201–210 of 523 posts
* Go Climate Neutral: http://goclimateneutral.com. It's much cheaper than you'd expect (~$10/month, depending on your lifestyle) to improve the world's energy efficiency enough to cancel out all your own impact.
* Donate to other efficient climate change charities: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2013/11/less-burn-for-y...
Businesses say that they are following the laws made by the politicians and are meeting consumer demands.
Consumers say the government should regulate things better and that businesses should be more environmental friendly.
In others words, everyone is looking to everyone else to do something; thus no one really does something.
Sure, there are some token efforts here and there. But the actual sweeping changes that we need aren't happening.
Not a new phenomenon, and also not isolated to just climate change. It just happens to be the most pressing problem.
The solution? I don't see one, save for a fundamental refactor of our democratic institutions. I don't see that happen in the next 12 years.
So what can be done? Many things can be done technically. What can realistically be done given the current state of affairs? Quite little, I think. Stuff like going to work on the bike is cute – and something I do – but not really making a massive impact.
Vote for your local green party? In some places that's fairly useful; in others it's about as useful as wiping your arse with the ballot (US and UK being prominent examples) :-(
Honestly I think nothing serious will happen until it's too late. Maybe not even then. C'est la vie I suppose?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why? Why can't we adapt to those environments using technology? This is what the OP comment is saying.
Most of the people who live in places that will become uninhabitable, can either not or can barely afford clear water and food. They will not be able to afford hi tech solutions. Since Humanity does not help them now, it is not reasonable to assume that we will help them in the future.
To solve this crisis in 12 years would require overthrowing the government of every country with an industrial base and replacing them with much more progressive people. You can try if you want but I don't see it happening. As far as actually convincing people of global warming, the older generation will absolutely never believe it no matter how much evidence you present. They are truly lost. Change will only be poss…
I don’t think the result would be good. All that would do is destabilise the world crash our economies and set back our green tech.
I like polar bears so it's sad to see those go. It will be disturbing to see coastal cities founded next to sunken cities. Storms are fun but only when they're occasional. I already miss the insects. We worry about losing languages, cultures, artwork to the unyielding entropic horror named time. Not because we have a pragmatic need for them. But the future is scary when you can't bring the past with you. My culture i…
Polar bear populations are fine, sea level had been rising at the same rate for much longer than we've been industrialized, storm rate isn't changing, and where do you live that there are no insects?
> Maybe corporations are the ones who can be pressured to take the lead. Yes. They absolutely will. But only after they have the right incentives. Those incentives can be created over night by having governments put in place a carbon tax. It gets even worse. If a large group of people reduced their energy consumption to help climate change it has the consequence of reducing demand and therefore energy costs will come…
Haha, sure! :D Carbon tax. Sounds legit! Here's what's gonna happen: Corporations just jack up prices accross the board according to the tax, and then everybody else gets to pay. And then nothing changes. It'll be like the sugar tax in Norway. Do you really think people are buying less sugar over here because of it? Get real! :D We're well past incentives. The change has to be law, and the law has to be protected wit…
Could we have prevented the extinction of the dinosaur with the knowledge we have now? If not, why worry?
So I'm honestly not as concerned about this as I once was. Don't get me wrong: the climate is going to change, arguably we're in a mass extinction event already and people aren't going to suddenly start acting in the collective long term welfare of humanity. One of the things I like about futurism is the levelheaded optimism and pragmatism you tend to get. And I'll call out Isaac Arthur as a well-known example of thi…
I think you are fundamentally missing the point of the question. The question is what we can do to prevent climate change, not how we should align our beliefs not to worry about it.
> So it's kind of sad that a lot of the larger fauna is doomed but you're not going to change people's appetites for rhino horns, fish bladders, tiger oil or pangolin dishes. Then again, maybe future genetics can restore some or all of those species.
This perfectly exemplifies my problem with this attitude.
You call this "levelheaded optimism", but you're basically throwing your hands up hoping for someone to apply some sort of sci-fi solution to the problem at some point in the future. Calling for Jurassic Park to restore extinct species is the opposite of levelheaded. To say that there's nothing we can do about it now is really just thinly veiled defeatism and not at all optimistic.
Meanwhile, for example, the demand and supply of rhino horns is decreasing overall, not because people are content with speculating about how someone else in a future generation will solve the problem, but because deliberate action is being taken to change the attitudes towards rhino horns, campaigning to educate people about the medicinal myths surrounding them, to destroy smuggled horns and to protect the animals from poachers.
If the people engaging in these actions had just laid back, convinced that someone will be able to beam rhinos from a parallel universe by 2100AD anyway, they'd probably have been extinct by now.
So I'm honestly not as concerned about this as I once was. Don't get me wrong: the climate is going to change, arguably we're in a mass extinction event already and people aren't going to suddenly start acting in the collective long term welfare of humanity. One of the things I like about futurism is the levelheaded optimism and pragmatism you tend to get. And I'll call out Isaac Arthur as a well-known example of thi…
I used to be a big believer in this. But, from a pure waste heat standpoint, if we ever have to worry about having enough area in Earth's surface for solar panels, we have much bigger problems.
We are nowhere near that point now, but given a small but steady exponential growth in the energy supply, we'll get there in a couple hundred years.
However, space based solar power could help with intermittently of solar/wind if battery tech doesn't outpace enonomic orbital launches.