the medium term then that's what we're going to get, their descendants be damned.

nec4b 1y ago
Which country not driven by capitalism is doing better in regards to environment?
- AlecSchueler 1y ago
  There are no countries in this world where capitalism is not the dominant factor. This has been true for centuries. I said "we live in a world..." not "we live in a country.."
  - nec4b 1y ago
    >>There are no countries in this world where capitalism is not the dominant factor. That is certainly news for North Koreans or Cubans. >> This has been true for centuries. Soviet Union would like a word with you. What they did to their environment hasn't happened in any capitalist country.
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      North Korea is completely crippled because of the dominance of capitalist countries. The Soviet Union was also unable to escape capitalism because of its influence on global supply chains etc. It furthermore presented them with an outside factor which could dissolve their entire system if allowed to come in and flourish, forcing them into a state of semi isolationism. The same thing is true of North Korea. Pressure from capitalism eventually lead to the USSR's collapse. Think about it like someone with extreme immune issues who has to take multiple shots every day to avoid a certain disease. Your argument is that because they don't actually carry the disease it's not a dominant factor in their lives.