Earth systems critical to all life are on the verge of total collapse
Earth systems critical to all life are on the verge of total collapse
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12214870
We're in a hostage situation, and the captors own the government.
Meh. I respectfully disagree. This is the system we designed. It's working exactly as intended. What we need is a sea change. The system is broken and that's evident everywhere. The path we are on doesn't work. The only way to course correct is for everyone to get on the same page and as is witnessed during the yearly COP meetings clearly the rich nations don't fully care about the poor countries. Things are changing but dreadfully slow.
We, as in the people living now, did not design it, we are stuck with the designs of forefathers upon forefathers that had a few centuries to bake in profit above people. Before the American government, the British government did it. Other governments mimic the Big Guys. Governments are designed by the rich and powerful to minimize the power of the individual, especially in America. Keep the citizens too busy, too overworked, too sick, too poor, too homeless, too much lead in the water, too many PFAS, too much fracking pollution in the air. They just pay lip service to freedom and keep education levels low enough so people are either unaware or infinitely feeling helpless.
Look at the water shortages looming in western US. The Department of Reclamation run by a bunch of Mormons that thought it was their God-given right to terraform the US made some overly optimistic measurements at the beginning of the 20th century and ran amok building dams and changing water routes all across the west. That led to building entire cities in places that should not have cities (Phoenix, AZ; Los Angeles, CA; Las Vegas, NV, etc.) and now those cities are "too big to fail" slurping up all the water they can from places very far away. LA has an entire nuclear facility powering water pumps to push water over a mountain range to feed some of it. The agricultural West and midwest (Midwest: NE, KS, etc.) all relied on these river sources as well as giant underground aquifers. The water was always finite, but the US government sold it cheap to push farming and agriculture into the west and away from the south where water was more plentiful. Now it's running out.
This isn't even getting into the problems faced by the poorer nations you mentioned above, resources will become spread so thin, looming water wars and other conflicts on the horizon that will start out so civil at their beginning. Those nations at the equator will be on their own to survive, with mass-migration towards the poles being the only real solution for those that survive.
We (now-humans) are stuck having to mitigate the worst of the damage for humanity and many species to continue to survive, and attempt to roll back all these arrogant asinine greedy decisions in the hope that the near-future will be at least semi-habitable.
Earth will be fine, it'll rebuild and reset and grow some new beings. Trying to guilt people for things they didn't do and have little control over is not a good motivator when faced with major extinction.
if we exceed the 1.5°C warming target set by the Paris Agreement.
Pretty sure previous studies have already confirmed we're already blowing past 2°C even if we stopped producing CO2 today.
Not to be too doomer about it but we're already too late to prevent centuries of damage. What we can do now is try and keep the ecosystem from becoming completely uninhabitable.
I'm just hoping to be able to travel a little bit and see the world before there's nothing left.
Not to be pedantic, but the target is a ten year trailing average. It’s a crime that we’ve likely hit it for a year or two already, and that shows how urgent the problem is but we’ve still got 5 years or so
Even worse carbon emissions haven’t yet peaked, much less started dropping, and way less quickly than they need to drop
That's not really how that works. The 2°C increase is a prediction of how average temperatures will increase based on already existing carbon in the atmosphere.
If we stop emitting today, the average temperature will still increase beyond 2°C and stay there unless there's another force actively removing the CO2 from the atmosphere.
This isn't "if we stop emitting today, we'll peak at 2°C increase and then it'll go back down" the 2°C prediction is a permanent increase to the average temperature.
The damage is done. Millions will likely die regardless of how much carbon we put out from this point forward. The fight now is to decrease the people that will die beyond that number.
Those extra years don't mean anything though. It's the target that matters. Just because 10 years was predicted doesn't mean we can do whatever we want in this 10 years as long as it fixed right before that mark.
If you still have hope that humanity will stop destroying (the human habitability of) our only habitat in the name of short-term private profit for humanity's most prolific sociopaths, at least share the kind of drugs you're on.
"LINE MUST GO UP!"
-Homo Sapien, ~200,000 BCE - ~2100 AD
Accelerationists gotta accelerate, I guess. For the longest time it baffled me as to why anyone with intelligence would knowing act to destroy the planet and, with it, society. Then I learned about this shit called accelerationism and it all starts to make sense.
We ARE in a hostage situation like someone commented, except we're on a bus, speeding toward a cliff, and the rich elite refuse to take their foot off the pedal. They think they're going to come out of societal collapse alive and poised to shape whatever comes next however they want. It's literally the game of Monopoly with that fucking speed die version...
That sounds like Vault-Tec level evil to me.
Jokes on them, the earth can stay a boiling lava pit for longer than they can stay in their bunkers.
Also, good luck trying to have people service and maintain your bunker system as you dictate their lives without any of them just trying to kill you.
It would be so much easier to just admit they have to work with the poors to keep the earth alive so everyone can live than just wipe out humanity and think they can outlast it
Right? Shortsightedness is a problem everywhere. And their calculations are not gonna work out for them. Sure, raise the price of goods and services today, who's gonna buy them if no one has any money cause they're syphoning off and propelling us to the bottom. I'm convinced the ultra wealthy stopped mentally growing at age 7-10.
Take that Ken Griffith guy, the one who had to get bailed out by other ultra wealthy a-holes in 2020 during the GameStop meme-time. He just spent like $44 million on a stegosaurus skeleton that the company was going to try to sell for like $3-$7 million. Dudes atrocious with money and predictions it seems. He's like a wealthier Tim Poole.
rich
It's not about the rich. No one cares, except for a small handful of people. The vast majority of people want to fly away on vacation, own a large home, have a crappy grass lawn, eat meat everyday. They see environmentalism as some sort of odd lifestyle. If you make a law that says they can't use gas lawn mowers, they'll scream and go bat shit insane, call you the devil. They are relentless in wanting to pave over anything living.
me when i destroy the planet to get just 1 more green piece of paper that means jack shit in the grand scheme of things
genuinely think money is an addiction to these big oil fucks
It's a way of keeping score. They don't care where the money comes from any more, just that they have more than some other guy.
People who care about people generally don't get rich, because they are kind and helpful people and will spend money on others.
It's not only the top 1% that are doing this. Well, yes they do, but they are all fueled by ignorance of people that keep them in power. There is nothing wrong with having ridiculous amounts of money, there is something very wrong when those amounts of money get you immunity to law and regulation. Because that destroys the point of regulation anyway - and they are supposed to keep everyone safe.
I have had this conversation with parents and grandparents, if we ignore the ecology for a bit and just look at the numbers and speed we are consuming oil. According to (they cite their sources) worldometers.info we have 39 years left before we consume/pump all oil. There is a possibility that even my grandparents could outlive oil, but there is a high possibility that my parents will outlive oil at the current rate - let alone me and our generation.
The thing is that we NEED oil. We need it for so many things like plastics, medication, but also transportation. Ships, planes all currently need oil to move as there is no way to power them all alternatively YET. So my question was why spend the oil on cars, the one thing that we know how to and CAN power using electricity. The response from grandparents was that they would never buy an electric car. This mindset then fuels people across generations, and it is so dangerous. When you include the consequences for earth if we would spend all the oil at this rate, it gets even more frightening. We won't need oil at that point, we wouldn't exist anyway.
"Sorry, I'm freeing Palestine this election by posting on Instagram about it and not voting"
yeah it's not the "fuck everyone else let's subsidize billionaires and crude oil some more" party that has anything to do with it; it's definitely the "i think genocide is bad" crowd.
Ok, so I am all about working to resolve climate change, very active in the movement even.
But gosh golly gee, can we talk about that particular websites UI for a moment? I do not need a roll ad every 3 seconds. And I really do not need to know that one weird trick on how to get rats to like me.
Again, all for the climate. I’m saying this as I just walked 45 minutes to go grab my lunch. Totally on board with more buses and trains. Big advocate of a Citizens Climate Lobby. Doing my part, hope you do too.
Keep the rats the f away from me!
The more data processing your computer does, and the more information served from elsewhere, the worse the use of electricity, and therefore the carbon footprint.
It's all a little extra press on the scales in order to ensure things end just that little bit quicker.
Companies and billionaires when the only thing they care about are multicoloured laminated pieces of paper that basically mean nothing once someone's wealth is high enough:
As conservatives cheer.
I've been doing my best, but we need to be investing money as a society into it.
My neighbor is blasting Tool and singing along, poorly. Let's go ahead and collapse this already. I'm tired.
One great big festering neon distraction
I've a suggestion to keep you all occupied
See you on Arizona Bay!
Please just do it already
I know right? The faster shit gets really really bad, the faster people will (hopefully) start building homemade guillotines.
Personally I'd prefer any way that doesn't shovel the less abled and less privileged into the Accelerationism Machine as fuel.
We have to hope things get better, because no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse. People will see things getting worse as evidence that it hasn't gotten worse enough. The idea that there is some point where it can get bad enough to spur positive change is false. The positive change that has happened in society originates from people wanting things to get better.
We have to convince people to want things to get better, by showing them it can be better. Too many people are worried about losing the little they have. People have to see we can all be living more complete lives without harming the planet.
Well since there's nothing I can do then I guess it's time to kick back and wait for the end of humanity. We had a good run.
I can honestly say that I believe, checks notes, that tinfoil hats will help you with this issue!
Really wish there was a way to block this kind of stuff from all my feeds. I already know this, and there is nothing I can do to stop it from happening, so I really don't want to see it.
There is something you can do. You can get into and support climate activism.
Right, that worked back in the day but it doesn't work now because Republicans, conservatives, and people who own those people don't care about saving the planet and don't care about real actual science anymore. They will flatbout refuse to listen to facts, reason, and logic, so it's impossible to have actual real conversations with them. If that stuff still worked, then we would already be working on trying to reverse what is happening, and we would be passing laws and issuing fines in the billions to companies like Exxon and BP.
Think about it. If we had the hole in the ozone right now instead of in the 80s there is absolutely no fucking way they would have passed the laws to fix it and the same goes for all the acid rain we had. If you think that stuff works, then please sell me whatever copium you have cuz christ could I use some.
Repression against climate activism is (in my view) at an all-time high with movements even labeled as terrorists and a certain part of the populace agreeing with injuring or even killing members of climate activist groups. Not something I'd want to put myself into. :/
This is wild, the exact same discussion with the exact opposite upvotes would happen in the progressivepolitics community.
But to the point about "not being able to do anything" that's just not true. Is it singularly enough to reverse or accelerate climate change? No, but that's not the question is it. Anything is anything. Can you do anything? Yes.
The answer is Yes. So please do. You're walking instead of driving? Eating less meat? Good. There you go - no need to crawl into a hole and die, you're doing something. It's not nothing. It's good.
Even with appliances or vehicles: if you’re going to buy one anyway, you can choose increased efficiency and you’ve done something, no matter how small.
Sell your car. Stop eating meat. Go to city council meetings and push for bike lanes.
And that still won't do shit when a company like ExxonMobil produces more pollution in a single year than thousands of people will in an entire lifetime. Don't sit here and act like anything I do will make a difference just because it makes you feel better.
Those things are helpful and nice, but they aren't even close to enough. As long as conservatives hold any power, billionaires and corporations will continue to cook the planet. To combat global heating, we must combat conservatism.
do these absolute buffoons not know how important my crude portfolio is?
This planet needs to work on respecting your money more! Can't these stupid rainforests stop dying?
Right!? I mean there’s still money to be made, FFS!