The world has experienced its hottest day on record, according to meteorologists.
The average global temperature reached 17.01C (62.62F) on Monday, according to the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction.
The figure surpasses the previous record of 16.92C (62.46F) - set back in August 2016.
At least companies created incredible profits for a small number of shareholders for a short period of time. Totally worth it
That’s a pretty weak take. Do you know how profitable it is to hire a short-gain CEO, pump his stock, sell before the inevitable crash and follow him to his next venture? Immensely so.
Think how great the world would be if everyone did that, jumping from sunken venture to sunken venture, burning through any and all good will, until the only thing that still has worth is the planet you’re on, but even that is nothing because Mars is the next frontier you can sink our money into.
Think before you speak so poorly of those better than yourself
It’s a joke from a viral editorial cartoon. Don’t be such an antagonistic jerk.
edit: If you were attempting satire then I’ve fallen victim to Poe’s law because there are lots of people who sincerely believe exactly what you wrote. Hopefully that isn’t the case here, and if so I retract the jerk comment. If you do believe what you wrote, my comment stands.
It’s definitely satire.
100% satire
I think that’s ok. We don’t need to take everything here seriously. You can take it seriously, I can take it satirically. OP can say they can’t remember original intent.
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I used to think the more apparent and devastating outcomes of climate change were bound to hit long after I passed away, but now I’m not so sure. Local storms are becoming more and more serious with every passing year, each summer is less bearable than the last and the nearby forests are burning down for the 2nd summer in a row. We are definitely speedrunning this shit.
Most of the climate change predictions I’ve heard in my lifetime have talked about stuff that would happen by 2050 or 2100. It’s always been bullshit, just a way of pushing out the consequences beyond a timeframe we can actually conceive of effectively. In reality this shit is already hitting us and accelerating hard.
2050 isn’t really that far away. if you remember the year 2000, that’s about how long.
My nephew will be 38 in 2050. Sure makes it seem a lot closer.
Well, I started hearing “2050” in the 1980s and it seemed impossibly far off. 2100 really ain’t that far off either.
I’ve always thought those predictions were listed as “conservative” so the average is a lot closer but main media outlets pick the fastest out point in the bell curve so it’s not so doomed.
Yeah, it’s not bullshit to be conservative with climate models because they are incredibly complex. It’s good practice. However, because of the political climate around climate change, scientists probably er on the side of being extra-conservative, and the models are still dire! So, if the real world trends happen to go outside the bell curve, not in our favor, which keeps happening, we’re fucked.
2050 is less than 3 decades away. I am sure I will be dead by then, but someone born this millennium should absolutely be alive still. What is infuriating is how little importance many younger people put on this issue.
I used to think the more apparent and devastating outcomes of climate change were bound to hit long after I passed away, but now I’m not so sure.
Too many people thinking like that is exactly why we are where we are today. And why it will continue to get worse.
Those of us who actually care about the world our children and grandchildren will have to live in have been trying to get some large scale action for decades, and we’re tired of beating our heads against a brick wall.
You constantly hear people say “oh, well we are in a warming cycle, so yeah, of course the Earth is going to get warmer”.
These are people on the Right who have moved past the point of denying the problem of Climate Change and shifted their argument to admitting it is happening, but not admitting that it is man-made.
In some ways, they are right - the Earth’s climate IS indeed shifting away from an Ice Age and moving toward a warming period, but what we humans have done is essentially thrown gasoline onto the already burning fire. We are accelerating the problem.And it’s that acceleration that’s the real problem. If this sort of warming happened over twenty or thirty thousand years, the ecosystem would have a chance to adapt and maybe humanity along with it. A couple hundred years? Nah mate, ecological collapse is going to happen and it’ll probably take us with it.
Yah and we were actually headed to a 100,000 year cooling cycle. So even their supposed science is wrong lol.
It’s the way we tend to think of things as black and white. Someone decided to set some disaster increase threshold for the climate crisis events and called it a day. When it has always been about an increase in frequency and intensity of natural disasters and more, both of which we are already seeing.
If it doesn’t hit in my lifetime it will be soon after, which is one the reasons I choose to not have kids.
It’s hitting now.
It’s amazing how the human race realize the shit it put itself in only when it is a fraction of a second from hitting the wall at high speed. It’s like that every single time.
Except the impact of climate change isn’t at all like a car crash. In a car crash everything stays fine until it suddenly goes to shit. Which I think is one of the issues why people have such a hard time dealing with it.
Maybe we should think about it more like a sinking ship. We already got wet feet, which isn’t great but only the start and we really need to start shutting some bulk heads to keep the water from pouring in. And get some Wellies to deal with the water already in. But those won’t help if it keeps on rising.
On geological time scales, this is very much like your car crash analogy.
Unfortunately, most people don’t seem to be capable of understanding time at that scale.
Because we’re humans, not rocks. What do you expect?
The rich are on the top decks where the valve controls are, they don’t have wet feet, why should they close the valves?
Surely even the rich would prefer to be able to go outside without the air being full of smoke, and visit a forest that isn’t dead. But I guess there’s a minority for whom the amount of money next to their name is more important, and they happen to run everything.
We were warned. We were told it was a tipping point situation and things would seem ok until they aren’t.
Don’t worry, I’m sure if we all keep doing the same thing this will sort itself out.
How about we go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.
Sorry, the Winchester had to close due to Covid and anyway, we have a water shortage so no beer.
Thought you said Winchesters but these aren’t the sort of monsters they deal with, well season 7 yes.
Those damn demons causing global warming
Just add a little nuclear winter and we’re good. So there might be a little radioactive fallout, that’s just a problem for the poors to deal with. Billionaires will be okay in their acre sized underground bunker clubs and that’s what’s important.
“Global Warming did happen. But thankfully nuclear winter canceled it out.”
—Leela
I know it’s a joke but I actually looked into it and it turns out that nuclear winter only reduces temperature in the short term - the effects wear off and you’d just get hit with global warming abruptly when it wears off. I guess it could potentially buy some time to implement carbon capture or something.
If by sort itself out you mean the planet wiping us out in a few generations, yeah
Seriously the green rhetoric needs to change. The planet is going to be fine. Humans aren’t.
Just bury our heads in the sand, then our torsos, then while you are at it, might as well just start living underground.
We thank people who disregarded nuclear energy. We could’ve sliced global emissions by a lot if were not for you, but burning coal is far safer.
I thank the oligarchs and their willing consumption enthusiasts. This apocalypse is brought to you by unchecked, insatiably greedy capitalists and capitalism.
This apocalypse is brough to you by unchecked, insatiably greedy capitalists and capitalism.
Most environmental solutions are also being created in capitalist societies, and the richest countries (which by coincidence are capitalist) are the ones that are decreasing their emissions by a considerable amount.
Connecting capitalism to environmental changes is just communist propaganda, dunno if you did it willingly or not but that’s about it.
Way to minimise the last 40-50 years of capitalists actively working to stop any real progress on climate change. Sure progress is being made now after they figured out it was getting bad and there was money to be made in green tech. That doesn’t excuse the decades of lobbying and and actual propaganda put out by capital interests that we are all paying for now.
That you are spouting off about “communist propaganda” tells me you either grew up in the 80’s and really bought the red scare line or you bought the far right propaganda telling you to be scared of ‘CHI-NAH’ (to quote the orange traitor).
You couldn’t far wronger in this question lol
“You couldn’t far wronger in this question lol”
Sure. I couldn’t “far wronger”.
What a thoughtful and fact filled reply that furthers conversation.Try making a point or defending your position if you want to be taken at all seriously.
As it stands why should anyone think you might be correct in your statements and not just dismiss you out of hand as a moron who is far wronger?First, in the 80s I wasn’t even born and if the fact I don’t fall for every bull**** communist propaganda that I read in the internet makes you upset, boho I’m so sorry.
Blaming the environmental changes on capitalism it’s like calling “The Radium Girls” dumb. During the latest decades they didn’t know very well about the damages they were causing but if you check history, as soon as there was scientific evidence that something was causing harm, laws were passed in capitalist countries to remove it promptly. Look at the lead in petrol debacle, CBDs, the CFCs.
Also, even today there’s really not a good way of replacing “dirty” technologies like jet engines. Of course, the communist countries aren’t doing sh*t to solve the issue either, they’re even making it worse.
laws were passed in capitalist countries to remove it promptly
Promptly on what timescale? Geological?
It’s always too little too late. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Reality speaks for itself.
Exxon has known the damage they were causing since at least the 80s and have spent absurd amounts of money alongside their competitors lobbying governments and paying scientists to keep the status quo. We had at least some evidence that burning fossil fuels was going to cause global warming at the turn of the 20th century.
What you’re saying isn’t entirely false, but it sure is bending over backwards to be nice to the capitalist societies that caused this problem. Also there aren’t any communist countries causing this problem, China is every bit as capitalist as the US in how their economy functions these days, they’re communist in name only. You’ve been influenced by capitalist propaganda friend.
During the latest decades they didn’t know very well about the damages they were causing
Yea, they (the capitalists) have known full well for at least two decades the damage they were causing.
Holy shit you are delusional if you believe any of that. A simple google search on climate science coverup by fossil fuel companies (like Exxon, Shell, and BP) in the 70’s is just a single example and it would take you almost no effort to learn. That you haven’t even done the very LEAST you could to not be embarrassingly wrong, should serve to let anyone reading anything you comment on to simply dismiss your ramblings as misleading at best.
You need to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself if maybe you got this wrong since myself and MANY others have pointed out the various things you are just factually incorrect on.
I’m not holding out hope though, I am willing to bet you will just double down in your fantasy instead of facing reality. Feel free to prove me wrong, little would please me more.
There’s actually a news article from the March 1912 edition of Popular Mechanics warning about how ‘the furnaces of the world’ are ‘burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year’, and how ‘when this is burned, united with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly.’ They conclude that adding 7 billion tons of CO2 per year ‘make(s) the air a more effective blanket for the earth and raise its temperature’ and that ‘the effect may be considerable in a few centuries’. Their only mistake was underestimating how much CO2 future generations would put in the atmosphere. They estimated a few centuries for 7 billion tons of CO2. I’m wondering what they’d make of 43 billion tons.
Capitalists ignored the clear warnings from scientists about pumping CO2 into the atmosphere for over a century because it wasn’t economical for them to do something about it. It was always somebody else’s problem. Until it wasn’t. Where do you live? New York, that has recently had some of the worst air quality in history thanks to Canadian wildfires? Or Denver, where it was our turn in April and May? Or when we got the horrible DECEMBER wildfire that burned into Boulder? Man, wildfires in fucking December. NOW it’s fashionable for Capitalists to at least pretend to care about the environment, but shit, if there could be a dollar made burning down the last forest, you fucking better believe that capitalists will gleefully play a Captain Planet villain while they do just that.
Edit: A fun link: https://bigthink.com/the-present/1912-climate-change-prediction/
Most environmental solutions are also being created in capitalist societies, and the richest countries (which by coincidence are capitalist) are the ones that are decreasing their emissions by a considerable amount.
Only because those capitalists societies are offloading the work that generates those emissions on to poorer countries because it’s cheaper to do it there.
Yes, the German method. We lower our emissions not by using nuclear power, but by moving our coal outside of EEA and buying it back at 5x the price!
We will be able to decrease emissions, never get them to 0. Hence maybe some CO2 extraction will be needed.
Only because those capitalists societies are offloading the work that generates those emissions on to poorer countries because it’s cheaper to do it there.
It’s cheaper and most importantly they allow it. These countries want growth, they want to attract investment, have work for the people. It’s a win-win relationship otherwise these countries wouldn’t allow it.
I take no offense to being called a communist, even though I’m a socialist. I have a great deal of pity for the sycophants of capitalism, though, cheering their own exploitation and oppression as their masters terraform the planet to be hostile towards human life in the name of quarterly profit expectations.
Your family will be burning from the global oligarch’s fine work, and you’ll be blaming the invisible communists and socialists that countries like the US used military means to decimate through global destabilization the world over to further capitalist interests. The capitalists won, are fully in charge, and have captured their own regulatory bodies in most of the world. This is the world of capitalists own making. They run the show, we are living in what the capitalists would consider their utopia, where they live like modern Pharoahs as most of the species subsists to further enrich them.
We crossed that threshold years ago, man made climate alteration is a runaway train of multigenerational suffering at best, and possibly the end of human civilization for ages at worst. Have fun cursing the dirty commies when you’re thirsty with no recourse 🤣
Ah yes, socialism, the ideology that kills countries but blame on the Americans.
That’s a false dichotomy. There are more power sources than coal and nuclear.
Also electricity generation is not the only source of emissions. Car traffic, cruise ships, aiplanes, all need to be reduced and can’t just be replaced by nuclear power.In theory, yes. In practice, nuclear plants that are shut off are almost always replaced with fossils, with the specific fossil fuel of choice often being coal.
Energy is not something where you can just pick one solution and run with it (at least, non-fossils, anyway). Nuclear is slow to ramp, so it usually takes care of baseline load. Renewables like wind and solar are situational, they mostly work throughout the day (yes, wind too, differential heating of earth’s surface by the sun is what causes surface-level winds) and depend greatly on weather. Hydro is quite reliable but it’s rarely available in the quantities needed. The cleanest grids on the planet use all of these, and throw in some fossils for load balancing, phasing them out with energy storage solutions as they become available.
You can’t just shoot one of the pillars of this system of clean energy and then say you never tried to topple the system, just wanted to prop up the other pillars. Discussing shutting off nuclear plants without considering the alternative is pure lunacy, driven by fearmongering, and propped up by no small amounts of oil money for a reason.
Replacing nuclear with renewables is simply not the reality of the situation. Nuclear and renewables work together to replace fossils, and fill different roles. It’s not one or the other, it’s both and even together they’re not yet enough.
So when you do consider the alternatives, moving from nuclear to the inevitable replacement, fossils, is still lunacy, just for other reasons: even if you care about nothing more than atmospheric radiation, coal puts more of it out per kWh generated, solely because of C-14 isotopes. Nuclear is shockingly clean, mostly due to its energy density, but also because it’s not producing barrels of green goo, just small pills of spicy ceramics. And if your point is accidents, just how many oil spills have we had to endure? How many times was the frickin ocean set on fire? How many bloody and brutal wars were motivated by oil? Is that really what a safer energy source sounds like to you, just because there are two nuclear accidents the world knows about, and a thousand fossil accidents, of which the world lost count already?
And deflecting to other industries is also quite disingenuous. Especially if your scapegoat is transportation, since that’s an industry that’s increasingly getting electrified in an effort to make it cleaner at the same logistical capacity, and therefore will depend more and more on the very same electrical grid which you’re trying to detract from.
nuclear plants that are shut off are almost always replaced with fossils, with the specific fossil fuel of choice often being coal.
Being from Germany, I have often read such arguments and at least here that is simply not true.
The decrease in nuclear power was accompanied by a decrease in fossil fuel.
Could that decrease have been larger if nuclear had been kept around longer? Possibly.
But if we are talking about building new power plants, the money is typically better invested in renewables. They’re faster to build and produce cheaper energy.I’m not sure what the point is.
German Electricity is dirtier than France’s therefor no other sources of electricity exist beyond coal and nuclear?
That would be a weird conclusion seeing as both countries also use other power sources.@geissi
except from countries lucky enought to get a lot of electric damn, there is no example of countries having a stable network mainly reliying on renewable energy production, because they are not stable. Doing so requires a lot of new powerlines, storage solutions, … and at the end may still be unreliable during winter / summer peaks. Its is much easier to have a mix with the fundamental ensured by a drivable power plant and there are two ““clean”” choices: water and nuclear.Its is much easier to have a mix
A mix of more than just coal and nuclear, right?
So other power sources do exits and we should use them?
Germany, specifically, was one of the worst offenders in this category. They do renewables at maximum capacity (like everyone else) but there’s still a massive gap to fill, and with issues of strategic dependence around hydrocarbons, the obvious answer to fill in the missing capacity was coal. Most of the time you get a mix of coal and natural gas, whichever is easier, but in Germany’s case that mix was almost entirely on the side of coal.
And without abundant hydro power, or an energy storage solution that could store a full night’s worth of energy even if the current deployment of renewables was able to generate that (which it’s pretty far from), there aren’t a lot more options. Germany’s strategy to shut off its nuclear plants out of fearmongering has been a heinous crime against the environment.
When oil companies love your green party you know you fucked up.
there’s still a massive gap to fill
in Germany’s case that mix was almost entirely on the side of coal
I’m assuming the ‘gap’ refers to the reduced nuclear capacity.
So you’re saying that Germany replaced the power previously generated by nuclear power almost entirely with coal power?Do you have ANY statistics to support that?
The only actual increase in coal energy I know of was an unplanned short time rise due to the war in Ukraine and the loss of gas imports.
Edit: Also the original argument was that coal and nuclear is a false dichotomy. Your own comment mentions a mix of coal and gas, mentions renewables, so clearly there are more than those two options, right?
There was a link in this very same thread (right here) that compares France to Germany. It’s a very simple case study: a country that does use nuclear pollutes 10x less per kWh than a country that actively destroyed its nuclear capability. It doesn’t get any more simple than that.
Unless your argument is that if Germany didn’t shut down nuclear it wouldn’t have deployed renewables, which I hope it isn’t because it would be a completely lunatic point to make, the situation is the same no matter how you twist the mental gymnastics. Germany’s grid is one of the dirtiest in Europe largely because of the lack of nuclear baseline, which, if it was kept, would make it one of the cleanest.
If your argument is that the renewables deployed in Germany should be counted towards replacing nuclear, then you must also accept that Germany failed to significantly cut into its fossil plants with renewables, which other countries managed to do in the same timeframe, because its entire renewable capacity had to go towards filling a gap the shutdown of nuclear left. It’s the same difference either way, and it suffers from the same fallacy that you’re pretty clearly intentionally making at this point: that you are unwilling to consider nuclear in the context of its alternatives, and are only willing to talk about it either in a vacuum, or in an idealistic situation where renewable capacity and energy storage are high enough that shutting off nuclear will not lead to an increased demand for fossils.
I’ve addressed that idealistic future in this very same comment section by the way: as soon as we reach a point where we can eliminate fossils and any renewables deployed cuts into nuclear’s share, as opposed to that of fossil plants, I’m against nuclear. But that’s not the reality of the situation yet. The decommissioning of nuclear plants in Germany was extremely premature, and harmed the environment, both with increased radiation and with gargantuan amounts of CO2 output.
Renewables > Nuclear > Fossils. It’s literally that simple. As long as we have fossils, replacing them with nuclear would be beneficial, and any decrease to nuclear capacity is a negative. If you can offset something with renewables, it should be fossils, not nuclear.
I’m saying that coal or nuclear is a false dichotomy, meaning there are other possible choices.
Comparing the carbon intensity of France to Germany does nothing to address this argument.Your last comment then stated that Germany has replaced coal with nuclear.
Comparing the carbon intensity of France to Germany does not address this argument either.If you want to show that Germany replaced nuclear with coal then you need to show the development of the energy mix in Germany and show where nuclear capacity decreases and coal increases.
Comparing Germany to France does not show the development in Germany.
And since both countries have a power mix with more than two energy sources, it certainly disproves that there are only two options.Here is a map of carbon intensity of electricity generation:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricityFrance has 85g/kWh, Iceland has 29g without nuclear.
Does every country have the same potential as Iceland? No.
Is nuclear the only alternative to coal? No.
There is massive work being done to improve large scale energy storage (big batteries) so the renewables become less and less situational. Large scale energy storage is significantly less constrained than car batteries, because weight is a one time cost. Even gravity based batteries could become viable.
Also, in response to the previous commenter, electricity generation is by far and large the main source of emissions accounting for more than half, with more than a quarter being agriculture. Transportation is 14%, and given the future transition to electric vehicles, one might argue that half of that can be tack’d on to electricity generation’s share. (Half because electric cars are more than twice as efficient at energy conversion than petrol cars. Toss in some power line losses and that’s a reasonable estimate)
All of that is great, and I’m all for it. Can’t wait for the first grids with no fossils whatsoever, once energy storage improves enough that it can take all the balancing load. When we reach that, it will mark the start of the era where nuclear is actually being replaced by renewables rather than fossils.
My point here is that switching off nuclear is premature for now. It’s a very clean source of energy once you look at the per kWh numbers and nuclear waste management solutions are actually extremely safe. (The videos where they test the containers by smashing actual trains into them are kinda fun – and those tests are done with liquid water, which is far more susceptible to leaking than solid ceramics.) Of course, if we reach a point where wind, solar, and hydro can fully replace fossils and start eating into nuclear’s share then that’s gonna be a very different conversation, and I’m fully with renewables in that situation, but we should always keep the alternatives in mind when we shut something off.
That’s why we’re not just shutting down coal plants altogether, because there’s just nothing to replace them. Although an energy policy where you just flat out ban
renewablesfossils and tell the market that that’s the supply, now go figure it out would certainly be interesting. Very expensive and terrible for the economy, but interesting nonetheless. (Definitely the based kind of chaos if you ask me.)edit: okay, that was a weird word to accidentally replace, lol
There are more problems with nuclear energy, though. The biggest being that we burden future generations for literally thousands of years with a growing amount of waste. I am not sure why this is always missing from the discussions of people who are pro nuclear power.
It is making the same mistake again as we did before: creating a problem for future generations to solve. And in this case the problem is dire and, because of the immensely long timespan, we have no way to reliably plan ahead for so long.
Spent fuel can be reprocessed in a modern reactor. Even if that wasn’t possible the storage is extremely safe.
Because the actual amount of waste that has to be stored for that long is minimal and can be shoved kilometers down into the earth’s crust with the same tech that’s used to extract oil. Nuclear waste storage is a great headline topic but there have been a lot of innovations in the past ~50 years.
As for lower tiers of waste (as in, less dangerous, more numerous, mostly consisting of stuff like tools used to work on the power plants, which is what actually goes in the yellow barrels usually depicted with grey goo), several reactor projects existed that actively used that radioactive waste for even more energy generation, usually targeted extremely hard by anti-nuclear activists because it would take away their talking points. The science exists, the opposition is usually political and driven by fear tactics. But this is why we store those lower tiers of nuclear waste on the surface, not because it’s the best place to put it but because it’s where we can retrieve it once we find a use for it.
And again, consider the alternative. Fossils also fuck up the environment and it’s not a good thing that they do it faster. The only way their effect would go away that fast is mass genocide of the ecoterrorist flavor, and exactly what future generations are we talking about in that case?
Just make nuclear powered cruise ships, easy.
/s
As far as I know there are some military ships powered by nuclear energy.
Many Navy ships are nuclear powered. Aircraft carriers have multiple nuclear reactors, submarines are nuclear powered, and many cruisers are nuclear. There’s also a lot of nuclear powered icebreakers.
They made exactly one nuke-powered cruise ship. It never made money.
You can technically power EVs with nuclear energy. But yeah airplanes and cruise ships are harder.
I’m all for getting rid of the cruise ships. Floating land-whale-buffet reef-destroying pollution devices is what they are. I’ve seen firsthand the effect they have on Caribbean islands they make their destination, and it’s never good.
It’s not a false dichotomy when it’s a zero sum game. Our consumption is essentially inelastic, because we are all complete assholes, so all we have control over is what kind of production we build.
it’s a zero sum game. Our consumption is essentially inelastic, because we are all complete assholes
Even if that’s the premise there are still other power sources -> more than two choices -> false dichtonomy.
But then, blaming “people who disregarded nuclear energy” - instead of people who don’t want to change anything in the face of a historically unprecedented worldwide disaster - seems a bit short sighted.
Thank the good old Green Party of Germany! Restarting all those coal plants and shutting down nuclear reactors!
Yeah, I’ll take a source for this one. Coal power generation has not increased in Germany whereas the Green party’s policies in 1998 led to the first large scale deployment of solar energy in the world.
@Regelfall @Widowmaker_Best_Girl
would removing wind turbine to expand the coal mine count as a source ?
https://www.realclearenergy.org/2023/04/04/wind_farm_in_germany_dismantled_to_expand_coal_mine_891111.htmlIt counts as an anecdote
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-reactivates-coal-fired-power-plant-to-save-gas/a-62893497
‘Intensive use’ of German coal power plants releases additional 15 mio t of CO2 in 2022 – report https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/intensive-use-german-coal-power-plants-releases-additional-15-mio-t-co2-2022-report
Well they were in a position to do something about that but held against keeping the reactors running, https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/akw-streit-105.html. If I remember correctly getting them into a normal running condition was unfeasible either way.
God, that’s so depressing. I genuinely don’t understand how we - any of us, in any country - are supposed to be okay with these political mechanisms filled with incompetent, out-of-touch, self-interested codgers. I’m not willing to take action, but when our entire world is being picked apart by the public sector and sold for parts by the private sector, what are we to do?
Lobbies. The German “green” party if fully funded by Russia, which has a vested interest in keeping coal, but especially nat gas (which despite the CO2 emission is still labelled as “green”) being the primary source of energy.
While lobbies are extremely powerful, I don’t understand how I, personally, am supposed to support the lobbies that represent my interests. Donating to PACs? I’m just not wealthy enough to make it make sense.
I think its a bit too late for that. 40% of wealth is owned by the top 1%, and even if the remaining 99% own 60, most of that wealth is not available, but used for everyday necessities. So no, you cant outbid our out PAC billionaires anymore. Too much trickle up economy has been going on for too many years
We thank people who disregarded nuclear energy.
Do you really think governments actually gave a shit about some deluded hippies? Nah, they were just the scapegoats the politicians used to pretend they weren’t in bed with the fossil fuel lobbyists.
Why would you disparage beautiful, clean, coal like that?
Tell that to the people near Zaporizhzhia right now.
Every person living in a democracy can make a difference with their VOTE. Only vote for people who have plans and intentions of bringing change. Vote at all levels, and vote whenever you get an opportunity. Ask what candidates in municipal elections think about the climate emergency. Organize. Talk to doubters. We can do this.
If voting worked, we would have solved this issue decades ago. You can vote for whomever you want, but at the end, no matter what they promise, they always end up doing nothing at all, because they are elected by using big oil donations.
Only a self-organized revolution can stop this madness, people in some nations are already blocking oil tankers and oil rigs. We can’t win by only voting, you can vote for a day every few years, but we need to fight this everyday. Take turns blocking streets so no oil driven trucks and cars pass, only this will make an effect.
The idea that nonviolent protest works has been the most harmful idea in history
I mean nonviolent protests DO work.
Non-disruptive DOES NOT work though.
MLK Jr didn’t peacefully sit in a park. They ran boycotts, sit ins, shut down streets, trespassed into white only areas, and drove businesses insane.
If MLK Jr was your enemy you were going to have a miserable time when he rolled into town.
Ghandi had people illegally burn documents and basically smuggled salt against all regulations.
MLK had the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam as looming threats. Gandhi is also the one who said “pacifism without violence is not pacifism, it is helplessness.” A violent counterpart to a non-violent movement helps by being the stick to the non-violent carrot.
That’s fair, but either way we gotta give up on this nondisruptive nonsense.
Gathering on the park outside of the white house at a time they agreed to doesn’t do anything and why it’s encouraged.
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I can assure you the US Government is not quaking in their boots at the thought of Billy Bob’s basement arsenal.
Especially since those guys are pretty much all lard-asses. There’s a reason why every competent military on the planet emphasizes physical fitness before anything else; it’s because real combat --as opposed to playing paintball with your fatbody friends-- is one of the most physically and psychologically punishing activities known to man.
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Oh yeah? Tell that to Gandhi
You are aware that besides Gandhi there was a lot of violent protest?
Only violent protest makes the demands of the nonviolent acceptable to the ruling class. Without a violent part of a movement, the demands of the nonviolent are always ignored. Which is perfectly logical, because why accept the demands of someone you can ignore without consequences.
Disruption can be non violent
Gandhi was a UK agent and delayed Indian independence by decades. Also he was a pedophile.
Thanks for those insights even if they’re not really relevant to what was being discussed
Yup, the only real revolution is a violent revolution.
Violence is a sometimes (even often) unavoidable byproduct of revolution, not an essential characteristic. Don’t confuse the two.
George Jackson would disagree.
And Michael Jackson would disagree-hee-hee.
You know, now that a good portion of people are on Lemmy, it just might be the perfect place to start organizing, whatever you feel that may be…
Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution would suggest otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Revolution
Okay, when a government has completely collapsed, after the total collapse of the larger global leading entity; a peaceful revolution that results in something completely new, should be the top option.
But I don’t think we have that much time
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In my personal (very, very amateur) opinion; less than 10 years, where things keep running as “normal”
Humanity is awesome at adapting so I think it’ll be a very long time before things become impossible to deal with, but there is going to be a lot of transition and disruption over the next 20+ years
And how the heck do we know that it have any reasonable chance of working out well and that it won’t be brutally suppressed or co-opted by reactionaries? And how would anyone even organize such a thing? ~Strawberry
We don’t have any idea if it will work out or if it’ll be snuffed out.
However, the lack of purposeful revolution will result in an aimless one, carried on not with thought and intent, but instead as a reaction to the immseration of the world’s people as we bake in and are flooded from our homes and cities.
The only option is to try as the current hegemony will not solve the problems we face for the problems are a direct result of their desired politics in action.
As for organizing one, that’s way too long of a conversation to occur here.
So we have no idea if it’s even remotely a good idea or if it’s likely to leave us in a similar position to before or worse, or how to do it? Great plan. ~Strawberry
Both. We need both. Voting matters. Grassroots organization matters. Now is absolutely not the time to give up on democracy. It is also absolutely not the time to give up on mass organizing at the grassroots. Both, we need both.
Now is absolutely not the time to give up on democracy.
No one wants to give up democracy, we just recognize that liberal bourgeois democracy only serves to create an illusion of democratic voice. The only interests taken into account in the so-called modern “democracies” are those of capital, and that is no democracy at all.> Now is absolutely not the time to give up on democracy.
We need direct democracy. What we live in is no democracy at all, they choose for us and then we just pick the worst of two evils.
How the heck do you organize that as quickly and at as large of a scale as is needed for it to have a good chance of working out? ~Strawberry
I don’t mean to be a doomer but we can’t. We’re passed the point of no return. The best we can do is organize so that we can reduce the amount of death from here on out.
I mean working out as in making sure it doesn’t get a significant degree worse than it already is? I know we’ve already passed the point where we can avoid any damage. ~Strawberry
I think it would require some extreme changes to the oil, industry amongst other things. We’d also have to be vigilant that those changes don’t disproportionately affect the global south.
Any idea what changes would be needed and what would be required to actually get those implemented? ~Strawberry
I don’t know everything we need to do, and/or by what means. I would like to think it can be all done peacefully but we have seen how oil executives will fight tooth and nail to keep their quarterly profit report line going up; so that may not be a viable way. We could all practice consuming less and reevaluating our lifestyles. Putting more thought into whether we really need to consume as much as we do is a good example.
By starting early enough and being persistent. It will take time, but we had this issues for decades and we will have it for decades more. Best time to start a revolution is yesterday, second best is today.
Honestly voting now is to little too late. The Overton window isn’t anywhere near the point of allowing actually meaningful change and the 4-5 year cycle of voting is too slow. If we really want to solve anything, the change should be systemic. Still, voting is important.
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But what about the feelings of the rich people? They might not like that!
And their quarterly profits!
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So many logical jumps here.
“WW3” ? wtf…
“narrative” that wasn’t mentioned.
The “whole economy” that also was not mentioned.
Try responding to the comment as written, not the voices in your head and it might appear more coherent to others.
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Your echo chamber is showing in how much you read into things. Wow.
Life Pro Tip for ya: Try engaging with the words on the screen as written not the voices in your head and your feed.
Of course voting alone won’t do it. We need a lot more. Holding billionaires to account will go a long way as well.
I think its a statistical loss if we rely on denocracy. The stupid far outnumber the rational.
And the greedy outnumber us both. As long as these companies are lining politicians pockets, they will only act like they’re trying.
The “momentarily-embarrassed millionaires” don’t help, either.
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Relying on democracy without participating in democracy is the only way to fail democracy.
You may be underestimating how many stupid people there are.
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Sadly no, show me a political party that the us, china or India could realistically vote for that would substantially reduce emissions in the next 10 years
Now let’s see them actually do it, and hold the fascist scumbags trying to do a coup and commit genocide against trans people accountable in a court of law for that matter. ~Strawberry
It can and will. We need to get a bigger majority of political reps to really get everything rolling.
And how do we do that? And didn’t the dems already have a majority in congress before the mid-terms? I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly, but if they did, why didn’t they shut down the anti-trans bills then? ~Strawberry
There’s a LOT of fascists, so it’s going to be a battle. I don’t know how anyone can stop the RW from trying to push through bigot legislation other than keeping enough good people in a position to block and building on it. No giving up!
I just wish we could actually get good things to happen, rather than just stop bad things from happening at best, and even then often only temporarily or partially. ~Strawberry
Individual action also works. Its pretty easy to get information about what you can do and show those less inclined that it’s not hell to live on the other side. The IPCC has that part as well if anyone is looking for the impact their changes can have: https://news.sky.com/story/climate-change-what-does-the-ipcc-mean-by-choice-architecture-and-can-it-change-our-behaviour-12582739
Great link. Thank you!
Unfortunately, voting doesn’t help. Besides there being basically no parties with any real strong climate policies, when you vote a decent sounding one in, they just go back on their promises anyway.
And even IF we vote in a party that truly brings about radical and positive climate change policies, that’s just our one country, a drop in the ocean. The rest of the planet would still drag us down with them, even in that wildly positive scenario.
I don’t mean to be a doomsayer, I just don’t see a way out, I wish I did. Voting certainly doesn’t solve our problems, climate change or otherwise. The rich ruling class will do whatever they want, regardless.
You’re incorrect. Giving up isn’t an option.
Absolute rubbish. People believing that their vote will bring change ensures climate disaster. The system is rigged and if you agree to participate in the system you are part of the problem. Thinking voting can have any meaningful impact highlights that you are unaware of how serious the situation is.
Just want to join your downvotes by backing you up and saying you are right. Belief in the system and that voting is the answer is downright absurd at this point.
in other news my ultra conservative parents installed solar panels on their house, and for over a month now, they’ve been generating more electricity than they can use, feeding back into the system their surplus. when real world results are such, we can start using these incidents as examples of why it’s not only the morally correct thing to do (combat climate change and save our species), but also the economically savvy thing to do.
who knows what will be the final straw that breaks their stubbornness.
Shit my ultra conservative parents literally left Arizona because it just kept getting hotter every season. Yet they continue to deny climate change is manmade and a real threat to the global ecology.
Gotta love the pentecostals “it’s all just the end times!” Oh yeah, like it was when Paul wrote his letters, and like it was in the 1840’s when the millerites did their “math,” and like in the other dozen predictions since then that have all not come to pass.
I don’t know how many thousands of years can be the “last days” but something tells me it’s just whenever an individual who believes in it is currently living.
You mean they had a financial incentive to partake?
Your example just shows how economics incentives are designed to work, but that money does come from somewhere.
I’d love to get solar but it’s not economically viable to encur 20k expenses that will need over twenty years to pay off when that money can be used elsewhere
If someone gave me a Tesla I’d love it but I really don’t have the cash to get a car right now and even if I did the price of teslas and most electrics are so high it’s just not an option.
People think he solution here is to remove cheaper options but that won’t work it will just keep people holding on to beaters far longer.
If the economics make sense to change people will change but trying to shake people or force people to make economically disadvantage choices will never work long term
My wife got a used Prius for 13K or 17k a couple years ago, it’ll be more expensive now I believe, but the thing is most people don’t have 13k or 17k to spend on a car. If people can’t scrape together 500 dollars from their savings in an emergency, they aren’t going to be able to get a hybrid or electric car for a very long time, and all legislation that tries to push people in that direction benefits the rich, and penalizes the poor when they remove options the poor can afford.
Just a heads up, most home solar installations are designed to pay for themselves in 7 to 9 years. But it does depend on net metering in your area, and whether you install a battery pack.
Figured I’d ask here since this thread seems to be getting informative. The number of door to door sales people for solar that come by my area really make solar feel like a scam. How should one go about finding a proper deal on getting solar without having to work with sleazy sales practices?
Why I say it feels scammy: the area I’m in has a lot of older middle class (not upper middle class or anything) residents. From talking to some solar reps, this is their target. There are much wealthier neighborhoods a town or so over but the salespeople I’ve spoken to say the business would rather sell financed installations to collect incentives and that it’s easy to convince people they’ll save money in the long run. But in this community, we’re generally fine financially as long as nothing big hits. When they gave me the numbers, it fell into the category of a big upfront payment due to down payments and high annual costs that would only slightly be offset by electricity savings. I don’t recall the term, but it was not something we could budget for. The paperwork is all showing the future savings and the savings on electricity, until you look into the details. There are two houses that I’ve seem go for it nearby.
A lot of those door-to-door guys are indeed scams. Or if not outright scams, just incompetent.
It’s hard to find good installers that aren’t completely booked for a year or more.
Depending on your needs and skill level, a decent-sized solar setup isn’t hard to DIY. You don’t necessarily need to start with a huge system, you can set up a smaller system to run an AC system or some load like that. Then if you want scale up as you learn more.
Also, solar doesn’t have to be photovoltaic, solar thermal is great for hot water.
Interesting, this sounds like enough to start a Google quest to learn more and maybe experiment. Thanks!
Check out DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse on YouTube for lots of great info! He also has a web shop with many of the products he thinks are good quality.
If they live in the Midwest you could even point to the drop in solar production from the smoke as an immediate negative economic effect
For me it was a 20 year ROI and I would have had to ask my neighbors to take trees down. I don’t think I’ll be here for that long. And when the average joe is getting poorer and poorer it’s harder to afford. This is the problem.
Definitely dont chop down the trees. Also I heard there’s payment plans for solar panels
there’s payment plans for solar panels That still doesn’t mean they are affordable.
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That’s only one relatively minor factor among many. Anyone who points to it without also mentioning the much more significant impacts of things like global supply chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine is either ignorant, or is trying to spin a particular narrative while being intellectually dishonest about their priors.
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You don’t have to argue with your parents. It seems like the advancement of technology is naturally taking care of the issue.
Words of wisdom. The most efficient solution will speak for itself. People don’t like wasting time, effort, or money.
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Being wealthy enough to invest in a long-term savings is the only real factor in this decision lol
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Im just glad it’s shaping up to be so apocalyptic that there’ll be no safe haven for the owner class that caused it. Let them burn with the peasants they decimated for profit.
And that’s why the billionaires are investing in spaceships… Seriously though, they are really buying “doomsday” properties to ride it out.
It seems pathetic to me that people are so obsessed with self-centered “survival” at any cost. I don’t want to live in a bunker or a ruined world, and I couldn’t possibly care less about “my lineage” or genetic material or whatever.
So you care about human survival but not about your own survival?!
well, that’s not precisely what I meant, but sure. I would much rather not see humanity reduced to apocalyptic conditions at all. But if that was to happen, I’d not want to live in a bunker or in space and I’d feel bad for people who did. I also mean that I’m not concerned with “I and my offspring must survive into the future” the way some people are. I don’t have any kids… that might change things.
Love that they are spending billions on bunkers to “ride it out”, when the moment they need to use the bunker, there is nothing to ride out, we are not coming back to the surface in the next few lifetimes if ever.
those who go to those bunkers might have a chance to survive and essentially be what will be left of humans if it gets so bad surface becomes completely hostile for life. If its those fucking shits that are partly responsible for all this, they will make humanity into mockery of what its now. But its also likely they just made “luxury bunkers” that are nice to live in but that cant actually support people as long as its needed.
Those bunkers are luxury tombs and little else.
Yup, I’m sure their grandchildren will get all the warm fuzzies growing up in a confined bunker with picture book after picture book of the blue skies, green landscapes, and animals that their grandparents helped destroy.
That explains a lot with billionaire space race.
The COVID pandemic makes me their plan is to turn New Zealand into a bunker nation and leave us all to die.
Like, just the billionaires on an island? Who will do all the labor required to maintain their lifestyle? Because they sure as he’ll aren’t. To paraphrase Pratchett, it takes a hundred people standing in the mud to keep one person with their head in the clouds.
Who is this Pratchett character? Sounds like a righteous bloke lol
Terry Pratchett, author best known for the Discworld series of novels.
There’s an island full of laborers already in New Zealand. The COVID response showed that they were willing to protect people already living there, so their response to climate change will be the same.
I think that if they manage to fuck over the whole world, there is no amount of money and bunkers that can save them from the angry mob
Watch the show Silo. They’ll find a way. The books are good too.
There is no such thing as a semtex-proof bunker.
Eh, ring of fire will get them
Probably.
Billionaires seem to think nature is irrelevant. See: Elon Musk and his Mars fetish lol
This exactly. One of the reasons I left NZ was a fear of earthquakes. My dozen Christchurch rellies all living in the least damaged house, with a bucket in the garage as their toilet, just confirmed for me that I’d made the right choice.
Too bad the security they will hire to keep their bunkers safe will quickly figure out that the money they are being paid isn’t worth anything any more… they will probably point us over to the air vents when we show up with the cement trucks.
The ones responsible will be gone by the time the worst effects will be felt. Sins of the father?
Not the descendants that accepted and kept their family’s blood money without a second thought. The moment you, as an autonomous adult, choose to accept the power and wealth reaped through human misery, you accept the legacy of blood that came with it.
Anyone can walk away from blood money, or use ALL that blood money solely to provide restitution to the populations exploitated to obtain it. It doesn’t happen though, because human beings as a rule are the fucking worst. Most people, the fuckees, fantasize about becoming the oligarch fuckers, instead of dreaming of ending their oppression and restructuring society to prohibit amoral levels of wealth/power accumulation. Most humans, given power/wealth, would use their own suffering as an excuse to propagate more suffering.
Very true. I have an example in my family: my father-in-law owns a lot of land. That land, not so long ago, belonged to some native tribes that were all killed to have said land stolen. My wife said that, when her father dies and she inherits the land/money, she’s gonna donate most of it (maybe all, depending on our financial situation), because she doesn’t want the blood money.
Every time I (proudly) tell this to someone, they look at me like I’m crazy.
Playing devil’s advocate here: do you live in the US or UK?
The US, not proud of it at all though, and would leave if I had an in pretty much anywhere in Europe or Canada.
And this is true
Honestly one of the reasons that longevity treatments could actually turn out to be a good thing.
All of a sudden a bunch of rich fucks who were sooo sure that climate change wouldn’t effect them but rather their great great grandkids have a good reason to pour a lot of money into the problem so they don’t die of heat or starvation at the young age of 150 when they could have lived 200? 300? Who knows, at a certain point you get a longevity tech run away effect.
What the heck? I thought this was supposed to be fixed by all of us using paper straws and driving hybrids?
Nah I think it is fine haha it is just summer really hot out don’t worry about it /s
Whenever someone mentions the future a few decades from now as a time frame for doing things I usually just say ‘well in 2050 we’ll be killing each other for water and air conditioning so I don’t think it’s ( whatever they’re talking about ) going to matter so much’.
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I just try to enjoy each year as the coldest year I’ll get for the rest of my life.
We’re gonna blow right past it.
Billions will die.
It’s not even all about the climate though; it is human greed and cruelty that will kill the most: the haves butchering and purging the have-nots.
You are not a “have”.
For all intents and purposes, NONE of us who would actually be here, on Lemmy, in this comment thread, able to be reading this, are a “have”.
Unless your personal assistant’s butler’s niece’s boyfriend is sharing this with you, you’re probably just as fucked as he, she, and they are.
Unironically me this morning: “HOLY BLEEP IM ABOUT TO FREEZE TO DEATH HERE!”
Lemmy: “hi today is the hottest day on earth lmao”
Me: “what”
Lets build a giant air conditioner to keep the global warming out
