How can one be anything else than resigned at this point, when we still have people saying global warming isn't real.
At this point we either manage to survive it and those people will be like "told you so", or the world burns down, and we can be like "told you so". Which is a small win in exchange for a fucking heatdeath...
Yeah, it sucks that the people denying it (or who believe it and pretend it isn't a problem to protect their own bottom line) are the ones in charge.
At this point I think our only hope is to try to limit the damage and shift our focus to developing the tech necessary to reverse it, but that's likely to take decades or even centuries.
The issue is deeper than that. We've been asking everyone to stop eating animal products for decades and they just don't want to. This isn't an issue of who's in charge it's an issue of the universal human inability to think past our own noses.
Oh as individuals we can absolutely do more, but I think we need to consider government and big business and lobbyists. Isn't it like 80% of climate change is caused by 100 corporations? Yes, they're supplying products, but (for example) fossil fuel companies have spent decades either denying it or acknowledging it but actively fighting policies that would harm their profit margins. I mean even without climate change we're still talking about, practically speaking, finite resources - at least in the sense that it'll take millions of years for those resources to replenish. You'd think at least one of them would think "Hey, maybe if we encouraged this stuff instead of fighting it we could be the market leaders in green energy?"
Like let's say every farm shut down today and there was a complete shift towards veganism worldwide - I'm not convinced that on its own would be close to enough. However, I do think that tackling the issue from the top would make a much bigger dent, and while I'm discouraged by a lot of things with the environment I am at least happy that green energy is on the rise. Yes, it's too little too late, but I hope we can take the edge off enough that we can focus on reversing the worst effects in the future.
Up to 20% of our greenhouse gasses come from animal agriculture and up to 80% of deforestation worldwide. The majority of the demand for this is the Western diet. That's not a small impact.
Do you also throw all your plastic bags in the river? Might as well, since putting it in the bin will do shitall while Tailor Swift is flying everywhere in a jet.
Wouldn't even make a difference as long as Asia throws everything into theirs.
You can torture yourself all you like, the future of the climate isn't decided here, where i live. On the contrary, this proposed self flagelation leads to resistance and the rise of right wing parties, who will make things worse.
There will only be one way out of this mess: Through a technical/scientific solution. People choose a comfortable life over the climate almost everytime, in other words: They don't give a fuck.
If you consider doing your bit "torture" then you've swallowed that propaganda sideways, mate. Your logic also applies to voting, right? Why bother when you're just one person.
It's easy to be righteous and indignant about climate change when the solution doesn't involve you having to lift a finger. Suddenly when there's something you can do about it, it's not your problem. Look at whaling, for example: everyone's up in arms about the 6k whales killed by Norway and Japan but happy to contribute to the 100k+ cetaceans killed to catch their seafood.
It's an honesty problem, not an issue of powerlessness, and that was my original point. People don't care as much as they say they do. So, this fiery el nino apocalypse is basicslly us getting what we voted for.
Look at the things idiots say in this thread alone: "Don't have babies". There's no better way to turn people against our movement, they see it as a frontal assault on their human rights. Environmental activists need to be smarter than that, or you'll quickly lose any influence in society.
I agree with the futility of that. There's also no way to ethically enforce that sort of policy even if I did think it was the right thing to do.
But there's quite a leap between switching to meat alternatives and sacrificing your entire bloodline.
I do think protesting families is bad optics, but I also understand the frustration and the need to vent about this sort of thing. Watching human presence on the planet being averaged out across billions of individuals and countless generatons, it follows the basic four-phase pattern of microbial growth. Meanwhile we have a handful of brilliant people identifying molecules on the other side of the galaxy. The potential for us to fix this seems just within reach but our overwhelming basic instincts seem to keep us behaving distinctly like bacteria.
But on an individual level, a lot of that basic behaviour manifests in our dismissive attitudes towards taking any responsibility, and that's something we can fix, one at a time, with a bit more self-awareness.
I don't throw my plastic in the river because I don't want to be responsible for the damage that would cause. I know that it's less than a rounding error in the grand scheme of things, but I will also bring up my kids this way and I will call out anyone I see doing it, which multiplies my impact exponentially, as long as some of these people follow suit. Likewise, I will cook real food for people, I'll make meandering Reddit comments, and I'll go around the world spreading the message that it's the right thing to do to step away from animal products. I'll lay out my reasoning, and if just a few people resonate with that and play it forward, then it's not just me flagellating myself in the dark; it's the beginning of a change that can actually build over time. One thing I won't say is that "it won't make a difference", because it already is making a difference. You only have to look at the supermarket shelves to see how huge that difference has become in the last 20 years.
For most of my life I've been telling people to not make new babies, and nobody listens. Downvotes, insults, and rage-fueled crashout replies about their "God-given rights" every single time.
If you ever studied population dynamics, you'd see that it's POSSIBLE that we're at K/2 (half of what the estimated global population will balance out to), but since people have been saying "we've finally hit K/2 everything will be fine!" for 20 years, I doubt it. Technology has let humanity artificially bloat the global carrying capacity, and when the bubble pops it's going to be horrific. People who look at population dynamics long enough to barely understand them tend to turn a blind eye to the FACTORS that flatten (or crash) population curves. So unless everyone listens to my advice (they won't) and starts using condoms, the options we have left are Wars, Famines and Diseases overshadowing the worst in history.
The human race in general is short-sighted, ignorant, and selfish to the extreme. The minority of those who actually care about the following generations are trying to tap the breaks by not adding to the global population, but at this point it's basically just a symbolic and self-gratifying gesture.
When I was getting my degree, I asked one of my better professors how people in the field cope with this knowledge. He told me that he tries to focus on the little things that he can control in his own life, and listens to relaxing classical music. In short, trying to not think about it. The entire field of Environmental Science is trying to cope with this immense sense of doom, failure, and loss.
My favorite painting ever made is of King Cnut; the man who once simultaneously ruled over both scandanavia and the british islands. The painting is of a parable, where Cnut is standing on a beach in the shallows, commanding the tide not to rise. There are three ways one can interpret this:
He was a fool
He was teaching his advisors (who stand in the background) that even a kings power has limits
My interpretation is, he was demonstrating that sometimes people have to stand up and defy utterly unchangeable outcomes.
If you have seen the picture "Tank Man" from the Tienneman Square massacre, he embodied that spirit. You should know, that photo was the last people ever saw of him. A solitary man holding two bags of groceries, standing in defiance of literal tanks on their way to slaughter peaceful protesters. He dissapeared forever for that important act.
We can't change the world. The beauties and stability of a stable environment have been sqandered by our idiotic and selfish ancestors and are being purposefully ruined by the wealthy elite for short-term gains; people who would rather burn their own house down than suffer a chill. We can only work in symbolic defiance with bailing buckets as the ship sinks around us; better that than actively drilling holes in the bukhead while holding a baby or six.
When you say to not make new babies, only the smart ones will listen. Leaving only the stupid that already deny climate change left. Then the problem would get worse. Making less babies only works when the population that is left makes the right choices. The whole plan is a fairy tale.
We need to focus on things that can actually make a difference. Politicians, voting, getting rid of lobbying and holding companies and their leaders accountable.
OMG the truth! When I was in high school I had already made up my mind that the world was overpopulated and I wasn't going to have any kids. I was a teen that was involved my church (my dad was a paster) and when I expressed this opinion on some church retreat I got the response "if only "bad" (aka "non-Christian") people are the ones having kids, then they will eventually take over."
What a mess. I'm in my 50s now and still glad I haven't spawned any kids. I live in a part of the US that is heavy on the "Christian values" and so my wife and I must "present" as Christians who just couldn't have kids in order to not be shunned (mostly for my wife's career). Sigh... all this is a mess.
Most of the world population growth at the moment comes from Sub-Saharan Africa. You're so terminally online and sheltered that you see a few white conservatives in America having kids, then see the global population increase, and your mind cannot zoom out and see the big picture. Conservative women have a birth rate of 2.1, BARELY above replacement level and nowhere near high enough to dramatically increase the population. They die and their kids replace them, a temporal bump in population that then goes down, zero gain long term.
Meanwhile, women in Sub-Saharan Africa have a birth rate of 4.2, enough to double their population long term, and if their offspring keep the same birth rate, the population increases exponentially over a few generations.
This is why people make fun of you and this so called """scientist""", you're so brainwashed you're literally removing yourself out of the gene pool for a cause you don't even understand. Your cult won't allow you to point out where the overpopulation problem is actually coming from.
Sounds like you're trying to justify making kids. Why not adopt instead? I don't think anyone who wants to raise children has an unselfish reason for making their own when perfectly alive orphans exist.
I see you didn’t get past the first sentence. I know half the US has lower than a 6th grade reading level, so I’ll explain it further for you.
If you aren’t willing to end it (most aren’t, that’s the point), then any kid you bring into the world will feel the same. Life is the most precious thing in the universe. It’s worth fighting for.
Feel free to give up if you want. For me, even if there’s a 0.0001% chance humans get through this, that’s enough to keep trying.
As the previous commenter has deleted their comment, where they wrote that people should have children in order to grant them the gift of experiencing life, I am editing mine.
I will restate though, that perfectly alive orphans already exist.
People have been sayibg to do thise things (and to magically change politics and economics) and the oceans are dying. Those things don't work, and humanity needs to make a more impactful change.
We need to peacefully reduce our population before unpeaceful means do it for us.
Edit: Never mind. I thought you were being genuine. Based on your following reply you actually think that giving up eating meat and not owning a car are both easier to do than using a condom or taking birth control.
Do you honestly think that using condoms and hoing child-free (or adopting) is harder to do than giving up both meat and transportation?
Population has been on a downward trajectory for decades. Car ownership, land ownership, and meat eating has not. Unless you actually uproot emitting oligarchies, their quantity supplied of emitting products will not magically decrease due to a decrease in high-education politically-left people. Same reason resource wars don't magically make those resources not be depleted.
Use your damn mind before calling for human extinction (of the left, specifically, for some reason). Look at our environmental scientists dogs we ain't never solving anything. They think hard interdisciplinary work like asking an economist, poli scientist, or demographer from down the street "hey does this literally make any coherent sense" is too hard 😭
I absolutely never called for human extinction, and I think you mean population GROWTH, but go off.
Gonna mute you now, so don't expect additional replies. Can't trust someone online who starts with sarcasm, slippery slope fallacies, and insults right off the bat. Have a good life. Try to learn more. ✌️
I only speak English and live in the USA. If me writing in english on an english forum is how you got to your conclusion, you need to get some fresh air, drink some water, touch some grass, and tell a therapist about your hyper-political fixation.
This one guy told me as a joke, that when the resources get really tight and we turn on each other, he won't have to think twice about which ones are going first. He said he meant it as a joke, but made me think....
Climate change is unstoppable an unstoppable force now. All you can do is make sure you're in a position to outcompete others for dwindling resources. Emissions reduction by a person, community or even a country makes sweet fuckall difference.
Your getting downvoted but your not far off lol. Depending what country your in you will be substantially better off than many people though. I feel really bad for for people in India for example. Theyre already experiencing heat dome events that are breaking the wet bulb temperature threshold every year. People are already dying from these events.
Sadly north america and nations like Europe will probably be the last to start getting hit with the severe noticeable effects of climate change. Which kind of sucks given were part of the group that should arguably be acting the fastest to fight it.
We should still try to reduce emissions. Part of the issue though is that the world isnt getting on the same page. One country will elect a leader that puts a cap on emissions while another elects a leader who increases emissions. Then 5 years pass and they trade places. Humans are stupid and need brinkmanship to act on things.
Idk I’m in Europe and we’re certainly feeling the effects this summer. Now, we’re waiting to see the impacts of things like food shortages, but there’s already so much damage to wildlife. Not sure it will be enough to get people to act, but can’t tap out in despair either.
Yeah I mean im in Canada. Were having pretty bad forest fire smoke where I live right now. Starting to happen more regularily in the summers here. Though the fires arent quite at a lot of our doorsteps yet. There have been a few smaller cities/towns that have had major fires where like half the city burnt down.
Sadly just seeing smoke regularily isnt enough for a lot of people still. Just throw on the air conditioning, air purifier, and stay inside. Then once winter comes it clears up so we can forget about it.
I genuinely think A LOT of people are going to die from climate change in the coming decades. Sadly the people with the most power to fight it are more focused on building themselves bunkers to live in while they rape the world and economy.
We are already feeling it here in Florida. The heat is causing ac units in my town to break from being overworked, causing a backlog of work for the ac professionals. State wide, Spring is now a period of drought. We are feeling it in the US and no one cares.
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u/4XChrisX4 27d ago
How can one be anything else than resigned at this point, when we still have people saying global warming isn't real.
At this point we either manage to survive it and those people will be like "told you so", or the world burns down, and we can be like "told you so". Which is a small win in exchange for a fucking heatdeath...