191–200 of 356 posts
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I didn't get to choose it either. It's what happens when money is power. If you want to fix it going forward, you've got to divorce the two.
If we have to divorce money and power in order to fix climate change then we are completely fucked
One eye-opening fact I recently learned is that fossil fuel infrastructure being built today is expected to have a three-decade lifespan, after completion of its construction. So every time you hear about a new pipeline, drilling project, or refinery being built you know that the people sitting in the rooms authorizing billions of dollars being allocated to the project all believe it will safely be operating and prod…
Getting people to switch cars may be a part of reducing the dependency, but still contributes to the use. It'll be a long road that includes getting down to the minutia, like stopping girls from wearing makeup, before you can entirely remove fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels will not go away for at least a few more generations, because they are far too beneficial and there are no replacements for the myriad of uses they have today.
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500 million years is longer than the time it has taken to evolve mammalian life. Assuming that no other intelligent species would ever evolve is pretty crazy, it's only taken us 200 million years. If that's an average, we could be looking at 1 to 3 other intelligent species developing on this planet alone.
It has not taken 200m years. It has taken 4.2bn years. Every other species today has had the same 4.2bn years. In 4.2bn years, we’ve had one successful draw of a species with sufficient intelligence born into an environment with sufficient incentives to tackle this problem (that we know of). Saying another 1 will happen in time to thwart the pending extinction event strikes me as an aggressive gamble, let alone 3.
What we need to consider is the level of complexity life will be able to sustain after our annihilation. How long did it take to get to humanity from the last time life was at that level of complexity? Much less than 4.2bn years, since we likely will not be reducing life to the level of one single living cell.
Growth? Growth?! Yes, we absolutely 100% should stop immediately digging the hole deeper.
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If we can't reach 1.5°C then we should try to reach 1.6°C. If we can't reach that then 1.7°C. Ultimately: It doesn't matter whether we can reach 1.5°C, because everything we try helps making things better. And any carbon sequestation technology will only help significantly after drastic emission cuts, not as a replacement for it.: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x
Goals should be realistic. Aiming for 1.5C, then missing it and then continuously failing on 1.6C, 1.7C, 1.8C etc. is akin to a fat person missing their goal of 200lbs, and then telling themselves in front of the mirror every extra 10lb - "I'm going to stop eating junk food today! No, really, this is the day!" It's a cognitive failure to adequately process signals that the real physical world is sending to you. Or me…
There's some really bad redline some place past 1.5C.
Putting the goal possibly to the right of that redline (and possibly blowing past it anyways) is not good.
1.5C is a decent benchmark because it lets us measure various scales of intervention against it.
Most pressing issue in our futures
Futures? That's optimistic, it's affecting everyone already, right now. Droughts, food prices going up, heat records being broken. I mean personally it hits me in the wallet for groceries and having to make adjustments to my house (built for a cooler climate) to keep it comfortable, but that's probably a luxury position to be in compared to droughts, famines and forced relocation that millions of people are having.
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If we can't reach 1.5°C then we should try to reach 1.6°C. If we can't reach that then 1.7°C. Ultimately: It doesn't matter whether we can reach 1.5°C, because everything we try helps making things better. And any carbon sequestation technology will only help significantly after drastic emission cuts, not as a replacement for it.: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x
How about we aim for an achievable goal instead. What’s the point of setting ourselves up for failure? That’s part of effective goal setting. Anything else is fantasy and counterproductive.
"If we do we'll be able to stay under 1.5C" "If we don't do we won't be able to stay under 1.5C" "Our goal is to keep global warming under 1.5C" <- lie, a goal is by definition achievable and anyone who's giving statements on climate change knows that 1.5C is not achievable
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I’m not sure it is arrogant. Arrogant would be saying we have some divine right or special capacity that places us at the center of this. I think we’ve gotten incredibly lucky in the last 600 years or so and have stumbled our way into a viable exit strategy for life on our planet. We don’t necessarily deserve this role. I think I’m well aligned that keeping life alive for the next few thousand years is absolutely nec…
Oh, I certainly disagree with people who put the environment above humans. But usually I just discount such people - they "are not serious people." > my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade. This is an edgy take that I see increasingly adopted by young people in cities. Generally I try to recenter around "okay, if humans are a mistake, who would you like to kill first?" People find it…
I suspect the fact that we use various tools. But at the end of the day we need food, light and water.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we can't reach 1.5°C then we should try to reach 1.6°C. If we can't reach that then 1.7°C. Ultimately: It doesn't matter whether we can reach 1.5°C, because everything we try helps making things better. And any carbon sequestation technology will only help significantly after drastic emission cuts, not as a replacement for it.: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x
If we're already going to have to heavily adapt our living arrangements to account for extreme climate change, at what point does 0.1° not matter? 5.0° vs 5.1°? 10.0° vs 10.1°?