YouTube’s climate deniers turn into climate doomers — A new report documents a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won’t work
YouTube’s climate deniers turn into climate doomers — A new report documents a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won’t work
A new report documents a sharp rise in claims that clean energy won't work.
YouTube’s climate deniers turn into climate doomers — A new report documents a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won’t work::A new report documents a shift away from climate denial and a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won't work.
Here's my thing: I absolutely believe that clean energy and radical climate policies would work. However I have basically 0 hope that enough countries will implement these things to evade climate catastrophe.
Mitigation is a spectrum not a binary outcome. Anyone arguing to not try does not understand the problem or is being dishonest.
Countries already are. Slower than we'd like, but change is happening. Big changes start small, but gain momentum. Look at the rollout of renewables and EVs. If you'd described where we are now to past me only 10 years ago, I wouldn't have believed you.
We need to roll out good public transit and get more people off the roads in general, too.
EVs are a good step in energy independence, but they're only mildly better ecologically than ICE vehicles (which should definitely be phased out). The whole ecological cost of maintaining road infrastructure is also not getting helped by heavier vehicles, so we need less of them on the road.
It's gotta be a peer pressure thing, diplomatically, to work. The countries taking the biggest steps need to be loud about it so the ones dragging their feet (hi from the US) get their pride hurt if they don't take action. The ozone hole fix worked that way too (though of course that didn't have major political powers denying it was a problem).
I agree. Additionally, I don't believe that, without controlled depopulation (restrictive birth control, not killing people), we can achieve climate stability and solve other issues like increasing pollution of the entire environment. I believe that the population should have stopped growing in the 90s (at about 4 billion), of course, this number is a hunch, not knowledge.
We have reached a point far beyond sustainability; we are on artificial life support. Without this support, even getting dressed would be a challenge, given the lack of a natural and clean source of textile materials. Nearly all clothes are made of plastic or contain some plastic additives. As we wash these clothes in our machines, we inadvertently consume plastic particles in our food and drink.
Speaking of machines, the devices produced today have an increasingly shorter lifespan. Simultaneously, the recycling of these devices is problematic, as our waste is often massively exported to third-world countries.
Another concern is the escalating scarcity of drinking water, among various other challenges. The list goes on and on. Anyone expecting the Earth to accommodate an unlimited number of people is plain insane or doesn't understand the complexity of the issue.
We must act now on all the fields, even those unpopular ones (like population control).
Those who are against population control, please take a look at this initiative: https://populationmatters.org/ and its patrons (like Sir David Attenborough and Jane Goodall).
The amount of Doomers on Lemmy and Reddit is depressingly large as well. It's du jour to act like any talk of climate positivity is naive, change is impossible and collapse is inevitable. Just look at the popularity of whole subs dedicated to Collapse and Doomer material. It's exhausting trying to challenge the position of some of these users, yet we must try. Hope is an important part of tackling the climate challenges we're facing, and the glamorisation of defeatism isn't going to help foster that.
Mindless optimism isn't the answer either. We need real change immediately, the window to slam on the brakes as a species is already behind us arguably. The only answer is to be both realistic AND ambitious.
No one said anything about mindless optimism. You are correct, change is needed and fast, but relentless pessimism achieves nothing except foster defeat. I'm advocating for a realistic approach to how we look at climate change mitigation. Part of being realistic is understanding that things may not be as hopeless as parts of the Internet would like you to believe.
DuJour means friendship!
An argument I hadn't seen until recently was "Man-made climate change is real, it's an existential problem, and the only way to combat it is to burn as much fossil fuel as we can right now to boost the economy and increase our efforts to find a solution."
Because scientific endeavors work in real life exactly like Sid Meier's Civilization?
If only Gandhi were around to nuke those idiots.
It's not a shift away from corporate bullshit: the same people that were arguing that changing something is bad because the climate isn't changing now are arguing that changing something is bad because it's too late and let's ride into the sunset giving trillions to oil companies.
To be fair, destroying the planet and foresaking future generations is easier than admitting you were wrong.
so, we've moved from "ots not real" through past "maybe its real, but its not.human caused" all the way to "its real and we can't do anything about it"/"its too late to do anything about ot"
I doubt it's a natural evolution.
Climate change denial was the product of oil companies and worked on idiots. The "it's too late anyway" is likely also the work of oil companies and works on people who think they're smarter than the idiots.
We're past the point of averting the climate crisis. We're now at the point where any effort to mitigate climate change, to reduce emissions, is damage control. But there's little doubt of a global population correction, likely in my lifetime, and probably defining the latter half of my grandson's life.
The risk for human extinction due to ecology collapse is no longer insignificant. More likely we'll be reduced tens of thousands. Civilization is going to collapse, and all that we do today, culture wise, is unlikely to survive.
Others have thought about this more than I. A good deep dive is The World Is Not Ending by Sophie From Mars (on YouTube) who points out that we're more inclined to imagine the end of the world than we are the end of capitalism. She imagines two outcomes; one in which we embrace mutualism sooner and one in which we hold onto our capitalist values and grind industry until the last possible moment.
I think the general response of the international community to Greta Thunberg's call to action demonstrates pretty well what the climate response movement is up against: The aristocrats and plutocrats that control our industries and nations will not listen to anyone that doesn't drop on them with nine feet of rainfall and 115 MPH winds. And even then they haven't budged.
Now from my perspective, it's not a matter of willpower, but whether our species is capable of organizing a response to the climate crisis when it threatens established edifices of economic and political power. All signs say that we just have not worked out a sociological method to change minds who would rather die and see their own species go extinct before giving up their own wealth. It's a fox and grapes situation, and may well doom the human species.
The human animal has demonstrated itself unable to be able to choose reason when wealth and power are on the line, and then once we pry it from the cold dead fingers of our elites, we can't trust anyone else who has it momentarily not to abuse it. And that is the great filter that will kill us.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think if we found an organism that drives hundreds of other species to extinction a day, we'd do our damndest to eradicate it.
Unfortunately that organism is us. Human exceptionalism is gross. We deserve to go extinct.
It's sad that you think that way
Nobody listened when they kept telling us we were reaching Peak Oil back in the early '00s and now look at us. Completely out of oil. We need to listen to the climate scare ppl for suresies!!