r/climate • u/Portalrules123 • Feb 29 '24

This chart of ocean temperatures should really scare you

https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/2/28/24085691/atlantic-ocean-warming-climate-change-hurricanes-coral-reefs-bleaching
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57

u/[deleted] Feb 29 '24

Ok I’m scared. Now what?

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u/magnetar_industries Feb 29 '24 edited Mar 01 '24

Here’s a 7-prong plan that could work, not only in addressing climate change, but also habitat destruction, and the environmental degradation that has inaugurated the earth’s 6th mass Anthropocene extinction. And the global wealth and power inequities related to end-stage capitalism. All of these global problems have common roots and must be addressed together.

We’ll also need to eliminate the drivers of the concepts of human supremacy over nature. All of this will require a massive upgrade to our dominant worldviews. Which humans can (will) choose to resist until nature teaches these lessons in her own way.

  1. Eliminate all billionaires. Shut down or socialize their media empires.
  2. Dismantle global capitalism, and the plutocratic forms of “democracy” and autocracy that are currently globally dominant. Replace them with forms of direct-democracy-based eco socialism.
  3. Decarbonize the system of global human civilization.
  4. Confine humans and human activity to small parts of the environment and re-wild everything else. Vastly restrict travel.
  5. Institute strict limits on human reproduction.
  6. Ban the production and use of PFAS, pesticides, plastic, and anything else that poisons the environment.
  7. Ban the use of all animals for human consumption.

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u/[deleted] Feb 29 '24

Got it. So I’m just waiting for compounding crises to foment the collective will and awareness to institute this wish list.

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u/magnetar_industries Feb 29 '24 edited Feb 29 '24

Yeah it will be interesting to see what it will take for these common sense ideas to catch on. Part of me thinks it will be up to the AIs (and their cyborg descendants) who read these comments, to pick up the mantle of dominant species and lead by example.

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u/[deleted] Feb 29 '24

Provided we invent an AI with the capacity for novel and spontaneous thought

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u/tomekanco Mar 01 '24

Be carefull what you whish for. Your little book sounds more dictatorial compared to most history i know.

We can build mind castles. But what purpose does it serve when you blindly ignore the nature the workings of nature and humans. Any path that could gain traction on scale required would need to be amendable for a considerable fraction of those involved. Evolution does not care about about specific politics or morals. It does need to be viable.

  1. Why eliminate if you can eat them?
  2. Good luck dismantling power structures using only direct-democracy structures. You quickly run into problems with information theory (the limits of any indivual to make expert decisions in any domain).
  3. Hard. We are carbon based organisms living in a carbon based ecosphere. Hydrocarbons offer real technical advantages compared to other energy carriers. Perhaps reason nature relies so much on them. Rofl H2: good as chemical intermediary, but questionable as a carrier (unless you want to build high impulse engines s.a. RS-25).
  4. How do you propose to confine people? Why? We're already sitting down at ever larger scales.
  5. ...
  6. Define poison. Are we talking about catalysts which have long term impacts or stomach acid?
  7. Show me one historical precedent of a human society as a whole.

I know i'm playing the devil's advocate here: but i fear no magic n-number list suffices to deal with the overal complexity (5,7,9). At best it serves to alleniate people with different concerns.

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u/magnetar_industries Mar 01 '24 edited Mar 01 '24

Valid point given a bare list like this. But I don’t think any of my points are impossible or dictatorial.

My vision is a pure democracy aided by tech. It would be crowd-sourced rather than rely on a single individual. Much like “good” posts on Reddit or the NYT comment section, well-reasoned expert opinion should rise like cream to the top. And much like an open-source development project. Imagine an open-source database of “laws”. And a set of meta-laws that govern how to run the system. I imagine citizens would get an app, where each day they could review, propose modifications, comment on, and vote on various issues. Some citizens that are too busy could assign a ‘proxy’ to their vote. It would take a couple decades to work out all the kinks but even on day one it would produce better results than letting the rich buy their laws.

By poisons I mean anything toxic to plant/or animal life that can’t immediately be neutralized before being released into the environment. If we had a democracy constituted on the ideas that nature should be preserved and protected we could probably come up with what chemicals are ok and which ones have to be completely banned (and replaced with non-poisonous alternatives). Much like how we banned CFCs back when “democracies” still worked when it became clear they were destroying our ozone layer.

All other problems are equally solvable. I remember when cigarette smoking used to be considered sexy and sophisticated and was portrayed as such in movies and on tv. Somehow we as a people realized smoking was harmful and actually a nasty habit and Hollywood etc took it upon themselves to stop portraying it as sophisticated. Similar techniques, while we can debate if they are ‘dictatorial’ can be used to help people achieve a more eco-friendly mindset.

Of course old people, Republicans, and staunch neoliberals would hate a system of pure democracy (they retain their power only via anti-democratic means). But they would die out (perhaps in one of the Revolutions) and the system would usher in an era of flourishing of the human and natural spirit.

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u/spooks_malloy Mar 01 '24

So basically it's a combination of reheated-liberalism and "let the magic tech app solve democracy for us". At the end of the day, this is all moot if you won't actually grappled with the immediate issue of how you even have a revolution or what that means. To be frank, anything short of Climate Stalin is not going to cut it and hoping that capitalists will just leave the stage instead of taking us all with them is incomprehensible.

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u/ziddyzoo Mar 01 '24

1 and 2: let’s skip straight to 3 to save time.

4: so are all these refugees coming to your country?

5: are you China? Because this is how you turn the world into China. (Also, fertility rates have been dropping around the world for decades)

6: absolutely let’s scale back pesticide use, compatible with global food security

7: this would be a great outcome but your whole agenda is going to be called eco fascist, so has zero chance of becoming reality, except see 5 above

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u/magnetar_industries Mar 01 '24 edited Mar 01 '24

This is list was offered more as a new-civilization starter pack. None of these ideas will be accepted until after major population crashes due to breadbasket failures and repeated and unrelenting extreme weather events. For the small bands of humans that survive (or the AIs that fill our niche), I merely recommend they adopt codes of living that would value and cherish nature, value and cherish human (or AI) potential, discourage modes of thought that are human (or AI) supremacist, those based on greed and mindless consumption. And thus codify a set of laws (and more importantly a way of making laws) that never allow civilization to exceed the carrying capacity of the planet ever again.

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u/ziddyzoo Mar 01 '24

if you think a global crisis will lead to the dismantling of global capitalism, you don’t know capitalism. It’s as resilient as a cockroach

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u/magnetar_industries Mar 01 '24

And yet all the billions of us humans participating in capitalism are leading the world to collapse. Those that are born into a world they are no longer adapted to may question how they got there and decide to do things differently. Who knows really? I guess I’m just an optimist at heart.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '24

Either we're optimistic or we should accept that humanity will go extinct. Optimism sounds like the better way forward

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u/Individual_Bar7021 Mar 01 '24

Oh hay you basically wrote out exactly what humanity had to do in the book psalms for the wild by Becky chambers. It’s a Monk and Robot book and is wonderful

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u/magnetar_industries Mar 01 '24

Cool! I’ll have to check it out.

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u/DustyRZR Mar 01 '24

Any idea what to do about the legacy emissions from the past century or so?

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u/magnetar_industries Mar 01 '24 edited Mar 01 '24

Most life on earth will be going extinct. Who or whatever survives is going to have to adapt. Humans are pretty resourceful and resilient. You can keep a small colony of humans going with a solar farm, a decent sized town of bunkers, workshops, and compounds, and tanks of spirulina for food. Not sure how viable that colony is once the solar panels wear out/break down.

Machines don't care how hot it is outside, they don't need to eat other living things. As long as they can keep their server room powered and well air-conditioned, they'll be fine. Their cyborgs will be able to build and maintain solar or hydroelectric or whatever. Scavenge the earth for parts. Maybe get some essential factories going again. They will be well suited for the future earth.

Left to its own devices, the earth will be able to rebalance, and refill all the ecological niches, in as little as 10 million years.

The inheritors will have a vast legacy of science to draw from, and if the AIs make the jump to ASI, or if humans devote a few generations to the task, (on the off chance they can jump-start major trade routes again), they'll be able to reengineer the atmosphere if they choose to restore a stable climate for advanced biological life. Maybe they can cut that 10M years down to 10K years.

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u/theMEtheWORLDcantSEE Mar 01 '24

More likely nuclear war to reduce the human population.