5 ms·

How to Abandon Your Climate Commitments and Get Away with It

71 points by littlexsparkee 3mo ago

madhacker 3mo ago
Needs a Hail Mary event for humanity to work together
- mmooss 3mo ago
  The event we need is for you and others to start working, instead of standing on the sidelines telling other people it's impossible. Humanity has overcome many things by working together. Much of humanity is already working together to overcome climate change. In fact, if the Republican Party in the US would get to work on it, that may be a sufficient fraction of humanity. And if the US led on it, more would participate.
  - GuB-42 3mo ago
    It is easy to start working on it when you are rich, but people in the world aren't, and they aren't because we are and we exploit them. And these people don't care about how terrible the next centuries are going to be because they need to survive right now, so climate change is not a priority. It is kind of depressing, really. We can't even agree on not killing each other. I mean, no one wants to get killed right, and the solution to this is the simplest there is, we just need to collectively decide not to kill. And if we did that, just consider how much resources it would free up: military, security, no need to rebuild what war has destroyed if there is no war. So if we can't simply decide not to kill each other even though it would be a net, immediate benefit, how deciding to care for climate, which will involve at least a global reduction in comfort for many years before things get better is going to work?
    - mmooss 3mo ago
      Wow, people are really advocates of helplessness. Warfare is a great example: It has gone on for all of history, yet people working together have mostly eliminated it - exactly what you say. It has gone on for all of history, and most of what humans have acheived by working together have been done contemporaneously with it.
    - esseph 3mo ago
      "Modern Life May Be Pushing Human Minds Beyond Their Limits, Reflecting an Evolutionary Mismatch" https://www.sciencealert.com/modern-life-may-be-pushing-human-minds-beyond-their-limits-reflecting-an-evolutionary-mismatch https://www.sciencealert.com/modern-life-may-be-pushing-huma...
    - watwut 3mo ago
      This has it other way round. The ones who will be hit by climate change the worst are the poor. It wont be "the next century" either. They also can not do all that much about it. The ones who actively prevent collective measures to stop the climate change are the richest of the rich. And they also spend pretty significant money on lies and propaganda designed to prevent collective work against climate change.
  - xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago
    Okay. Who's gonna pay me to work on it? I'm looking for a new job. Can start tomorrow
    - ColdStream 3mo ago
      This is a key part of the game theory behind this predicament. Can we pay our way out of it? If we could it would be to direct our actions towards things like nature restoration rather than anything that could directly increase consumption. In fact it would actively decrease production and reduce consumption by sucking direct resources out of the market economy. Yes, you are being paid to fix some problems but also pulling our of manufacturing thus increasing the prices of almost everything you purchase. But that is a part of the idea behind planned degrowth. Use the system to actively scale down consumption before ecological and resource constraint blow back forces it. Better to be proactive than reactive.
      - harshreality 3mo ago
        Can't happen. Western (and most other developed/developing) economies are addicted to number-never-go-down.
        ColdStream 3mo ago
        Pretty much. I have been involved with the much more true to heart environmentalist for decades now and they are basically of the opinion that the most viable path is to preemptively prepare for when various systems start to break. This is why things like the Dark Mountain project came about - https://dark-mountain.net/about/ https://dark-mountain.net/about/ This idea is to be like serotinous plants. Seeds and cones that can only open up when the fires come through to melt the resin that holds them shut. In a way this is what the Solar punk movement is all about. Depict, advocate and produce futures that will out last the 'line goes up' society.
  - potsandpans 3mo ago
    perhaps you could outline the direct action you are taking.
  - ColdStream 3mo ago
    I do agree with the sentiment that we shouldn't' just sit back and go "Well its done now!". It is better to try than to do nothing at all. But when it comes to climate action it really seems like scale and latency has really hidden the full scale of the issue. It is so big that few if any people really comprehend the hyper object and the systemic nature of it. It is so slow to show up direct results that most can ignore it short term. I have said that the right lives in denial and the left lives in delusion. The right say it isn't at thing or it isn't a big issue. The left tend to seek technical solutions that aren't all that. Near me is a mural of Greta Thunberg that was put up in 2020, it calls for "Net zero by 2025." that was never going to happen on a time scale like that. As for the Republicans changing the tastes of the world, unfortunately the one thing that Trump has done very well the last decade is burn through any sense of trust of the nation. Regardless of everything else, trust is the one resource you do not want to run out of, it is the foundation on which everything else sits.
  - skybrian 3mo ago
    Vague asks like this are empty. Do you have anything specific that you want to advocate for? Favorite charities?
    - mmooss 3mo ago
      Think for yourself. I'm not making a pitch for funding. Instead of complaining and talking about tangential stuff, get to work.
bureauchaos 3mo ago
[flagged]
know-how 3mo ago
[dead]
rho138 3mo ago
Nah guys, it’s cool, by 2050 the earths atmosphere acidifies for humans and our bodies can’t hold enough phosphorus or calcium for basic metabolic tasks: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-026-01918-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-026-01918-5
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- timr 3mo ago
  This article is nonsense. It takes observational data from a survey, averages it, doesn’t control for obvious medical factors that more strongly influence the observed data than climate (e.g. illnesses), and then asserts that the correlation is causative. It is not science. It’s just propaganda.
  - thinkingkong 3mo ago
    To what end? Either there’s a global conspiracy to destroy the planet or theres’s a global conspiracy to save the environment?
    - timr 3mo ago
      Or neither option in your false dichotomy has any relation to the quality of this paper?
      - thinkingkong 3mo ago
        You quite literally used the word “propaganda” which is an intentional attempt to mislead or hide the truth. If the quality of the paper is in fact purposefully low and youre saying its for a reason just say what the reason is.
        timr 3mo ago
        The reason is that it's propaganda. That also isn't even close to what the word means. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda
musha68k 3mo ago
https://archive.is/mmpjZ https://archive.is/mmpjZ
Teever 3mo ago
A $13 billion dollar Meta datacentre was recently announced for a location near me: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/meta-data-centre-alberta-greenlight-power-plant-9.7266096 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/meta-data-centre-alb... There's a kaleidoscope of issues with this that result in strong feelings of dismay and it took me a couple days of thinking about this recent announcement before I realized what's so completely disappointing about it. So they're installing a $13 billion dollar data centre that's going to pull 1-1.8GW of power, dumping the resulting pollution onto the people in my province and the land they live on. It's probably going to mess up the groundwater int he area. And it's going to mess with the prices prices electricity and natural gas. And this is all at the whim of one person -- Mark Zuckerberg because with 61% of the voting power of Meta he is Meta. And the C02 emissions... Yadda yadda yadda, we all know the drill with these conversations. But none of that is the worst part. The worst part to me is that the heat energy from this 1-1.8gw operation is going to be completely wasted and dumped into the atmosphere. No attempt to use it for anything else. In a different world the Alberta government wasn't so inept and self-serving and sheltered from the consequences of being so that they capitalized on an opportunity to bootstrap a heated greenhouse industry in central Alberta from the waste energy of a Meta funded datacentre. In a different world Mark Zuckerberg wasn't so self-centered and sheltered from the consequences of being so that he would seize on an opportunity to feed hundreds of thousands to millions of people with his table scraps. But that isn't the kind of world we live in. And there's nothing that can be done about that. It makes the kind of waste that Steinbeck so sorrowfully described in The Grapes of Wrath seem quaint.
- 8note 3mo ago
  youre in edmonton, you can complain pretty directly to the government but also, like, alberta makes a killing selling oil for others to burn. its still our carbon footprint and its a lot worse than that data center and cant be converted to non-emitting
  - Teever 3mo ago
    Can you elaborate on your comment? I can see the link between it and the subject that I raised but I don't understand the point that you're trying to make in the context of the conversation.
8note 3mo ago
hardly getting away with it when youre stuck choking on wildfire smoke
- ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
  I saw a headline the other day suggesting excess deaths from wildfire smoke alone are already projected to cost the economy more money than many mainstream estimates of climate damages thought the total cost of damage would be. Seems dramatic but if you assume the mainstream numbers were driven more by politics than science or economics then it makes sense.
frollogaston 3mo ago
Under President Biden, there was extraordinary pressure for big business to address climate change. The Trump administration is now pushing companies to abandon climate goals and encouraging the use of more oil, gas and coal, claiming that environmental initiatives are “woke” distractions that hamper economic growth. This was the part I wanted to understand, what exactly were the pressures under both administrations? Were these companies going to be punished under Biden if they didn't make some vague, nonbinding promises about pollution?
- ColdStream 3mo ago
  This was one of my main issues with the Biden administration. They approved approved over 13,000 oil and gas drilling permits in a single term, about 4,000 more than Trump did during his first term. Liked to say one thing and do another. Get the feeling they would have loved to point that out during the election period but that would have alienated half their potential voters. I get that a lot of politicians will try to put a positive image forward, but that was a bit rich. Would still prefer that kind of stability over whatever we have now.
ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Most of the work is shifting from fossil fuels. Those are becoming more expensive than clean alternatives (renewables, batteries, EVs, Heat pumps), particularly for the 70% of countries that rely on imported fossil fuels. Now the implosion of the American empire also makes those imports less reliable and more expensive. America can delay this for a while, but they hurt themselves by doing so. Hopefully one day they realize that.

madhacker 3mo ago

Needs a Hail Mary event for humanity to work together

mmooss 3mo ago
The event we need is for you and others to start working, instead of standing on the sidelines telling other people it's impossible. Humanity has overcome many things by working together. Much of humanity is already working together to overcome climate change. In fact, if the Republican Party in the US would get to work on it, that may be a sufficient fraction of humanity. And if the US led on it, more would participate.
- GuB-42 3mo ago
  It is easy to start working on it when you are rich, but people in the world aren't, and they aren't because we are and we exploit them. And these people don't care about how terrible the next centuries are going to be because they need to survive right now, so climate change is not a priority. It is kind of depressing, really. We can't even agree on not killing each other. I mean, no one wants to get killed right, and the solution to this is the simplest there is, we just need to collectively decide not to kill. And if we did that, just consider how much resources it would free up: military, security, no need to rebuild what war has destroyed if there is no war. So if we can't simply decide not to kill each other even though it would be a net, immediate benefit, how deciding to care for climate, which will involve at least a global reduction in comfort for many years before things get better is going to work?
  - mmooss 3mo ago
    Wow, people are really advocates of helplessness. Warfare is a great example: It has gone on for all of history, yet people working together have mostly eliminated it - exactly what you say. It has gone on for all of history, and most of what humans have acheived by working together have been done contemporaneously with it.
  - esseph 3mo ago
    "Modern Life May Be Pushing Human Minds Beyond Their Limits, Reflecting an Evolutionary Mismatch" https://www.sciencealert.com/modern-life-may-be-pushing-human-minds-beyond-their-limits-reflecting-an-evolutionary-mismatch https://www.sciencealert.com/modern-life-may-be-pushing-huma...
  - watwut 3mo ago
    This has it other way round. The ones who will be hit by climate change the worst are the poor. It wont be "the next century" either. They also can not do all that much about it. The ones who actively prevent collective measures to stop the climate change are the richest of the rich. And they also spend pretty significant money on lies and propaganda designed to prevent collective work against climate change.
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago
  Okay. Who's gonna pay me to work on it? I'm looking for a new job. Can start tomorrow
  - ColdStream 3mo ago
    This is a key part of the game theory behind this predicament. Can we pay our way out of it? If we could it would be to direct our actions towards things like nature restoration rather than anything that could directly increase consumption. In fact it would actively decrease production and reduce consumption by sucking direct resources out of the market economy. Yes, you are being paid to fix some problems but also pulling our of manufacturing thus increasing the prices of almost everything you purchase. But that is a part of the idea behind planned degrowth. Use the system to actively scale down consumption before ecological and resource constraint blow back forces it. Better to be proactive than reactive.
    - harshreality 3mo ago
      Can't happen. Western (and most other developed/developing) economies are addicted to number-never-go-down.
      - ColdStream 3mo ago
        Pretty much. I have been involved with the much more true to heart environmentalist for decades now and they are basically of the opinion that the most viable path is to preemptively prepare for when various systems start to break. This is why things like the Dark Mountain project came about - https://dark-mountain.net/about/ https://dark-mountain.net/about/ This idea is to be like serotinous plants. Seeds and cones that can only open up when the fires come through to melt the resin that holds them shut. In a way this is what the Solar punk movement is all about. Depict, advocate and produce futures that will out last the 'line goes up' society.
- potsandpans 3mo ago
  perhaps you could outline the direct action you are taking.
- ColdStream 3mo ago
  I do agree with the sentiment that we shouldn't' just sit back and go "Well its done now!". It is better to try than to do nothing at all. But when it comes to climate action it really seems like scale and latency has really hidden the full scale of the issue. It is so big that few if any people really comprehend the hyper object and the systemic nature of it. It is so slow to show up direct results that most can ignore it short term. I have said that the right lives in denial and the left lives in delusion. The right say it isn't at thing or it isn't a big issue. The left tend to seek technical solutions that aren't all that. Near me is a mural of Greta Thunberg that was put up in 2020, it calls for "Net zero by 2025." that was never going to happen on a time scale like that. As for the Republicans changing the tastes of the world, unfortunately the one thing that Trump has done very well the last decade is burn through any sense of trust of the nation. Regardless of everything else, trust is the one resource you do not want to run out of, it is the foundation on which everything else sits.
- skybrian 3mo ago
  Vague asks like this are empty. Do you have anything specific that you want to advocate for? Favorite charities?
  - mmooss 3mo ago
    Think for yourself. I'm not making a pitch for funding. Instead of complaining and talking about tangential stuff, get to work.

bureauchaos 3mo ago

[flagged]

know-how 3mo ago

[dead]

rho138 3mo ago

Nah guys, it’s cool, by 2050 the earths atmosphere acidifies for humans and our bodies can’t hold enough phosphorus or calcium for basic metabolic tasks: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-026-01918-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-026-01918-5

xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago
[flagged]
timr 3mo ago
This article is nonsense. It takes observational data from a survey, averages it, doesn’t control for obvious medical factors that more strongly influence the observed data than climate (e.g. illnesses), and then asserts that the correlation is causative. It is not science. It’s just propaganda.
- thinkingkong 3mo ago
  To what end? Either there’s a global conspiracy to destroy the planet or theres’s a global conspiracy to save the environment?
  - timr 3mo ago
    Or neither option in your false dichotomy has any relation to the quality of this paper?
    - thinkingkong 3mo ago
      You quite literally used the word “propaganda” which is an intentional attempt to mislead or hide the truth. If the quality of the paper is in fact purposefully low and youre saying its for a reason just say what the reason is.
      - timr 3mo ago
        The reason is that it's propaganda. That also isn't even close to what the word means. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda

musha68k 3mo ago

https://archive.is/mmpjZ https://archive.is/mmpjZ

Teever 3mo ago

A $13 billion dollar Meta datacentre was recently announced for a location near me: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/meta-data-centre-alberta-greenlight-power-plant-9.7266096 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/meta-data-centre-alb... There's a kaleidoscope of issues with this that result in strong feelings of dismay and it took me a couple days of thinking about this recent announcement before I realized what's so completely disappointing about it. So they're installing a $13 billion dollar data centre that's going to pull 1-1.8GW of power, dumping the resulting pollution onto the people in my province and the land they live on. It's probably going to mess up the groundwater int he area. And it's going to mess with the prices prices electricity and natural gas. And this is all at the whim of one person -- Mark Zuckerberg because with 61% of the voting power of Meta he is Meta. And the C02 emissions... Yadda yadda yadda, we all know the drill with these conversations. But none of that is the worst part. The worst part to me is that the heat energy from this 1-1.8gw operation is going to be completely wasted and dumped into the atmosphere. No attempt to use it for anything else. In a different world the Alberta government wasn't so inept and self-serving and sheltered from the consequences of being so that they capitalized on an opportunity to bootstrap a heated greenhouse industry in central Alberta from the waste energy of a Meta funded datacentre. In a different world Mark Zuckerberg wasn't so self-centered and sheltered from the consequences of being so that he would seize on an opportunity to feed hundreds of thousands to millions of people with his table scraps. But that isn't the kind of world we live in. And there's nothing that can be done about that. It makes the kind of waste that Steinbeck so sorrowfully described in The Grapes of Wrath seem quaint.

8note 3mo ago
youre in edmonton, you can complain pretty directly to the government but also, like, alberta makes a killing selling oil for others to burn. its still our carbon footprint and its a lot worse than that data center and cant be converted to non-emitting
- Teever 3mo ago
  Can you elaborate on your comment? I can see the link between it and the subject that I raised but I don't understand the point that you're trying to make in the context of the conversation.

8note 3mo ago

hardly getting away with it when youre stuck choking on wildfire smoke

ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
I saw a headline the other day suggesting excess deaths from wildfire smoke alone are already projected to cost the economy more money than many mainstream estimates of climate damages thought the total cost of damage would be. Seems dramatic but if you assume the mainstream numbers were driven more by politics than science or economics then it makes sense.

frollogaston 3mo ago

Under President Biden, there was extraordinary pressure for big business to address climate change. The Trump administration is now pushing companies to abandon climate goals and encouraging the use of more oil, gas and coal, claiming that environmental initiatives are “woke” distractions that hamper economic growth. This was the part I wanted to understand, what exactly were the pressures under both administrations? Were these companies going to be punished under Biden if they didn't make some vague, nonbinding promises about pollution?

ColdStream 3mo ago
This was one of my main issues with the Biden administration. They approved approved over 13,000 oil and gas drilling permits in a single term, about 4,000 more than Trump did during his first term. Liked to say one thing and do another. Get the feeling they would have loved to point that out during the election period but that would have alienated half their potential voters. I get that a lot of politicians will try to put a positive image forward, but that was a bit rich. Would still prefer that kind of stability over whatever we have now.

ZeroGravitas 3mo ago

Most of the work is shifting from fossil fuels. Those are becoming more expensive than clean alternatives (renewables, batteries, EVs, Heat pumps), particularly for the 70% of countries that rely on imported fossil fuels. Now the implosion of the American empire also makes those imports less reliable and more expensive. America can delay this for a while, but they hurt themselves by doing so. Hopefully one day they realize that.