Yeah. At least when nuclear war was the existential threat hanging over humanity you had the comfort that it would all be over in an instant. Now we get to watch a slow unraveling of civilization over decades while things continue to get worse. Fun times.
Don't just wait passively for it, take action. Everyone can contribute and together we will achieve big things. If we all work together the collapse is not just a dream.
The RNC debate was a pretty big red alert. One of the more popular candidates literally said "climate change is a hoax" and got applause. And most of them would at least admit it was real but immediately talked about removing 'government restrictions' unfairly placed on corporations and climate change is an excuse to burn money for the current party.
Spoiler alert: The civilization disrupting aspects of climate change are still decades out and the rich countries will probably be fine.
They'll be fine because they can afford the infrastructure projects and increased costs of energy and food.
Now Africa, South America, the poorer Asian countries, tiny Pacific Island nations... Oh boy. I would not want to be a citizen there in 20 or 30 years.
Eventually sea level rise will become a really big fucking problem, like for every single coastal city in the world, even the rich ones. Luckily none of us will be around to see that unless some sort of miraculous life extension technology becomes available.
On the one hand I don't like mentioning this because it gives the right wing ammunition to ignore climate change. But on the other hand some people have such existential dread about it that it's damaging their mental health, they are really overestimating how damaging it will be in their lifetime in their rich country they live in.
The interesting part are those who still don’t write letters to their congressmen and still vote for climate deniers. I just can’t.
It would be insanely easy to solve: Not one of the billionaires out there would recognize if they only had 999 mil left and neither would anybody else. That‘s a cool 10 trillion to pay towards climate change. You‘re welcome.
That money was earned using earth, so to saving earth it goes back (because no earth, no money and our billionaire overlords suprisingly havent saved us yet.)
You people think it will be a night and day collapse? Get real. The rich will continue to get richer and you'll toil away in relative comfort as you do now.
The problem IMHO is that the ”information“ feels like propaganda. “You need to stop doing this, because the planet needs you to“ I mean come on, 80% of all the greenhouse gas emissions come from 10 companies.
Don’t FridayForFuture us, FridayForFuture them.
Oh, and one thing to add to trigger a whole lot of people:
Most of the people are dependent on those companies, because they earn too little to get an alternative. And saying they are the reason is like telling a POW that their crafting of shells kills Americans.
I'm thinking of moving to a state that's colder where I can buy land that has water within the property.
I also think to do anything sizeable you need the resources a company can bring. Our problems are at scale. You need a scaled resource pool and reinvestment in that to work up to some of the issues. I like the idea of carbon extraction for example, but I don't see any resources invested in it from US companies.
It's already happening, collapse on this scale is a slow process, and hard to observe from within.
The roman empire didn't collapse from start to end in a single lifetime, after all.
Nobody alive today will be around to see the "collapse" collapse, the extremely dire breakdown that comes as a sudden crisis in civilisation terms, but we will continue to see a lot of hardship from our dated and crumbling institutions and our society slowly losing its grasp on what it is, etc.
In the end, just like the romans, our civilisation's collapse doesn't mean apocalypse, it's not the end.
All civilisations rise and fall, and while ours is by far the grandest and strongest in many respects, it's also the weakest, relying entirely on extremely fragile global systems that, should they fail for even a single month, would throw the planet into chaos (electricity grids/Internet), hastening or even triggering that final sudden crisis, once three slow rot of a dying civilisation has already set in.
But until then, such events will be overcome. Not until that rot has truly set in, and a sudden crisis is upon us all, will things finally collapse as we know it.
I live in Michigan where we just had at least 7 tornadoes yesterday, and NOAA is basically saying get used to it, this is the new normal. I’ve been in this house for 20 years and I’ve never seen devastation like this. I’ll be without power for several more days because massive 200 year old oaks were snapped like toothpicks and my street is littered with downed power lines.
7 people have died, and when this happens in winter (which they’re saying it will), people will freeze to death in the aftermath. Things will get ugly soon.
He’s Silent Generation (86), and he’s very smart and savvy otherwise (he’s an aerospace engineer, still has his 9-5 job in airplane development and has recently started driving for Uber to fill his spare time), and plays VR games on Oculus with me and my sister on weekends, but he doesn’t have patience for our climate change talk. He’s extremely liberal otherwise, but he thinks this is all overblown and the natural cycle of climate, telling us he’s seen these changes before.
How do I convince him this is different? Im at a loss. Or maybe I shouldn’t bother because at his age it doesn’t matter and I should just let him ‘be right’?
My sister is disturbed by his attitude, but im not sure it matters, really.
It's an excellent moment to remind you that even if we manage to dodge this, there is still the heat death of the universe, so it's just a matter of how long do we want to waste energy postponing the unavoidable
Just remember in 20 years when nothing changes and life proceeds as normal. No one will care what you think then because the robbery will have been done.
It's worse than that. If we degrowthed and decarbonized fast enough to stop global warming, billons of people will die. If we continue to do nothing or weak sauce half measures to stop global warming, billions of people will die.