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The technology-will-save-us mentality is part of the reason we are here. We live in a society that doesn't do anything unless it makes money for some set of dec

• davidguetta 27d ago
  Like "stop consuming" was a realistic idea lol.
  • irishcoffee 27d ago
    Oh, it is. That idea absolutely terrifies china. Their entire economy is predicated on global consumption.
• baq 27d ago
  Just like it isn’t possible to get politicians to stop spending other people’s money, it isn’t possible to stop enterprises from making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on a global scale (it may work locally!) Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas. Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years
  • panta 27d ago
    Neoliberism is not the only possible system, it is very well possible to change the boundaries of what enterprises can do. Technology-will-save-us is a quasi-religious belief, not supported by evidence. Also if it was true that we can't convince politicians and enterprises to change their course now, why should they do later when costs will be much higher? Relying mostly on technology that doesn't yet exist seems absurd to me. We have an incredibly hard problem to solve and maybe a narrow window of action, we should use all the tools we have at our disposal: rapid deployment of available solutions, sustained research into better ones, adoption of more frugal lifestyles, development of alternative sociological, political and economical frameworks.
• fullshark 27d ago
  Technology is more feasible than politically driven "degrowth" or any of the other proposals.
  • ch4s3 27d ago
    No country will ever vote for degrowth so it either has to be done secretively which will cause a populist backlash like in the UK or at gun point. Degrowthers are IMO all basically eco fascists.
    • lukeify 27d ago
      The reality of the situation is if you don’t embrace degrowth principles, the planet will probably do it for you. Think mega-wildfores that cause so much devastation that hundreds of thousands of people die from air pollution, or collapse of entire crops and food supply chains due to drought, or mega-heatwaves that wipe out millions. Degrowth is coming. And you don’t have a say in the matter.
      • ch4s3 27d ago
        Most of these large wildfires are started by people and a result of bad land management in the form of stopping small fires in fire adapted landscapes. Moreover meddling in insurance markets and NIMBYism causes people to build in burn zones. There just aren’t mega heatwaves causing famines and there won’t be at 1.5c of warming either.
        • lukeify 27d ago
          None of that changes that we now have substantially larger and less controllable fires than we used to. Are you really denying that extreme weather and droughts don’t play a part in dramatically increasing combustibility? > There just aren’t mega heatwaves causing famines and there won’t be at 1.5c of warming either. Oh we’re going way past 1.5C.
          • 24d ago
• epistasis 27d ago
  No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing. "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action. People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
  • Der_Einzige 27d ago
    Significant amounts of the third world are already eating de-facto vegetarian or vegan diets. Many for religious reasons (i.e. in India where the vast majority of people either eat no meat or only chicken/fish), and many others for financial reasons. Strict vegan diets would objectively massively help reduce climate change.
    • sajithdilshan 27d ago
      That is not true, most people in India don’t eat meat because they are too poor to afford it and hence malnourishment.
      • saxenaabhi 27d ago
        Punjab and Rajasthan have the highest proportion of vegetarians and also rank on the top of male/female height charts. Admittedly it's not fully vegan but still. Indians have long recognized the virtues of a vegetarian diet: both the moral imperative & it's health benefits. That's something everyone should be able to admire.
    • tekla 27d ago
      > in India where the vast majority of people either eat no meat or only chicken/fish That is such a misleading comment. ~80% of people in India consume meat. That "or" is doing some incredibly amounts of borderline lying. https://www.dataforindia.com/meat-consumption/ https://www.dataforindia.com/meat-consumption/
• throw8393739 27d ago
  [flagged]
  • lensecat 27d ago
    Sorry but this just isn't true. Of course you need more energy to produce a cow and then eat it than you need to sustain yourself by just eating the cows food.
    • drfloyd51 27d ago
      But we aren’t talking about that individual energy needs. We are talking about everyone’s energy needs at scale. The economies of scale work differently for billions of mouths vs one mouth.
    • throw8393739 27d ago
      I never seen vegan who would eat cheap cattle fodder. Usually it is very expensive produce, avocados imported by air etc... Wildlife hunting has zero emmisions! Even lower emmisions than agricultural products! If you are serious about lowering emmisions, lets push that!!!
      • locknitpicker 27d ago
        > Usually it is very expensive produce, avocados imported by air etc... This is like claiming seafood is very expensive to produce, and then give imported caviar as an example. I recommend you check any healthy eating table for vegans and vegetarians. Bread, beans, rice, legumes aren't exactly billionaire luxuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarian_Diet_Pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarian_Diet_Pyramid
    • mik1998 27d ago
      Let's cut out the middleman of grass here and just directly eat dirt and sunlight.
    • jpalawaga 27d ago
      I think it really depends by what you mean when you say vegan. If you’re eating vegan cheeses and whatnot you’re probably not doing so hot. Or impossible burgers. Or any other manner of “invented” food that is not essentially basic agrarian or hunter-gatherer. Conversely, wildlife play important ecological purposes and can be hunted sustainably. Wild life can also be useful in processing things we cannot eat and grows in abundance (grass) into things we can eat (cows). Everything in moderation…
• nozzlegear 27d ago
  I've been vegetarian for 7-8 years and think it'd be great if everyone stopped eating meat, but expecting even a single person to stop who hasn't already expressed interest in it is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. We should not base our strategies for fighting climate change on hoping all of humanity will take a sudden 180° turn on their natural instincts to eat meat.
  • irishcoffee 27d ago
    I watched a woman break down crying in a grocery store, the guy behind her put 40 lbs of ground beef on the conveyor. She started off as angry “how can you bear the thought of eating all that dead animal?” “Oh it’s not even for me, it’s for my dogs.” I admire anyone and everyone who wants to be a vegetarian/vegan. Expecting the rest of the world to follow suit is a fools errand.
• partiallypro 27d ago
  The issue with the global warming advocates is that they seem to believe that in order to solve global warming we need to make everyone's life worse. That was already a non-starter. It's just terrible marketing. You say it's for the benefit of "decrepit old men," but the fact is that more and more of the globe is being lifted out of poverty and living more comfortably than ever before. The unfortunate fact is that global warming is an unstoppable force now, humans would have to go extinct for it to waiver. I'm not saying we should do nothing, but I am saying that your framing is exactly why no one listens to global warming advocacy. We are powerless against it, not because of governments, but because people are living better and no one is going to sacrifice that; and even if they did the math doesn't add up to reverse course. The people that say we should all be sacrificing are often the richest among us that don't even know what sacrifice entails, contrary to your point.
  • collingreen 27d ago
    Your framing, that no collective action can ever include reduction or sacrifice, implies this is an inevitable and fatal path we cannot come back from. I hope you are wrong that nothing requiring sacrifice can ever be accomplished.
    • partiallypro 27d ago
      This sacrifice involves putting millions back in poverty. I don't think you understand what I'm saying.
      • iamnothere 27d ago
        Western activists are ok with this because (a) they don’t imagine that they will be greatly affected and will live a solarpunk luxury lifestyle and (b) they glorify third world poverty and consume media that presents it as a desirable, more authentic way of life, when the truth is that most of those people are desperately trying to claw their way into affluence. None of the above implies that everyone can achieve a current day Western lifestyle or that current Western lifestyles are sustainable. But average people are going to continue seeking it out, it’s just human nature. Activists who expect people to “just” give up that search are not being realistic.
• maxerickson 27d ago
  Ah yes, the profit motive kept us off of strict vegan diets. Right, sure.
  • deleted 27d ago
    [deleted]
• rib3ye 27d ago
  You really had to throw veganism into the mix there…?
  • Vegenoid 27d ago
    I think that convincing people to go vegan is one of the least plausible ways to combat climate change, but livestock are responsible for 10-20% of greenhouse gas emissions: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environment/livestock-dont-contribute-14-5-of-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...
    • irishcoffee 27d ago
      There is much lower-hanging fruit than demanding people alter their diets. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/31/turkmenistan-methane-leaks-un-alerts-mars https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/31/turkmeni...
      • myaccountonhn 27d ago
        Thing is, we need to reach for high-hanging fruits
        • irishcoffee 26d ago
          Did you read the link? Spending 1 million bucks to fix all the methane leaks in the world is such an insane bang-for-buck win that I can’t even fathom spending one billion bucks for a tenth of the gain. But sure, go for it. Logic be damned.
• LastTrain 27d ago
  I’m guessing the things you listed are the sacrifices /you/ are willing to make but omit the ones you are not willing to make. Do you travel by plane? Do you use AI? Do you have kids? Do you own a car? Etc etc.
  • b40d-48b2-979e 27d ago
    Do you have kids? One of these things is not like the others.
  • epistasis 27d ago
    > Do you have kids? This right here, the absolutely preposterous idea that giving up kids is somehow climate action, is exactly the nonsense that a climate activist should never tolerate. You think climate action is everybody stopping having children?! You think extinction of the human race is the only option?! "Of course not!" You say, so clearly we must have some children. But how many? If we drastically reduce our population, we will continue with the same broken systems, same energy systems, etc. Only by keeping society running do we have the energy to switch our society's engine to zero carbon energy sources. It's insulting to tell people not to have children, it's not realistic, but worst of all, it's not a climate solution to not have children. "Don't have kids" is just Malthusian nonsense from a prior environmental era, uncritical thinking, pure slop. And it greatly harms actual climate action when this extremely stupid idea gets associated with the climate movement. Stop. Just stop.
    • pretzellogician 27d ago
      Reducing population is a perfectly valid (partial) solution, and it also doesn't mean extinction. Telling people not to have kids may not be realistic, but... it's also happening already.
      • epistasis 27d ago
        Reducing population will not do anything to help with climate change. Look at the time scales of action. Look at what needs to done. Advocating population reduction has nothing at all to do with climate action. Please stop. You're just taking some idea that sounds vaguely "environmental" and extreme, and attributing it to somehow being climate action. It won't reduce emissions to stop climate change.
• boredtofears 27d ago
  We’re so far past this, technology is 100% the only hope and always was. Getting stuck in the mentality that we can shame our way out of this for a decade was (and continues to be) a colossal waste of time.
  • myaccountonhn 27d ago
    Nah, believing technology saving us is full copium and makes us not take action.
    • boredtofears 26d ago
      I never said I believed it was going to save us.
• mik1998 27d ago
  "strict vegan diet" AKA supporting industrial byproducts made into ultraprocessed food made on the other side of the globe rather than consuming vegetables, fish & meat produced locally and ecologically.
• hax0ron3 27d ago
  I think that vegan diets never took off primarily because the vast majority of people do not want to follow vegan diets. Money factors such as subsidies are secondary. There are also potential health impacts. I followed a vegetarian diet for a few years when I was younger because of ethical concerns, and I felt healthier once I started eating meat again. This is just anecdotal evidence of course, and many people argue that you can be as healthy or even more healthy vegetarian as you can be omnivorous. But it's a potential psychological factor arguing against the likelihood of mass adoption of veganism. Mass transit and dense development are potentially doable, but at this point the suburban sprawl + car model has been popular in the US for decades and it would feel like a downgrade for many people to live in smaller places in more heavily urbanized environments. I think that many Americans don't even have a clear idea of what it would look like to raise kids in a multi-story residential building in a city without it seeming like poverty. Also, in some parts of the US, mass transit and dense urban living run into the problem of anti-social behavior including street violence. Many of the people in the US who care the most about stopping climate change also oppose the kind of intensive policing that would be required to keep crazy dangerous people off buses and clean up troubled neighborhoods enough that the average person would feel safe living there. Violent crime rates have largely been going down since the early 90s, but are still much higher than in Europe. One of the reasons for the high rates, through definitely not the only reason, is the availability of guns, but getting US right-wingers to accept gun restrictions is probably even less probable than getting US left-wingers to accept major crackdowns on street crime.
• zzzeek 27d ago
  what's your proposed path to "strict vegan diets" exactly?
• blurbleblurble 27d ago
  > strict vegan diets sabotage achieved
• jgilias 27d ago
  In medicine there’s this well known axiom that if an intervention regime would technically work, but is something that the patients tend to not follow through, then the intervention regime doesn’t work.
  • SoftTalker 27d ago
    Yep. "Just eat less" would work, but patients don't do that, so semaglutide it is.
• hgoel 27d ago
  Apparently between technology and soul crushing authoritarianism at an unprecedented scale, you would much rather the latter than the former.
• satvikpendem 27d ago
  It was oil companies that created the notion of a "carbon footprint" as a way of deflecting blame from them to individuals and now you're falling right into their propaganda with "strict vegan diets" etc. And regardless, we have no alternative but technology to solve the issue because, are you just going to maintain the CO2 status quo in the atmosphere?
• rapind 27d ago
  At least we've discovered that trying to get people to behave differently at scale without the presence of an *immediate* emergency is a failed endeavour... So maybe now we can stop that nonsense and focus all of our energy on technological solutions?
  • rrr_oh_man 27d ago
    I fear ideologists who’d rather engineer emergencies
• lukeify 27d ago
  I didn’t ask for the world to have 8 billion people in it, and I sure as hell won’t be stopping enjoying fairly basic luxuries like consuming protein just because others tell me to do so. If we need to make such drastic changes to human consumption, have people considered if we have a overpopulation problem?
  • Supermancho 27d ago
    The demographic collapse was a forgine conclusion in the 80s. There is no global overpopulation problem over the next century. There will be food shortages due to a lack of labor and dessicated farmland. It will be rough for the average human.
    • lukeify 27d ago
      > There is no global overpopulation problem over the next century Sure there is. If the mere act of eating a staple food item causes so many carbon emissions it contributes to planetary-scale climate change, you have an overpopulation problem.
      • Supermancho 26d ago
        > If the mere act of eating a staple food item causes so many carbon emissions it contributes to planetary-scale climate change, you have an overpopulation problem. That is incorrect. If there is one person who produces the same amount of carbon emissions, it's the same problem which is independent of population count. All resources to sustain life are going to dwindle and secondary effects will continue to amplify, regardless of humans exist at all, over a long enough period of time. "Overpopulation" is used to define the set of problems (logistics of practical food/water production) that make climate change a secondary concern. Ofc, you can define it how you like to talk past other people.
        • lukeify 26d ago
          Overpopulation is the condition through which a population exceeds the sustainable resource carrying capacity of an environment. If that population consumes a resource at a rate which is not sustainable—which as people upthread are arguing re: emissions and agriculture—then it is an example of overpopulation.
• jghn 27d ago
  I mean, nearly all of my produce, meat, and dairy from a handful of small, local farms. They're all organic, focus on "happy animals", all that. I'll shift to a strict vegan diet once everyone else abandons their giant mega-agriculture lifestyle.
• clickety_clack 27d ago
  The means to do it would be things like uranium steel mills and concrete plants (via hydrogen production) or any of the huge number of industrial uses of heat. The amount of coal and oil burnt to produce industrial heat is mind-boggling. People are meat eaters. If I was to run a campaign to keep the green movement unpopular, I’d promote enforced veganism as one of its core ideas.
• zaken 27d ago
  The everyone-should-try-harder mentality doesn't work either unfortunately. It would be great if everyone rode bikes and went vegan but that's never going to happen so we have to stop making people feel bad for buying gas cars and eating cheeseburgers because it just causes division which ultimately hurts progress.
• westurner 27d ago
  We need to use AI to redevelop AI datacenters in order to cancel the harms. We need to use AI to solve for global warming. Is there a more appropriate use for AI?
• bilater 26d ago
  No that's not how the world works. Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners. As they should. The only way is through. Most of are not going to be living the suffocating life you think we should. We will grow, innovate and accelerate out of this.
  • jhanschoo 26d ago
    > Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners. You're confusing acceleration with velocity. Poor people are far from the greatest per capita contributors.
• disdegeneration 26d ago
  Have you not done enough damage? Human societies are not stable without surplus bribery, the recent authoritarian regressions are a direct product of net 0 policies. Trump is your utopias creature..
• deleted 26d ago
  [deleted]
• mancerayder 26d ago
  >We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development In other words, live a privileged person's life in an expensive city, risk malnutrition with a complicated diet, and don't ever leave the country (on a plane). As if the sources of climate change are you and me, and not industry in any way. It feels more like a way to say, live like me or almost literally burn in Hell.
• someguynamedq 23d ago
  The options are technology-will-save-us or everyone-spontaneously-does-the-right-thing-despite-not-wanting-to-do-it-and-in-many-cases-having-perverse-incentives. If the second one worked, everyone would be vegan, there would be world peace, no hunger, etc. We have one non-fantasy option and it's technology.