It’s surreal how quickly this went from being the most important problem in the world to barely being on anyone’s mind, all in less than a decade. I had plenty of problems with the fear-mongering and doomed-by-2030 predictions, but the current situation, where we seem basically fine with doing nothing, is genuinely scary. Technology has its limits, billions of people still aspire to a European standard of living, and…
Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
71–80 of 395 posts
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gl…
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.
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#73Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny it and convince most of us that it was our fault and that nothing could be done and that we should just buy their anti-environment-collapse products to protect ourselves.
It is, and they are. We keep hitting record X Y and Z temperatures, cyclones, etc, and they're on the brig shouting "it ain't global warming you morons"
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You're assuming that we keep the same system and that no sacrificing can be made. Technology is seen as the only solution because of the primary assumption that we need to keep growth and late stage capitalism. Degrowth, relocalisation, lower consumption are all solutions that would work better than technology (there are very serious people out there who demonstrated that technology won't replace the energy we need,…
No. I am not.
I'm saying that unless the incentive system is aligned with our goals, then it's not actually climate action.
Technologists succeeded at doing that.
People who decided to use non-policy driven political action failed utterly at this. The degrowthers are particularly bad at this, but then all their thinking was muddled and riddled with errors about the reality of the science.
Technology makes the system non-constant. Technology is one of the biggest sources of social change.
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#75Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gl…
> to solve global warming we need to make everyone's life worse This is ignoring that _not_ solving global warming will make everyone's life worse regardless.
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#77Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#78Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#79Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect. This only stops it. Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture indus…
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 decrepit old men. We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US. So…
Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
#80When will the rich, say top 10% of planet decrease their emissions?