The thing about this kind of take is that there isn't really one bus hurtling towards one cliff. Climate, biodiversity, water pollutants, sustainable agriculture and extractivism... these are not orthogonal, but often run in different directions nonetheless. And then there's civilizational issues...
The Swerve
21–30 of 207 posts
Re: The Swerve
#22I like Cory, and I think he's right. But he's preaching to the choir. No one who can get hold of the wheel is listening.
The is wrong on so many levels, in most places be it country or company the bus is being steered towards what is thought to result in global carbon reduction. This is a classic example of a moth and bailey argument, if only we had the same confidence about what to do about climate change as the fact of climate change. According to this article it is as if we only need to elect the right people and then those shall do…
We know what to do about climate change - stop emitting greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide and methane. Any strategy that doesn't address that on the scale that is required can be immediately dismissed as noise. That leaves relatively few options, and those are well enumerated. Probably we need to do all of them.
Re: The Swerve
#23Something I read in another comment on HN: "Climate denialists have gone in one smooth move from 'we'll fix it' to 'it's too late to do anything about it anyway'". Which unfortunately rings very true. The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be pretty harsh. But if COVID d…
Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause. And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, g…
“Sweeping” seems to be a favorite adjective of those who have moved into the “it’s too late to do anything anyway” stage.
As Doctorow writes, the policy changes didn’t have to be sweeping if we’d started in 1977. But we didn’t. Now all the remaining options will upturn someone’s lives. It’s just a question of balancing the effects to achieve something better than the current path which means sweeping catastrophe for our children.
Re: The Swerve
#24Something I read in another comment on HN: "Climate denialists have gone in one smooth move from 'we'll fix it' to 'it's too late to do anything about it anyway'". Which unfortunately rings very true. The really, really big problem is that people seem to think that they personally are going to be exempt from this, that it will happen to others, but not to them. Waking up from that will be pretty harsh. But if COVID d…
Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause. And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, g…
Nuanced is an interesting way to describe what happened - especially with a description like draconian!
The disdain is for ignoring the science, the health of other people, and negative externalities… it is not likely to change, nor are the minds of those who are dug in and feel as though their entitlement to the status quo will outdo entropy.
The anchor is sad about being dragged?
Re: The Swerve
#25I guess I'm in the camp that says that unless there are a bunch of people in the back row trying to sew a bus-sized parachute together out of old clothes, we're screwed. In other words, the only hope I have left is that somebody invents a climate-fixing machine. Or a bunch of different climate-fixing machines, I don't care. But, I don't see a lot of other appropriately-scaled options at this point.
Agreed. We're past the point where culture can shift in time to turn the wheel. Only technology shifts quickly enough to do so.
EVs and wind/solar energies are examples of technologies which are so much better than the alternatives that they're succeeding at reducing emissions faster than consumption can grow to catch up. We don't have the time to get enough people together to mandate that the front row drives a Tesla instead of a Ford, nor to mandate that they produce wind farms instead of coal plants, but they're doing so of their own accord - and demand for them exceeds production capacity by a large margin - because the electric car is better and the wind energy is cheaper. As you say, we now need parachute tech.
Re: The Swerve
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause. And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, g…
Nature really doesn't care about our feelings. All that whining is something that my grandmothers' generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was - compared to that, sorry - a…
You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects.
And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome.
Without an answer for addressing the second-order effects of green policy, there will be no consensus.
Re: The Swerve
#27I like Cory, and I think he's right. But he's preaching to the choir. No one who can get hold of the wheel is listening.
Preaching to the choir pays his rent.
The other options are sucking oligarchs, amusing children, selling off your body parts, living in a cardboard box and the vast frontier of crime.
Re: The Swerve
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nature really doesn't care about our feelings. All that whining is something that my grandmothers' generation would have scoffed at: you have it relatively easy, stop complaining. 5 years of war, occupation, hunger and brutal death is the kind of thing that generation lived through - or not, in many cases - and they came through to rebuild their world without bitching about it. COVID was - compared to that, sorry - a…
You don't seem to be engaging with the main point here: there were places that DID take COVID seriously--that shut down overnight, paid the price of mass unemployment, homelessness and growing tent cities, increasing substance abuse / overdose, loss of education that will never be recovered and countless other second-order effects. And those places did not emerge with a significantly better COVID outcome. Without an…
Those places would have come out better if we all did this. And that's the whole problem: if you don't tackle problems of this magnitude globally then you might as well not bother because a couple of dissidents on a large enough scale will ruin it for everybody else. In this case the dissidents even use this argument to show that the better choices didn't work... which when you think about it is really despicable.
Re: The Swerve
#29I like Cory, and I think he's right. But he's preaching to the choir. No one who can get hold of the wheel is listening.
It's rallying the troops and articulating the issues. Most of the readers are not yet doing much but can be encouraged to, there is a lot we can do by getting off our butts to convince the rest of the people (activism, lobbying, moving the political Overton window etc).
Re: The Swerve
#30I like Cory, and I think he's right. But he's preaching to the choir. No one who can get hold of the wheel is listening.
If you get hold of the wheel, and you try to slow down the party bus, you'll get eaten alive.