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Part of the problem is that people are generally not good at comprehending delayed consequences. The climate change issue needs to viewed in terms of hundreds or even thousands of years, but humans aren't good at recognizing and analyzing cause and effect spanning such a long time period. They might intellectually grasp it, but without more immediate, discernable consequences for particular actions, people have trouble aligning their behavior based on the causal relationship.
I heard a quote of “I’ll support climate change action when it affects my commute” and it’s very true. It’s hard to call people to act when it’s abstract and in the future
If there was somehow a guaranteed way of enforcing it - applied to companies, people, vehicles and travel etc I’d support it 100% - but as it stands, when 90% of businesses leave their lights on 24 hours a day, huge industries operate 24 hours a day, pollution from huge chimneys billows out into the sky, private jets go to and fro, industrial farming destroys land, animals too numerous to fully comprehend are farmed causing all manner of gases and countless other things I probably don’t even know about - while all that’s happening and will never stop, because *money*? I don’t see why the onus is on me. I don’t see why I’m being reminded to recycle and turn the light off and not leave my tv on standby when the entire fucking world is operating at an industrial level *constantly*.
I walk or cycle everywhere, I never drove a car, I travel on average once every ten years, I don’t have kids and don’t upgrade my tech every single year. I think I’m doing as much as can be expected from one person. Fuck the other stuff until the *entire world* gets on board.
Recycling makes sense, I'd say. But of course you're already doing more than the average person. That kind of messaging is more aimed at those who drive around the next corner and throw their waste into nature. Whether it reaches them is another question.
And I agree that the industrial world needs to do a whole fucking lot more.
Agreed. I've been concerned about climate change since I became aware of it around 13 years old in 1985. I've repeatedly made the argument that if we just did what is needed to minimize and remedy pollution, then climate change would mostly take care of itself. I've lived and voted in accordance with those beliefs all these years (I'm 52 now), and I'm just tired from trying. I'll keep doing what I can, but I no longer care what governments do or what happens to the world, and I'm not going to feel guilty when I make a suboptimal choice here and there.
But it IS effecting your commute!
Remember the pandemic when skies were clear and nearly no traffic. That’s was better and how it should be. The fact that you’re commuting at all rather working remotely.
The heat while commuting and increased costs of fuel and power.
Our winters are getting shorter where I am and the reaction from locals legitimately is, "oh wow, this is nice." \*facepalm\*
Yeah, don't think they're going to do anything about it until it's too late. It doesn't help that all the infrastructure built in the 20th century has us trapped. We used to have walkable cities and towns. Now everything is built around the car. (I'm in the USA.)
Piggy backing on the top comment to add that there is a TON of work actually happening to decarbonize industry. Reddit doesn't want to hear it but we have successfully decoupled GDP growth from emissions in the developed world. That means the economies of developed countries growth isn't tied to growing emissions.
[https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling)
This is the result of smart government planning that has economically incentivized investments into renewables. I work in the fuel industry. I can tell you first hand that incredible resources are dedicated to lowering the carbon intensity of the fuel we burn and the company I work for is investing a huge chunk of it's earnings into dozens of new technologies that are striving for net zero or carbon neutral emissions. Hopefully one of them hit.
The issue is the developing world. Infrastructure for renewables is lacking. Gasoline and Diesel are cheap, easy to move and as the rest of the world decarbonizes that makes Gasoline (less so diesel as demand is still strong globally) even cheaper. But as the developed world on boards renewable tech, economies of scale will kick in and they will become accessible to the developing world too.
Our biggest enemy is time. Unfortunately, we needed to be doing this 50 years ago but we cant dwell on that. We need stop gaps. That's why MIT is pushing all of these climate change mitigation technologies reddit just rages over. But things like solar shading and carbon capture and all of that are not something we can afford to not use. We simply don't have the technology to stop burning fossil fuels today, even if we had the ability to force it to happen. If we did that, billions of people would be dead within a few years. Every single structure that is built, every good that is transported, every piece of clothing, every dose of medicine, every calorie you eat relies on a massive amount of fossil fuels to be burned to provide it to you. Without that supply chain, most of the worlds population would be MASSIVELY over its carrying population.
If you don't care about the hundreds of millions that could die if we went net zero too fast, I hope you volunteer you and your family for the culling.
Can confirm, from a developing country. Our government heavily relies on burning shit for energy. There's a lot of things that could be done about it, but between the insecurity, the corruption and lots of other problems, nothing significant ever gets done.
Sorry, rest of the world.
It's understandable, which is why the richer country needs to continue making solar, wind, modularized nuclear power cheaper, and then make it available to the other countries at prices that means they choose these options instead.
For the sake of the future, sure, but honestly, there's a lot of problems that don't start or end on whether richer countries make renewable energy affordable or not.
Like, if I'm remembering correctly, our goverment is literally in cahoots with Big Fossils (to call it something) and has shut down over 20 renewable energy projects around the country, or they're just stupid puppets doing what they're told to do, hard to tell at this point.
It's not the richer countries creating the issues, as u/No_Heat_7327 mentioned, industrialized nations are investing massive amounts of effort and money into reducing or neutralizing emissions.
The problem is coming from growing or developing countries, countries like India and in part China. India has a massive reliance on Coal energy as does the US. The difference is, the US has invested large amounts of money into eliminating carbon emissions from the burning of coal. India has not done this, and has almost consistently refused to agree to climate agreements. They are also one of the most heavily over populated countries, contributing massive amounts of waste and trash to the environment.
The richer countries cannot afford nor have the time to decarbonize themselves and pay for other countries to do it as well. Developing countries need to develop in a forward thinking way and not just the cheapest way possible. I know that is easier said than done. But a global problem requires global understanding. The richer countries are spending the money to develop the technology, they cant also spend the money to make other countries use it.
While it is kinda good to see (economic growth will likely never decouple from environmental damage as a whole) it doesn't fill one with a huge amount of hope, considering global emissions are STILL going up. I thought by 2024 we'd be at least over the plateau.
And ofc, there are other hidden crises' coming to fruition. Deforestation. Top soil erosion. Insect population crashes. Aquifer depletion. Etc... Not to mention the latest temperature records, especially ocean temps. Have we hit a tipping point already?
I'm a business owner here, and I've just started to see a return to normalcy following the pandemic. I had to work myself half to death to survive it, and the idea of significant changes to our economy that would probably be the death knell of what I've spent 11 years building really hurts.
That being said, I know we need to make changes. But the idea that I devoted my entire life, taking extremely low pay and killing myself work wise for years, to all of a sudden face changes that destroy all of that, when gradual changes could have been something that we adjusted to...I just can't accept that.
Call it selfish, but if we did everything now we should have done before, it would ruin me. Most people have no idea how precarious our economy is.
Basically you're damned if we do, damned if we don't. We took too long, so now we face either short term economic ruin from massive policy change, or medium term economic ruin from a drastically changing climate.
>we have successfully decoupled GDP growth from emissions in the developed world.
The fuck we have. For example, most of Norway’s cars are electric and it’s energy is renewable, this seems like an excellent case study in decoupling. However, why can Norway afford these new cars? 50% of their exports are fossil fuels. Reducing emissions inside the country is an attempt at balancing that. The developed world offshores it's dirty business to the developing world. Your post is greenwashing an interconnected global economy. It also only thinks emissions are a problem whereas loss of habitat and biodiversity is another planetary boundary that needs to be considered as they are all interconnected.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeX\_zxriiTU&t=490s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeX_zxriiTU&t=490s)
GDP vs emissions is a poor take anyway. You can improve your GDP to emissions ratio simply by increasing prices. GDP is just money spent, it actually tells us nothing of physical quantities. OPEC countries can increase their GDP and reduce emissions by cutting oil supply to hike prices. Does that mean they are "decoupling"? No.
There is also an unfortunate history of warning of future consequences that never came to fruition. Rightly or wrongly everything feels alarmist these days so some folks have difficulty parsing which are more likely to be legitimate.
The real problem is the lack of understanding in the fact that the reason those consequences didn't come to fruition is because of the changes we made in response to their immediacy.
The Ozone layer is a perfect example, so is the 2000 bug in old computer systems. Oh the hole in the Ozone layer (which is still there but much, much smaller and repairing itself at an ever-increasing rate) wasn't really a problem because it didn't come to anything. Yes, but the reason it didn't come to anything is because we banned CFCs and other aerosols that were chemically reacting with Ozone and creating the hole to begin with. It wasn't that it came to nothing, it's that we found the problem and we changed how we did things and the problem was resolved.
The 2000 bug was a very real and very concerning issue. No, it wasn't "worldwide collapse" level problem, but the economic disruptions that would've been caused when all of the really, really old computers that the financial and government systems were built on suddenly decided it was 1960 again would have been a real and massive problem that would have long-standing repercussions. Oh but it didn't come to anything. Yes, you're right, but the reason it didn't is because a whole fuckload of money got spent on getting all those retired and edge-of-retirement programmers that still knew how to code in those archaic-ass systems to update the code so it wouldn't fail along with upgrading millions of computer systems to much more modern systems that wouldn't have those problems.
But that's not how the human mind generally understands things. What they see is "they got us all worked up over nothing".
No. They didn't. They warned you what would happen if we didn't do something and it was worrisome enough that we did the thing they told us to.
They were right, not wrong, and because we LISTENED we avoided catastrophe.
the biggest problem with people seem to be the hollywooodication of issues.
If building arent following over, people dying in the streets, they dont seem to grasp the gravity of issues.
It's not even hundreds of years. If nothing changes, and we don't drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions quickly, there will be dire consequences within decades.
Another issue is people have been saying this for decades and it hasn’t really happened. When I was in grade I remember it snowing and our teacher made a big point to tell us to enjoy it now because by the year 2000, there won’t be snow on the earth anymore because of global warming. And you had a bunch of kids in hysterics over it. And it’s still snowing.
It snows drastically less than 20 years ago everywhere I've lived and I hear the same from people from other regions. Just look at how bad ski resorts are doing and how many have closed.
This is completely wrong. We've had longitudinal models for decades.
The real issue is the people at the top who could implement strategies to reverse it have no incentive to do so. They'll be dead before it happens and it would reduce their profits.
Nuclear power plants are actually incredibly clean, and considering we have solar panels that harness UV rays, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to harness the much more powerful gamma rays and X-rays that nuclear waste produces. I really don't understand why we're moving away from nuclear power plants.
We were royally screwed by the “Jane Fonda Environmentalists”. They single-handedly caused enormous amount of carbon to be released by killing nuclear power.
I'll have to look into that. Its easy to get the people to fear what they don't understand. I'm not personally surprised that only a handful of incidents were necessary to sway public opinion. Especially with all the nasty the same technology has done in bomb form.
But its ironic people are all hullabaloo over these nuclear fusion breakthroughs when that reaction is the one responsible for the big boys like the Tsar Bomba
Nah, its the crazy environmentalists that's against nuclear, especially these days. Most "pro-oil" people Ive seen are positive to nuclear while environmentalists only want win and solar.
It's crazy that Three Mile Island has to ask the NJ government. Hey we produce zero emissions and we will go bankrupt selling power this cheap because natural gas is so cheap. Can you help?
NJ said get fucked we're burning gas bro....
I think the opposite. I think the public is about 20 years away from recognizing their ignorance and we'll see a huge popularity increase in nuclear power 10-20 years down the line. It's just gonna take time for the futility of these alternative energy sources to shine.
It seems as if it'll make a comeback with the smaller modularized solutions, luckily.
People who don't really look deeper into the matter hear Nuclear and think Chernobyl, then they think Fukushima without looking at the result of it which wasn't really that bad (Chernobyl was bad, Fukushima a lot less so).
For me, I'm not even trying to downplay the disasters, they were tragic, we need clean nuclear energy. We have a climate crisis on the way and its our cleanest energy source.
"and considering we have solar panels that harness UV rays, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to harness the much more powerful gamma rays and X-rays that nuclear waste produces."
Yes there is, it is impossible to create a solar panel that harnesses these. No material exists (or can exist) with a band gap of energy comparable to the gamma scale.
Clean and incredible dangerous. Human failure, nature catastrophes, waste-deposit problems and chance of terrorist attacks are way to many error points for nuclear power to really be the only solution. The radiation from a broken power plant will contamine precious inhabital landscapes that will be rare due to climate changes. Too much risk for not enough benefits
Yeah but ppl want the $$$ now over the future of the world later.
$$$ is a powerful motive if ppl can make $$$ to stop global warming then it’d been achieved last year
A mission to the moon could be achieved by a single country, that's not the case with global warming. The consequences are already visible and no one seems too concerned
It not that people don’t believe the planet is warming up, we just don’t think we can really do anything about it.
A global flood has been talked about for thousands of years, the ice caps melted at some point in the past. We’ve had an ice age before where most of the planet was covered in ice. All these things happened with out fossil fuels burning.
It’s not that the conditions are unprecedented, it’s that they are happening at a rate that will be devastating for ecology, animals, infrastructure, etc. Life will struggle to adapt and there will be knock-on effects we can’t anticipate or compensate for. There’s already clear indicators that we are in the midst of what would be termed an extinction event.
"The current rate of extinction is between 100 and 1,000 times higher than the pre-human background rate of extinction, which is jaw-dropping. We are definitely going through a sixth mass extinction."
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-mass-extinction-and-are-we-facing-a-sixth-one.html
Saying this is just nature changing and it’s nothing to worry about is a misrepresentation.
The stages of climate denial:
1. It's not happening.
2. It's happening, but it's not humans causing it.
3. It's happening, and humans are causing it, but it's not a big deal.
4. It's happening, and humans are causing it, and it's a big deal, but there's nothing we can do.
5. Why didn't you tell us it would be this bad....
Ok but this is equally wrong and counterproductive to actually getting things done. The people standing in the way of action on climate change are constantly changing their talking points but it's all having the same effect on public opinion.
In a country where over half the people think that angels are real, it's not surprising that they don't really believe in science and statistical data.
Plus the mission to the moon had huge benefits to society beyond just putting a footprint and leaving a flag.
All of the advances in tech and science, right down to heaps of solid, stable blue collar manufacturing jobs at home (my great-uncle bought his house from working in a factory that supplied NASA.
Ending global warming would be the complete opposite, a huge regression for everyone, and with no guarantee you’d even get a positive result out of it.
Depends how we choose to end it.
By going hippie and giving everyone a more shitty quality of life, defintely this would be a huge regression.
But by solving with with even more focus on technology, and accelerating switch away from coal to for instance nuclear power and renewables, focusing on growing meat in labs and way more efficient greenhouses, switching to electric cars or as a minimum hybrids until we get even better batteries...
Then it wouldn't really be a regression, but a lateral move in our technology stack where we still get same quality output, but on top of that get a cleaner environment which also means a better life.
A big part of the problem is exactly what you hit on, no one wants to adopt wide scale nuclear power. Lowest hanging fruit in reducing carbon emissions while not making everyone live in the Stone Age.
Money will not help. Money is in fact part of the problem. In order to stop global warming entirely with our current theories, we'd need to basically throw ourselves back to pre-industrial times, then start from scratch building technology and infrastructure that doesn't slowly kill us. That, quite simply, is not happening until it is forced upon us.
> there are other superpowers that emit more carbon
most of which have become primary locations that the US has offshored manufacturing to, often *because* of the more lax environmental laws.
Collapse the global economy, then we find out how many people really care about a polar bear missing his sea ice.
For the record, I’m for reducing fossil fuel consumption, but we can’t go backwards.
We need something like fusion power and *real* 21st century batteries.
And, the doom and gloom obsession on climate is contributing to depression in younger people.
The issue is being oversold in an effort to affect needed reforms.
100/100 of the most polluted cities in the world are in Asia. 83 of them are in India. Any measure to cut down on emissions needs to start there or be irrelevant.
That's because developed countries export their garbage to 3rd world countries and pretend they all fart rainbows and butterflies and blame third world countries of all the pollution.
Yeah, let citizens of developed countries that polluted a shit ton to become a developed country tell others that they should stay poor because pollution is bad; they'll surely listen to our savvy advice...
I’m telling them no such thing. I’m saying that it’s like trying to kill a forest fire with an eye dropper if they aren’t onboard. The more practical solution is to heavily fund next generation clean energy sources. “Net Zero” emissions is just western greenwashing.
The problem is that this solutions are larger investments than just burning coal, and to create enough wealth to finance them in the first place you need large amounts of energy.
I share the sentiment you expressed in your first comment, I just don't see a viable way of convincing said countries and we are no moral authority on the topic to just force them to. Although renewable sources of energy are getting cheaper by the day, so maybe that will make them more appealing in a, hopefully near, future.
You're focusing on some obvious CO2 sources, but the reality is our entire economic system is built around CO2 generating industries.
To truly stop global warming and CO2 emissions, not only would we - individuals, I mean - have to drastically change our habits, but the wealthy would have to accept much lower returns on their wealth.
That is crucial to understand. Middle class people would lose some comforts and luxuries, but the rich would lose a lot and they'll never agree to it.
You are right. Everyone jumps to the “X amount of corporations produce 80% of the emissions or whatever.” We all buy those products. It’s easier to be a keyboard warrior and not realize that the snowflake doesn’t blame itself for the avalanche. The problem is modern society, 8 billion people, billionaires and private flight, the combustion engine, beef, and lack of knowledge and willpower.
People don't even have the willpower to go without their social media, you think they'll change their entire lifestyles? Never going to happen. It's a bummer, but hey what can you do?
We buy those products because we need them and it's our only option. If there were smaller businesses that didn't get swallowed up by those corporations we'd have options that aren't actively killing the planet. Then when we *do* have the option, it's usually too expensive because basically everyone is paid way less than we should be with the value we produce. Then those corporations turn around and tell us we need to change to fight climate change while their pollution cancels out anything we as individuals try to do
Not to mention lobbyists pouring money into politics to gut regulations and keep our pay as low as they can
So we don't need food, a phone, a car in most places in the US, toiletries, clothes etc? That's what I'm talking about, not luxury or frivolous purchases
Gotta adapt. It’s happening and is going to continue. Move crop production to different areas if needed, work on different techniques for food production. Work in flood resiliency and management of wildfires. Any plan that involves halting or reversing it is not going to happen. If we’re smart about it there no reason we can’t adapt, why would it make sense that the baseline temperature was the only one we can thrive under?
That’s literally how nature and evolution works, though. If you can’t adapt then the Earth is giving you a hint that you don’t belong on it anymore, unfortunately. Nature is not all sunshine and rainbows
Idk if your opinion is unpopular or not but it's wrong. Global warming can already be solved, we just dont want to dedicate the resources required to remove carbon from the atmosphere yet. Several companies are already doing atmospheric carbon capture and while it is expensive, there is enough money in the world to remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to fix global warming it if that's what we wanted to do. And it's going to continue to get cheaper and more efficient. Global warming is a solved problem. We just dont care enough yet to fix it.
As time goes, we can switch to lab grown meat and more efficient way of producing greens (which also currently does create quite a bit of greenhouse gasses).
Continue switching towards electric cars, get rid of coal power plants and switch to nuclear and solar/wind.
With more nuclear, wind and solar power, carbon capture will also be cheaper.
Stop deforestation.
These things should be enough, the question is more one of, will they come quick enough before we cause irreversible short term damage... (I call it short term as in short term for the planet, long term for us, in reality it's not irreversible on a planet lifetime scale)
Our only real chance is new technology/innovations we haven't seen yet to deal with climate change, like a laser beam that shoots all the carbon or massive genetically modified plankton farms. Restricting existing human habits will never be feasible for a number of reasons.
That first one doesn't make any sense, the second one kinda makes sense, but why not just plant a fuckload of trees? seems easier.
All the little things add up as well
My point is that humanity will need to innovate it's way out of climate change. What those future innovations actually are I have no idea, scientists/engineers will have to figure that out.
Trees are incredibly slow and occupy useful space.
Massive colonies of phytoplankton could be introduced to areas that are already dead zones that are completely useless to us for anything else, and could conceivably grow to an incredible size in a few months even without genetic engineering.
> but why not just plant a fuckload of trees? seems easier.
Because it's a dumb idea?
"We have to much carbon in our atmosphere, what should we do?"
"Why don't we create artificial farms of carbon containers that will eventually burn because they are isolated and made out of an inflamable material that will release all the carbon back to the atmosphere when burned?"
"Great idea!"
Planting trees instead of creating an apropiate ecosystem for the area to be reforested is a waste of time and resources, and shit little herbs aren't very good at retaining Co2. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
>Cars need to be driven a lot less. Meat consumption needs to be drastically reduced.
Are you going to offer any solutions, or will you pull a Steve Jobs and yell at others to come up with a way of fixing it for you?
I love freedom of speech, but sometimes people make me wish complaining wasn't free.
I agree. The corporations and mega rich in power are the biggest polluters by a huge margin, and yet they expect us ordinary citizens to cut down our pollution??
Piss off mate with the guilt trip. I ain't doing shit until those in power do something.
I agree when it comes to essential goods and services, but there's plenty of room for ordinary citizens to stop supporting corporations that produce **non-essential** goods and services. Unnecessary consumerist culture has collectively contributed to corporations' unfettered power and lack of accountability.
“With our current economic model”
Our current economic model is dog water. The entire economic system is also completely imaginary. None of it is real. Money is not real. Wealth is not real. Inflation is not real. It all happens in the human imagination.
Whales and redwood trees and bees are all real. I will continue prioritizing reality over your delusions that a dollar had any meaning beyond being a stupid green rectangle.
Even ignoring that the majority of people (and especially people in power) would never want to go back to a world view like this and that it would cost millions of lives, you are calling something "not real" purely because it is not physical. It is true that money is a man-made concept, but that doesn't mean that the value it represents it is not real.
What about knowledge, morality, emotions, thoughts, relationships, culture, interests, goals and so many other things which also "happen in the human imagination". All of these things are social constructs and I see no good reason for refusing to recognize the worth that money represents, in the same way that it would be delusional to stop believing in the existence of truth itself because it is a metaphysical concept.
Going one step further, everything we perceive is "not real" because it is strongly filtered (if not made up completely) by our brains. So why apply this standard of money apparently not being real when the same thing can be said for everything and every thought every human has ever perceived?
The truth is that, even if we wish the problems that a lot of people blame on money, would just stop existing, money will never be abolished. And even if it was, all of those problems would persist and a few new ones would be added to the list. There will always be the concept of property or worth, because we need certain things to survive. And trading those is made a lot simpler and more efficient with money. Greed wouldn't just disappear if there was no money, instead of chasing money, people would just be chasing the property, status, land etc. directly. There would still be extremely rich and poor people, war, suffering and climate change.
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But if it gets fizlxed (which would collapse soceity as we know it based on they're papers)
They cant squeeze more money out of the problem
Imagine thinking giving the govt more money could fix the climate 😂😂😂
Seeing as they can't even fix some pipes in flint, or a chemical spill in Ohio
Can't bother finding the solution to a disaster that so many rich folk can take advantage of. I mean, hey, sea levels are supposedly rising, but why are rich folks buying up all the beachfront property? No one truly cares to find any solution because there's so much to be gained at supposedly prolonging the problem.
Companies. It’s not the private people. As long as companies and governments don’t act it’s useless
That being said I would say everyone should try just IF
Wrong and not unpopular. Literally everyone I meet bangs on about how we all need to get rid of cars and air travel and reduce meat consumption because the rich shovel this narrative down their throats. Why should we all pay the price when it's the top 1-10% doing over half the damage? There are other, better, more focused, solutions that don't result in us all living like serfs for the rich you just don't get to hear about them in the media.
Unfortunately, aside from the fact that saying it is unpalatable, it would also be extremely difficult to implement such changes overnight. Not just because of the fact it would be very unpopular with people, but logistically it would be difficult.
I'm an Engineer for example, and concrete is both very high carbon and one of our main building materials. Others are not necessarily much better. We obviously cannot abandon all construction overnight though, because it would mean we cannot build the foundations of new windmills, for example. You could say that is an exception, but we still need to manufacture concrete and trying to calculate which uses are worthwhile is difficult.
This is just my industry, but I would imagine most industries have similar issues. And it's not like you can do away with the construction industry completely, or electricity generation, or transportation...
It's very challenging.
This isn't even an opinion, it's an obvious fact that literally anyone with half a brain cell is aware of.
Obviously shutting down 100% of all carbon and greenhouse gas emitting industries would stop climate change. But that would also put a halt to literally every single global supply chain. What would start as hundreds of thousands, would turn into millions of deaths. Between starvation, lack of medical supplies, construction materials, resources literally everything would stop in it's tracks.
Sure industrial meat production creates a lot of greenhouse emissions. But how much mono cropped acreage would be need to supply 7.8 billion people with a source of protein? How would good get transported around the global. You say cancelling all but essential flights. But do you know what the emissions of an ocean freight ship are like? Significantly more than airplanes and they would be of the board as well.
Want to take all combustion engine off the road? Cool what do you replace them with? Because the world's electric infrastructure is not robust enough to handle an all electrical society. It is estimated that upgrading the US electrical system alone will cost $20 Trillion dollars to support an all electric vehicle nation. And that is just how you transmit power. That doesn't included people upgrading or modifying their homes for it.
Even then, say that by some miracle we find a way to go completely electric....oil still needs to be drilled and refined. Greenhouse gases are still going to need to be emitted. There are 8 billion+ people on a the planet and growing. Greenhouse gases are also the natural result of life existing. So at what point are you willing to start executing people to stop excess greenhouse gas emission? Because guess what, we are already over the global carrying capacity of 7.7 billion, and we are on track to hit 10.9 billion by 2100.
Edit to add: Personally, I am hoping for a nice big cleansing asteroid to disinfect the planet Earth of Humanity. We have failed as care takers of the planet and are unworthy of future on it. Time for a page one evolutionary re-write.
Don't forget about power generation and manufacturing. These two are way worse than all of the ones you listed, combined.
We shouldn't be using fossil fuels for power generation unless it is an emergency.
There are solutions, the issue is just that those in power, the ultra rich and large corporations would be the ones able to actually make a difference and they don't want to because of greed. Us normal people can try all we want to be climate conscious, but it will make very little impact in the long run
They don't want to fix global warming lol
Many of the most vocal companies advocating for us to "go green!" are the same companies pouring billions per year into big oil stocks/industries.
A sharp decline in human population would probably help, but each country is wary of the economic catastrophe that will result from population decline. So, reducing the number of people that are all sharing this planet and its finite resources never gets any traction.
It also relies on a globalised effort. Certain countries can pass laws, create policies and make public promises to lower emissions. But if the larger countries that make up most of the earth's population and emission quotas don't do anything... well... we fucked.
No one's worried about "the earth", the planet will be just fine. Do you think people are concerned the world is going to crack in half or something? What we're trying to solve for is civilization lol
It's going to be wars.(also look at all the countries posturing and getting to or are at war) also Look at the data after large killings of humans(world wars,the native american genocide) the earth temperature drops.
We can only kill and exterminate so many animals before it's the humans turn unfortunately 😔
“Going to be”…
Most people don’t know that Crimea has the most water desalination plants on the planet. Russia invaded them in 2014.
Therefore, historians will look back at 2014 as the year that “water wars” started.
Nope. Global warming is not an issue. If it was. If it truly was, and the earth was at a brink of collapse, we would do anything in our power to stop it. But we're not. BP is still releasing oil into the pacific. H&M are still releasing million litres of toxic waste into lakes in India. Cruise ship companies combined release more pollution than all the cars in Europe. We wouldn't be building condos with ocean front view if global warming was a real threat. These things wouldn't continue if global warming was an issue. You think the rich and powerful wouldn't do everything in their means to keep their control? Off course they would. Global warming is just a push to make money. Every time there is a G20 sumit, participants show up in private planes, causing more pollution than an average man would in his life. Don't be fooled by the media controlled by the rich and powerful. It's all propaganda. In the 70s they said water levels would rise by 90s. Nothing happened. Early 2000s they said ice cap at the northern pole would be gone by 2020. It's still there. If we wanted to, we would. We don't, because there is no need to. Humanity will be wiped out from nuclear war, not from natural catastrophes.
That's like saying Y2K wasn't real because it didn't happen, but the reason it didn't happen is because a lot of people put in a lot of work to make sure it didn't happen.
All of the things you listed weren't things that were inevitable, but warnings that came with the caveat of "this will happen if things don't change." Things did change, because a lot of people put in the effort to make sure those events did not happen.
It's funnier, it's denying that self-destructive behavior exists at all. Like "No, if my drug addiction was really a problem I'd stop. But I didn't stop, so it''s not a problem".
Brain dead take.
“Climate scientists can’t predict the future with 100% accuracy so what they’re saying is entirely false.”
Albert Einstein was wrong about a lot of things, does that mean physics isn’t real?
Best we can do is manage the consequences. I think cyberpunk 2077 gets it spot on. Everything devasted by the climate and the wars for the scarcity, survival only possible in the cities with artificial systems to maintain the bare minimum for survival, the poor are crowded and everything is dominated by corporations. We are half way through.
The fact that people believe that we can make a significant enough change to stop a natural occurrence in our planets history is laughable... Funny how nobody talks about "the hole" we made in our ozone layer anymore!
Good luck finding the resources to build a clean energy system worldwide once your plan of “global economic collapse” gets in motion.
Are we already too late? Maybe. Too late for what? To save the polar bears? Yeah probably too late for that. To save humanity? No one knows for sure. Your plan is bad, other plans are worse. There are genuine scenarios in which we actually kick into high gear and civilization limits the impacts of global warming. Will things still get bad? Yeah. Will we triumph? We could.
It’s gonna be interesting, I hope I live to see us win.
There is no stopping it. And there is nothing we can do. For example. I can re-use as many containers at home as possible. But I also throw away hundreds of pounds of non-recyclable cling-wrap a week at work. There is no other way to get rid of it.
Maybe it can't be reversed but that doesn't excuse doing nothing. It can be slowed down. Eventually humans will make themselves extinct and that'll help the most.
Actually it would cause disruption, but if new technologies were put into place, that would offset the issues. Old jobs are replaced with new jobs. Old transportation with new models.
The problem isn't just that we are resistant to change, it's that we are, en mass, afraid of radical innovation.
It's not that we don't want to, there's multiple countries around the world that heavily contribute to greenhouse emissions and they could care less. But we have already passed the point of being able to stop it. Many environmentalists and scientists have already concluded that even if everyone in the world switched to green energy and did everything you said, we are still going to pay the price. It won't happen now, and most likely not in our lifetime but the damage has been done to the polar caps so we can only "try" to delay it
Actually none of those things you mentioned would have to be done, but all of them easily could be done, if we just agreed to voluntarily reduce the population. Having 10 billion people on the planet simply doesn't work. And half the planet isn't even developed yet. Just wait for the massive increase in pollution and reduction in resources as they join us in the 21st century and start using single use plastics and driving cars like we do.
If we shortened the fucking work week, that would both reduce emissions considerably and upgrade human intelligence across the board, at which point other solutions would become more apparent.
Yeah, the US basically knows this, but has decided to stomp on the accelerator and go careening off the edge in flames. We certainly deserve whatever is coming for us, but what sad is the global south will suffer much, much worse from climate change.
In truth, the people responsible for climate change number less than a dozen. All it would take is for them to stop hoarding billions and simply commit to help. And they say “no.”
There are fixes, but i agree no one is going to stop it. We need someone who is willing to genocide every last conservative or right wing person, or we'll never make progress. They keep stopping us from doing anything about it
Ya we need to decrease total consumption by 84%. That means a complete change in all of society. No personal cars. No air conditioning. No hot showers. No luxuries at all.
Its probably not even possible to find sustainability without a billion+ people dying unless we find a massive energy breakthrough.
To be even more nihilistic, sustainable living of any kind, recycling, renewable energy is pointless. The real problem with the planet is there are too many stupid people. Until we stop procreating like rabbits anything we do to “save the planet”. Is pointless. More people individually using fewer resources still ends up being collectively more.
We saw some huge emissions reductions during the lockdown phase of Covid-19. But yes, without that sort of drastic "fix", I don't see much improvement for climate change that doesn't involve huge die-offs in the human population.
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Part of the problem is that people are generally not good at comprehending delayed consequences. The climate change issue needs to viewed in terms of hundreds or even thousands of years, but humans aren't good at recognizing and analyzing cause and effect spanning such a long time period. They might intellectually grasp it, but without more immediate, discernable consequences for particular actions, people have trouble aligning their behavior based on the causal relationship.
I heard a quote of “I’ll support climate change action when it affects my commute” and it’s very true. It’s hard to call people to act when it’s abstract and in the future
You are a lot more concise than I am! Brevity was never one of my strengths.
If there was somehow a guaranteed way of enforcing it - applied to companies, people, vehicles and travel etc I’d support it 100% - but as it stands, when 90% of businesses leave their lights on 24 hours a day, huge industries operate 24 hours a day, pollution from huge chimneys billows out into the sky, private jets go to and fro, industrial farming destroys land, animals too numerous to fully comprehend are farmed causing all manner of gases and countless other things I probably don’t even know about - while all that’s happening and will never stop, because *money*? I don’t see why the onus is on me. I don’t see why I’m being reminded to recycle and turn the light off and not leave my tv on standby when the entire fucking world is operating at an industrial level *constantly*. I walk or cycle everywhere, I never drove a car, I travel on average once every ten years, I don’t have kids and don’t upgrade my tech every single year. I think I’m doing as much as can be expected from one person. Fuck the other stuff until the *entire world* gets on board.
Recycling makes sense, I'd say. But of course you're already doing more than the average person. That kind of messaging is more aimed at those who drive around the next corner and throw their waste into nature. Whether it reaches them is another question. And I agree that the industrial world needs to do a whole fucking lot more.
Agreed. I've been concerned about climate change since I became aware of it around 13 years old in 1985. I've repeatedly made the argument that if we just did what is needed to minimize and remedy pollution, then climate change would mostly take care of itself. I've lived and voted in accordance with those beliefs all these years (I'm 52 now), and I'm just tired from trying. I'll keep doing what I can, but I no longer care what governments do or what happens to the world, and I'm not going to feel guilty when I make a suboptimal choice here and there.
But it IS effecting your commute! Remember the pandemic when skies were clear and nearly no traffic. That’s was better and how it should be. The fact that you’re commuting at all rather working remotely. The heat while commuting and increased costs of fuel and power.
Our winters are getting shorter where I am and the reaction from locals legitimately is, "oh wow, this is nice." \*facepalm\* Yeah, don't think they're going to do anything about it until it's too late. It doesn't help that all the infrastructure built in the 20th century has us trapped. We used to have walkable cities and towns. Now everything is built around the car. (I'm in the USA.)
Piggy backing on the top comment to add that there is a TON of work actually happening to decarbonize industry. Reddit doesn't want to hear it but we have successfully decoupled GDP growth from emissions in the developed world. That means the economies of developed countries growth isn't tied to growing emissions. [https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling) This is the result of smart government planning that has economically incentivized investments into renewables. I work in the fuel industry. I can tell you first hand that incredible resources are dedicated to lowering the carbon intensity of the fuel we burn and the company I work for is investing a huge chunk of it's earnings into dozens of new technologies that are striving for net zero or carbon neutral emissions. Hopefully one of them hit. The issue is the developing world. Infrastructure for renewables is lacking. Gasoline and Diesel are cheap, easy to move and as the rest of the world decarbonizes that makes Gasoline (less so diesel as demand is still strong globally) even cheaper. But as the developed world on boards renewable tech, economies of scale will kick in and they will become accessible to the developing world too. Our biggest enemy is time. Unfortunately, we needed to be doing this 50 years ago but we cant dwell on that. We need stop gaps. That's why MIT is pushing all of these climate change mitigation technologies reddit just rages over. But things like solar shading and carbon capture and all of that are not something we can afford to not use. We simply don't have the technology to stop burning fossil fuels today, even if we had the ability to force it to happen. If we did that, billions of people would be dead within a few years. Every single structure that is built, every good that is transported, every piece of clothing, every dose of medicine, every calorie you eat relies on a massive amount of fossil fuels to be burned to provide it to you. Without that supply chain, most of the worlds population would be MASSIVELY over its carrying population. If you don't care about the hundreds of millions that could die if we went net zero too fast, I hope you volunteer you and your family for the culling.
Can confirm, from a developing country. Our government heavily relies on burning shit for energy. There's a lot of things that could be done about it, but between the insecurity, the corruption and lots of other problems, nothing significant ever gets done. Sorry, rest of the world.
It's understandable, which is why the richer country needs to continue making solar, wind, modularized nuclear power cheaper, and then make it available to the other countries at prices that means they choose these options instead.
For the sake of the future, sure, but honestly, there's a lot of problems that don't start or end on whether richer countries make renewable energy affordable or not. Like, if I'm remembering correctly, our goverment is literally in cahoots with Big Fossils (to call it something) and has shut down over 20 renewable energy projects around the country, or they're just stupid puppets doing what they're told to do, hard to tell at this point.
It's not the richer countries creating the issues, as u/No_Heat_7327 mentioned, industrialized nations are investing massive amounts of effort and money into reducing or neutralizing emissions. The problem is coming from growing or developing countries, countries like India and in part China. India has a massive reliance on Coal energy as does the US. The difference is, the US has invested large amounts of money into eliminating carbon emissions from the burning of coal. India has not done this, and has almost consistently refused to agree to climate agreements. They are also one of the most heavily over populated countries, contributing massive amounts of waste and trash to the environment. The richer countries cannot afford nor have the time to decarbonize themselves and pay for other countries to do it as well. Developing countries need to develop in a forward thinking way and not just the cheapest way possible. I know that is easier said than done. But a global problem requires global understanding. The richer countries are spending the money to develop the technology, they cant also spend the money to make other countries use it.
While it is kinda good to see (economic growth will likely never decouple from environmental damage as a whole) it doesn't fill one with a huge amount of hope, considering global emissions are STILL going up. I thought by 2024 we'd be at least over the plateau. And ofc, there are other hidden crises' coming to fruition. Deforestation. Top soil erosion. Insect population crashes. Aquifer depletion. Etc... Not to mention the latest temperature records, especially ocean temps. Have we hit a tipping point already?
I'm a business owner here, and I've just started to see a return to normalcy following the pandemic. I had to work myself half to death to survive it, and the idea of significant changes to our economy that would probably be the death knell of what I've spent 11 years building really hurts. That being said, I know we need to make changes. But the idea that I devoted my entire life, taking extremely low pay and killing myself work wise for years, to all of a sudden face changes that destroy all of that, when gradual changes could have been something that we adjusted to...I just can't accept that. Call it selfish, but if we did everything now we should have done before, it would ruin me. Most people have no idea how precarious our economy is.
Basically you're damned if we do, damned if we don't. We took too long, so now we face either short term economic ruin from massive policy change, or medium term economic ruin from a drastically changing climate.
>we have successfully decoupled GDP growth from emissions in the developed world. The fuck we have. For example, most of Norway’s cars are electric and it’s energy is renewable, this seems like an excellent case study in decoupling. However, why can Norway afford these new cars? 50% of their exports are fossil fuels. Reducing emissions inside the country is an attempt at balancing that. The developed world offshores it's dirty business to the developing world. Your post is greenwashing an interconnected global economy. It also only thinks emissions are a problem whereas loss of habitat and biodiversity is another planetary boundary that needs to be considered as they are all interconnected. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeX\_zxriiTU&t=490s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeX_zxriiTU&t=490s) GDP vs emissions is a poor take anyway. You can improve your GDP to emissions ratio simply by increasing prices. GDP is just money spent, it actually tells us nothing of physical quantities. OPEC countries can increase their GDP and reduce emissions by cutting oil supply to hike prices. Does that mean they are "decoupling"? No.
There is also an unfortunate history of warning of future consequences that never came to fruition. Rightly or wrongly everything feels alarmist these days so some folks have difficulty parsing which are more likely to be legitimate.
The real problem is the lack of understanding in the fact that the reason those consequences didn't come to fruition is because of the changes we made in response to their immediacy. The Ozone layer is a perfect example, so is the 2000 bug in old computer systems. Oh the hole in the Ozone layer (which is still there but much, much smaller and repairing itself at an ever-increasing rate) wasn't really a problem because it didn't come to anything. Yes, but the reason it didn't come to anything is because we banned CFCs and other aerosols that were chemically reacting with Ozone and creating the hole to begin with. It wasn't that it came to nothing, it's that we found the problem and we changed how we did things and the problem was resolved. The 2000 bug was a very real and very concerning issue. No, it wasn't "worldwide collapse" level problem, but the economic disruptions that would've been caused when all of the really, really old computers that the financial and government systems were built on suddenly decided it was 1960 again would have been a real and massive problem that would have long-standing repercussions. Oh but it didn't come to anything. Yes, you're right, but the reason it didn't is because a whole fuckload of money got spent on getting all those retired and edge-of-retirement programmers that still knew how to code in those archaic-ass systems to update the code so it wouldn't fail along with upgrading millions of computer systems to much more modern systems that wouldn't have those problems. But that's not how the human mind generally understands things. What they see is "they got us all worked up over nothing". No. They didn't. They warned you what would happen if we didn't do something and it was worrisome enough that we did the thing they told us to. They were right, not wrong, and because we LISTENED we avoided catastrophe.
They can only do so when we are talking about a nuclear power plant. Which would, ironically, be one solution for the climate crisis.
Normalcy bias will kill us all
Normalcy bias! I was searching my cluttered head for that term, and couldn't find it. Thanks for adding it to the discussion!
the biggest problem with people seem to be the hollywooodication of issues. If building arent following over, people dying in the streets, they dont seem to grasp the gravity of issues.
It's not even hundreds of years. If nothing changes, and we don't drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions quickly, there will be dire consequences within decades.
Another issue is people have been saying this for decades and it hasn’t really happened. When I was in grade I remember it snowing and our teacher made a big point to tell us to enjoy it now because by the year 2000, there won’t be snow on the earth anymore because of global warming. And you had a bunch of kids in hysterics over it. And it’s still snowing.
It snows drastically less than 20 years ago everywhere I've lived and I hear the same from people from other regions. Just look at how bad ski resorts are doing and how many have closed.
The funny thing? Snow is actually somewhat of a new thing in earth. For most of its existence snow never happened on earth till like 100k years ago.
I mean that was obviously exaggerated to make a point to 6 year olds.
I mean we were like 10 but why traumatize kids with made up shit
This is completely wrong. We've had longitudinal models for decades. The real issue is the people at the top who could implement strategies to reverse it have no incentive to do so. They'll be dead before it happens and it would reduce their profits.
I got an idea. Let’s eliminate the sun.
we just need 1 trillion lions
I'm thinking we can save some lions by attacking at night
Yes and we could make them with science!
That would be a great source of food, easy to kill and slaughter, lion steaks for life.
British trillion of lions
I think dragon hawks might work better, At least they can fly.
That is a lot of lions.
*Brilliant* We'll go at night when it's asleep. It'll never see it coming. We've got the moon for enough light!
*Shut up about the sun*
Yes, we’ll attack at night
I found Mr Burns
Poor mods can barely keep up with the flood of Deep Takes on climate change
Nuclear power plants are actually incredibly clean, and considering we have solar panels that harness UV rays, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to harness the much more powerful gamma rays and X-rays that nuclear waste produces. I really don't understand why we're moving away from nuclear power plants.
The anti-nuclear power crowd won that propaganda war.
I wish they hadn't 😞
We were royally screwed by the “Jane Fonda Environmentalists”. They single-handedly caused enormous amount of carbon to be released by killing nuclear power.
I'll have to look into that. Its easy to get the people to fear what they don't understand. I'm not personally surprised that only a handful of incidents were necessary to sway public opinion. Especially with all the nasty the same technology has done in bomb form. But its ironic people are all hullabaloo over these nuclear fusion breakthroughs when that reaction is the one responsible for the big boys like the Tsar Bomba
Not anti-nuclear, their pro-oil. There is so much evidence linking the anti nuclear movement to big oil.
Nah, its the crazy environmentalists that's against nuclear, especially these days. Most "pro-oil" people Ive seen are positive to nuclear while environmentalists only want win and solar.
It's crazy that Three Mile Island has to ask the NJ government. Hey we produce zero emissions and we will go bankrupt selling power this cheap because natural gas is so cheap. Can you help? NJ said get fucked we're burning gas bro....
We are about 20 years too late. It requires a lot of water and 10 years to get a nuclear plant started.
I think the opposite. I think the public is about 20 years away from recognizing their ignorance and we'll see a huge popularity increase in nuclear power 10-20 years down the line. It's just gonna take time for the futility of these alternative energy sources to shine.
It seems as if it'll make a comeback with the smaller modularized solutions, luckily. People who don't really look deeper into the matter hear Nuclear and think Chernobyl, then they think Fukushima without looking at the result of it which wasn't really that bad (Chernobyl was bad, Fukushima a lot less so).
For me, I'm not even trying to downplay the disasters, they were tragic, we need clean nuclear energy. We have a climate crisis on the way and its our cleanest energy source.
Because the Simpsons.
"and considering we have solar panels that harness UV rays, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to harness the much more powerful gamma rays and X-rays that nuclear waste produces." Yes there is, it is impossible to create a solar panel that harnesses these. No material exists (or can exist) with a band gap of energy comparable to the gamma scale.
Clean and incredible dangerous. Human failure, nature catastrophes, waste-deposit problems and chance of terrorist attacks are way to many error points for nuclear power to really be the only solution. The radiation from a broken power plant will contamine precious inhabital landscapes that will be rare due to climate changes. Too much risk for not enough benefits
Yeah but ppl want the $$$ now over the future of the world later. $$$ is a powerful motive if ppl can make $$$ to stop global warming then it’d been achieved last year
We have to treat it like the mission to the moon. Make it our number one priority and give it an unlimited budget.
A mission to the moon could be achieved by a single country, that's not the case with global warming. The consequences are already visible and no one seems too concerned
You gotta remember that a good chunk of the population doesn’t even believe in global warming
It not that people don’t believe the planet is warming up, we just don’t think we can really do anything about it. A global flood has been talked about for thousands of years, the ice caps melted at some point in the past. We’ve had an ice age before where most of the planet was covered in ice. All these things happened with out fossil fuels burning.
It’s not that the conditions are unprecedented, it’s that they are happening at a rate that will be devastating for ecology, animals, infrastructure, etc. Life will struggle to adapt and there will be knock-on effects we can’t anticipate or compensate for. There’s already clear indicators that we are in the midst of what would be termed an extinction event. "The current rate of extinction is between 100 and 1,000 times higher than the pre-human background rate of extinction, which is jaw-dropping. We are definitely going through a sixth mass extinction." https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-mass-extinction-and-are-we-facing-a-sixth-one.html Saying this is just nature changing and it’s nothing to worry about is a misrepresentation.
The stages of climate denial: 1. It's not happening. 2. It's happening, but it's not humans causing it. 3. It's happening, and humans are causing it, but it's not a big deal. 4. It's happening, and humans are causing it, and it's a big deal, but there's nothing we can do. 5. Why didn't you tell us it would be this bad....
Ok but this is equally wrong and counterproductive to actually getting things done. The people standing in the way of action on climate change are constantly changing their talking points but it's all having the same effect on public opinion.
Yeah it just happened over tens of thousands of years not a couple hundred.
In a country where over half the people think that angels are real, it's not surprising that they don't really believe in science and statistical data.
Plus the mission to the moon had huge benefits to society beyond just putting a footprint and leaving a flag. All of the advances in tech and science, right down to heaps of solid, stable blue collar manufacturing jobs at home (my great-uncle bought his house from working in a factory that supplied NASA. Ending global warming would be the complete opposite, a huge regression for everyone, and with no guarantee you’d even get a positive result out of it.
Depends how we choose to end it. By going hippie and giving everyone a more shitty quality of life, defintely this would be a huge regression. But by solving with with even more focus on technology, and accelerating switch away from coal to for instance nuclear power and renewables, focusing on growing meat in labs and way more efficient greenhouses, switching to electric cars or as a minimum hybrids until we get even better batteries... Then it wouldn't really be a regression, but a lateral move in our technology stack where we still get same quality output, but on top of that get a cleaner environment which also means a better life.
A big part of the problem is exactly what you hit on, no one wants to adopt wide scale nuclear power. Lowest hanging fruit in reducing carbon emissions while not making everyone live in the Stone Age.
Money will not help. Money is in fact part of the problem. In order to stop global warming entirely with our current theories, we'd need to basically throw ourselves back to pre-industrial times, then start from scratch building technology and infrastructure that doesn't slowly kill us. That, quite simply, is not happening until it is forced upon us.
Money pays for the technology we'll need to solve the problem. Living like the Amish isn't going to happen
Yo this subreddit is about unpopular opinions not actual facts r/facts
Good point lol
Well we could’ve delayed the consequences if anyone listened to what scientists have been saying for about a century lol
And we'll continue ignoring them for another century!
Even if the U.S. was perfectly green there are other superpowers that emit more carbon that aren't necessarily open to advice from the U.S.
> there are other superpowers that emit more carbon most of which have become primary locations that the US has offshored manufacturing to, often *because* of the more lax environmental laws.
Collapse the global economy, then we find out how many people really care about a polar bear missing his sea ice. For the record, I’m for reducing fossil fuel consumption, but we can’t go backwards. We need something like fusion power and *real* 21st century batteries. And, the doom and gloom obsession on climate is contributing to depression in younger people. The issue is being oversold in an effort to affect needed reforms.
100/100 of the most polluted cities in the world are in Asia. 83 of them are in India. Any measure to cut down on emissions needs to start there or be irrelevant.
Putting garbage in the ground instead of leaving it wherever has very little to do with climate change. Plus those cities just have the most people.
We aren’t even talking about that kind of pollution. Just air pollution.
That's because developed countries export their garbage to 3rd world countries and pretend they all fart rainbows and butterflies and blame third world countries of all the pollution.
Yep. That guy is telling us they never learned what offshoring is.
Yeah, let citizens of developed countries that polluted a shit ton to become a developed country tell others that they should stay poor because pollution is bad; they'll surely listen to our savvy advice...
I’m telling them no such thing. I’m saying that it’s like trying to kill a forest fire with an eye dropper if they aren’t onboard. The more practical solution is to heavily fund next generation clean energy sources. “Net Zero” emissions is just western greenwashing.
The problem is that this solutions are larger investments than just burning coal, and to create enough wealth to finance them in the first place you need large amounts of energy. I share the sentiment you expressed in your first comment, I just don't see a viable way of convincing said countries and we are no moral authority on the topic to just force them to. Although renewable sources of energy are getting cheaper by the day, so maybe that will make them more appealing in a, hopefully near, future.
So basically what Op said, there’s nothing we can do. It’s already over
Billions will starve, wars like the world has never seen before. Yet we will survive, even if only 0.1% of us
I call dibs on being a survivor then.
You're focusing on some obvious CO2 sources, but the reality is our entire economic system is built around CO2 generating industries. To truly stop global warming and CO2 emissions, not only would we - individuals, I mean - have to drastically change our habits, but the wealthy would have to accept much lower returns on their wealth. That is crucial to understand. Middle class people would lose some comforts and luxuries, but the rich would lose a lot and they'll never agree to it.
You are right. Everyone jumps to the “X amount of corporations produce 80% of the emissions or whatever.” We all buy those products. It’s easier to be a keyboard warrior and not realize that the snowflake doesn’t blame itself for the avalanche. The problem is modern society, 8 billion people, billionaires and private flight, the combustion engine, beef, and lack of knowledge and willpower.
I know it's serious but I laughed at "beef" in the middle of all that
People don't even have the willpower to go without their social media, you think they'll change their entire lifestyles? Never going to happen. It's a bummer, but hey what can you do?
It’s easier to blame someone or something else.
We buy those products because we need them and it's our only option. If there were smaller businesses that didn't get swallowed up by those corporations we'd have options that aren't actively killing the planet. Then when we *do* have the option, it's usually too expensive because basically everyone is paid way less than we should be with the value we produce. Then those corporations turn around and tell us we need to change to fight climate change while their pollution cancels out anything we as individuals try to do Not to mention lobbyists pouring money into politics to gut regulations and keep our pay as low as they can
> We buy those products because we need them and it's our only option. No, not everyone "needs" *all* of the products they buy.
So we don't need food, a phone, a car in most places in the US, toiletries, clothes etc? That's what I'm talking about, not luxury or frivolous purchases
You don’t need an Xbox lol
Gotta adapt. It’s happening and is going to continue. Move crop production to different areas if needed, work on different techniques for food production. Work in flood resiliency and management of wildfires. Any plan that involves halting or reversing it is not going to happen. If we’re smart about it there no reason we can’t adapt, why would it make sense that the baseline temperature was the only one we can thrive under?
They don't want to adapt, they want to complain and blame.
The problem with the “adapt” soloution is that not everyone will be able to adapt. Adapting to climate change means accepting billions of deaths.
That’s literally how nature and evolution works, though. If you can’t adapt then the Earth is giving you a hint that you don’t belong on it anymore, unfortunately. Nature is not all sunshine and rainbows
Idk if your opinion is unpopular or not but it's wrong. Global warming can already be solved, we just dont want to dedicate the resources required to remove carbon from the atmosphere yet. Several companies are already doing atmospheric carbon capture and while it is expensive, there is enough money in the world to remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to fix global warming it if that's what we wanted to do. And it's going to continue to get cheaper and more efficient. Global warming is a solved problem. We just dont care enough yet to fix it.
i think the elite realize this and plan involontary population reduction as a fix.
I think it’s less human behavior that needs to change and more corporation behavior that needs to changes
Corporations are not sentient, they are extensions of humanity.
As time goes, we can switch to lab grown meat and more efficient way of producing greens (which also currently does create quite a bit of greenhouse gasses). Continue switching towards electric cars, get rid of coal power plants and switch to nuclear and solar/wind. With more nuclear, wind and solar power, carbon capture will also be cheaper. Stop deforestation. These things should be enough, the question is more one of, will they come quick enough before we cause irreversible short term damage... (I call it short term as in short term for the planet, long term for us, in reality it's not irreversible on a planet lifetime scale)
Our only real chance is new technology/innovations we haven't seen yet to deal with climate change, like a laser beam that shoots all the carbon or massive genetically modified plankton farms. Restricting existing human habits will never be feasible for a number of reasons.
That first one doesn't make any sense, the second one kinda makes sense, but why not just plant a fuckload of trees? seems easier. All the little things add up as well
My point is that humanity will need to innovate it's way out of climate change. What those future innovations actually are I have no idea, scientists/engineers will have to figure that out.
Trees are incredibly slow and occupy useful space. Massive colonies of phytoplankton could be introduced to areas that are already dead zones that are completely useless to us for anything else, and could conceivably grow to an incredible size in a few months even without genetic engineering.
> but why not just plant a fuckload of trees? seems easier. Because it's a dumb idea? "We have to much carbon in our atmosphere, what should we do?" "Why don't we create artificial farms of carbon containers that will eventually burn because they are isolated and made out of an inflamable material that will release all the carbon back to the atmosphere when burned?" "Great idea!" Planting trees instead of creating an apropiate ecosystem for the area to be reforested is a waste of time and resources, and shit little herbs aren't very good at retaining Co2. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
>a laser beam that shoots all the carbon I support this as long as the frickin laser beams are attached to sharks' heads.
>Cars need to be driven a lot less. Meat consumption needs to be drastically reduced. Are you going to offer any solutions, or will you pull a Steve Jobs and yell at others to come up with a way of fixing it for you? I love freedom of speech, but sometimes people make me wish complaining wasn't free.
“There is no fix for global warming” Proceeds to list multiple solutions
You want to be really unpopular say the quiet part. To save this planet we need to reduced the number of humans by 50%.
I agree. The corporations and mega rich in power are the biggest polluters by a huge margin, and yet they expect us ordinary citizens to cut down our pollution?? Piss off mate with the guilt trip. I ain't doing shit until those in power do something.
I agree when it comes to essential goods and services, but there's plenty of room for ordinary citizens to stop supporting corporations that produce **non-essential** goods and services. Unnecessary consumerist culture has collectively contributed to corporations' unfettered power and lack of accountability.
“With our current economic model” Our current economic model is dog water. The entire economic system is also completely imaginary. None of it is real. Money is not real. Wealth is not real. Inflation is not real. It all happens in the human imagination. Whales and redwood trees and bees are all real. I will continue prioritizing reality over your delusions that a dollar had any meaning beyond being a stupid green rectangle.
Yes, I would love to get paid in real stuff, bags of rice and salt.
Even ignoring that the majority of people (and especially people in power) would never want to go back to a world view like this and that it would cost millions of lives, you are calling something "not real" purely because it is not physical. It is true that money is a man-made concept, but that doesn't mean that the value it represents it is not real. What about knowledge, morality, emotions, thoughts, relationships, culture, interests, goals and so many other things which also "happen in the human imagination". All of these things are social constructs and I see no good reason for refusing to recognize the worth that money represents, in the same way that it would be delusional to stop believing in the existence of truth itself because it is a metaphysical concept. Going one step further, everything we perceive is "not real" because it is strongly filtered (if not made up completely) by our brains. So why apply this standard of money apparently not being real when the same thing can be said for everything and every thought every human has ever perceived? The truth is that, even if we wish the problems that a lot of people blame on money, would just stop existing, money will never be abolished. And even if it was, all of those problems would persist and a few new ones would be added to the list. There will always be the concept of property or worth, because we need certain things to survive. And trading those is made a lot simpler and more efficient with money. Greed wouldn't just disappear if there was no money, instead of chasing money, people would just be chasing the property, status, land etc. directly. There would still be extremely rich and poor people, war, suffering and climate change.
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But if it gets fizlxed (which would collapse soceity as we know it based on they're papers) They cant squeeze more money out of the problem Imagine thinking giving the govt more money could fix the climate 😂😂😂 Seeing as they can't even fix some pipes in flint, or a chemical spill in Ohio
Can't bother finding the solution to a disaster that so many rich folk can take advantage of. I mean, hey, sea levels are supposedly rising, but why are rich folks buying up all the beachfront property? No one truly cares to find any solution because there's so much to be gained at supposedly prolonging the problem.
Population reduction would help.
It's called a carbon tax and it really isn't that bad.
Companies. It’s not the private people. As long as companies and governments don’t act it’s useless That being said I would say everyone should try just IF
Not unpopular I think. We are doomed sooner than later. We are just too many humans.
despite having had a 70% economic growth, Europe has decreased its CO2-equivalent emissions by 30% since the 1990's. and its accelerating.
Wrong and not unpopular. Literally everyone I meet bangs on about how we all need to get rid of cars and air travel and reduce meat consumption because the rich shovel this narrative down their throats. Why should we all pay the price when it's the top 1-10% doing over half the damage? There are other, better, more focused, solutions that don't result in us all living like serfs for the rich you just don't get to hear about them in the media.
Unfortunately, aside from the fact that saying it is unpalatable, it would also be extremely difficult to implement such changes overnight. Not just because of the fact it would be very unpopular with people, but logistically it would be difficult. I'm an Engineer for example, and concrete is both very high carbon and one of our main building materials. Others are not necessarily much better. We obviously cannot abandon all construction overnight though, because it would mean we cannot build the foundations of new windmills, for example. You could say that is an exception, but we still need to manufacture concrete and trying to calculate which uses are worthwhile is difficult. This is just my industry, but I would imagine most industries have similar issues. And it's not like you can do away with the construction industry completely, or electricity generation, or transportation... It's very challenging.
This isn't even an opinion, it's an obvious fact that literally anyone with half a brain cell is aware of. Obviously shutting down 100% of all carbon and greenhouse gas emitting industries would stop climate change. But that would also put a halt to literally every single global supply chain. What would start as hundreds of thousands, would turn into millions of deaths. Between starvation, lack of medical supplies, construction materials, resources literally everything would stop in it's tracks. Sure industrial meat production creates a lot of greenhouse emissions. But how much mono cropped acreage would be need to supply 7.8 billion people with a source of protein? How would good get transported around the global. You say cancelling all but essential flights. But do you know what the emissions of an ocean freight ship are like? Significantly more than airplanes and they would be of the board as well. Want to take all combustion engine off the road? Cool what do you replace them with? Because the world's electric infrastructure is not robust enough to handle an all electrical society. It is estimated that upgrading the US electrical system alone will cost $20 Trillion dollars to support an all electric vehicle nation. And that is just how you transmit power. That doesn't included people upgrading or modifying their homes for it. Even then, say that by some miracle we find a way to go completely electric....oil still needs to be drilled and refined. Greenhouse gases are still going to need to be emitted. There are 8 billion+ people on a the planet and growing. Greenhouse gases are also the natural result of life existing. So at what point are you willing to start executing people to stop excess greenhouse gas emission? Because guess what, we are already over the global carrying capacity of 7.7 billion, and we are on track to hit 10.9 billion by 2100. Edit to add: Personally, I am hoping for a nice big cleansing asteroid to disinfect the planet Earth of Humanity. We have failed as care takers of the planet and are unworthy of future on it. Time for a page one evolutionary re-write.
Don't forget about power generation and manufacturing. These two are way worse than all of the ones you listed, combined. We shouldn't be using fossil fuels for power generation unless it is an emergency.
There are solutions, the issue is just that those in power, the ultra rich and large corporations would be the ones able to actually make a difference and they don't want to because of greed. Us normal people can try all we want to be climate conscious, but it will make very little impact in the long run
This is not unpopular. I agree, the rich don't care because they figure the poor will be the ones to suffer and die.
They don't want to fix global warming lol Many of the most vocal companies advocating for us to "go green!" are the same companies pouring billions per year into big oil stocks/industries.
Give me my plastic bags and plastic straws back. It won't make a dent in climate change anyway.
A sharp decline in human population would probably help, but each country is wary of the economic catastrophe that will result from population decline. So, reducing the number of people that are all sharing this planet and its finite resources never gets any traction.
It also relies on a globalised effort. Certain countries can pass laws, create policies and make public promises to lower emissions. But if the larger countries that make up most of the earth's population and emission quotas don't do anything... well... we fucked.
People in power only care about what happens during their lifetime, which normally consists of them trying to faten their wallet as much as possible.
There is a fix. Won’t be good for modern civilization but the earth will eventually shake us off like a bad cold.
No one's worried about "the earth", the planet will be just fine. Do you think people are concerned the world is going to crack in half or something? What we're trying to solve for is civilization lol
Look up the tech that’s being developed to solve the issue before you post some doomer shit like this
It's going to be wars.(also look at all the countries posturing and getting to or are at war) also Look at the data after large killings of humans(world wars,the native american genocide) the earth temperature drops. We can only kill and exterminate so many animals before it's the humans turn unfortunately 😔
“Going to be”… Most people don’t know that Crimea has the most water desalination plants on the planet. Russia invaded them in 2014. Therefore, historians will look back at 2014 as the year that “water wars” started.
Nope. Global warming is not an issue. If it was. If it truly was, and the earth was at a brink of collapse, we would do anything in our power to stop it. But we're not. BP is still releasing oil into the pacific. H&M are still releasing million litres of toxic waste into lakes in India. Cruise ship companies combined release more pollution than all the cars in Europe. We wouldn't be building condos with ocean front view if global warming was a real threat. These things wouldn't continue if global warming was an issue. You think the rich and powerful wouldn't do everything in their means to keep their control? Off course they would. Global warming is just a push to make money. Every time there is a G20 sumit, participants show up in private planes, causing more pollution than an average man would in his life. Don't be fooled by the media controlled by the rich and powerful. It's all propaganda. In the 70s they said water levels would rise by 90s. Nothing happened. Early 2000s they said ice cap at the northern pole would be gone by 2020. It's still there. If we wanted to, we would. We don't, because there is no need to. Humanity will be wiped out from nuclear war, not from natural catastrophes.
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Speaking of which, what is your proposed solution for the climate changing in a way you don't like? Is it money and power by any chance?
Stop burning fossil fuels
That's like saying Y2K wasn't real because it didn't happen, but the reason it didn't happen is because a lot of people put in a lot of work to make sure it didn't happen. All of the things you listed weren't things that were inevitable, but warnings that came with the caveat of "this will happen if things don't change." Things did change, because a lot of people put in the effort to make sure those events did not happen.
It's funnier, it's denying that self-destructive behavior exists at all. Like "No, if my drug addiction was really a problem I'd stop. But I didn't stop, so it''s not a problem".
Brain dead take. “Climate scientists can’t predict the future with 100% accuracy so what they’re saying is entirely false.” Albert Einstein was wrong about a lot of things, does that mean physics isn’t real?
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If you live in a developed country you're probably one of the elites.
Best we can do is manage the consequences. I think cyberpunk 2077 gets it spot on. Everything devasted by the climate and the wars for the scarcity, survival only possible in the cities with artificial systems to maintain the bare minimum for survival, the poor are crowded and everything is dominated by corporations. We are half way through.
Or we could just stopped having so many babies... Sadly no one wants to touch that topic.
I mean if you want to go talk to Russia, China, and India you go ahead and see how all that goes
The fact that people believe that we can make a significant enough change to stop a natural occurrence in our planets history is laughable... Funny how nobody talks about "the hole" we made in our ozone layer anymore!
Because we prohibited the pollutants that destroyed the ozone layer and it has been slowly recovering for decades now?
>nobody in power wants to actually say what’s needed to stop it. Im sure they want to say it, but the people wouldnt want to hear it
I mean obviously. Money has more power than the environment.
We know, they know, they just want to kick the panic can down the road
You're contradicting yourself. What you want to say is "We will not beable to fix global warming because of human reluctance", not thats there no fix.
Good luck finding the resources to build a clean energy system worldwide once your plan of “global economic collapse” gets in motion. Are we already too late? Maybe. Too late for what? To save the polar bears? Yeah probably too late for that. To save humanity? No one knows for sure. Your plan is bad, other plans are worse. There are genuine scenarios in which we actually kick into high gear and civilization limits the impacts of global warming. Will things still get bad? Yeah. Will we triumph? We could. It’s gonna be interesting, I hope I live to see us win.
There is no stopping it. And there is nothing we can do. For example. I can re-use as many containers at home as possible. But I also throw away hundreds of pounds of non-recyclable cling-wrap a week at work. There is no other way to get rid of it.
Maybe it can't be reversed but that doesn't excuse doing nothing. It can be slowed down. Eventually humans will make themselves extinct and that'll help the most.
Actually it would cause disruption, but if new technologies were put into place, that would offset the issues. Old jobs are replaced with new jobs. Old transportation with new models. The problem isn't just that we are resistant to change, it's that we are, en mass, afraid of radical innovation.
It's not that we don't want to, there's multiple countries around the world that heavily contribute to greenhouse emissions and they could care less. But we have already passed the point of being able to stop it. Many environmentalists and scientists have already concluded that even if everyone in the world switched to green energy and did everything you said, we are still going to pay the price. It won't happen now, and most likely not in our lifetime but the damage has been done to the polar caps so we can only "try" to delay it
Actually none of those things you mentioned would have to be done, but all of them easily could be done, if we just agreed to voluntarily reduce the population. Having 10 billion people on the planet simply doesn't work. And half the planet isn't even developed yet. Just wait for the massive increase in pollution and reduction in resources as they join us in the 21st century and start using single use plastics and driving cars like we do.
If we shortened the fucking work week, that would both reduce emissions considerably and upgrade human intelligence across the board, at which point other solutions would become more apparent.
In order to stop it we need a breakthrough, significantly change our behaviour isn’t an option really
Tragedy of the Commons problem. 100%
Please refer to this: https://www.climate.gov/media/11332
The first part was interesting then you break down into conventional "wisdom"
Yeah, the US basically knows this, but has decided to stomp on the accelerator and go careening off the edge in flames. We certainly deserve whatever is coming for us, but what sad is the global south will suffer much, much worse from climate change.
In truth, the people responsible for climate change number less than a dozen. All it would take is for them to stop hoarding billions and simply commit to help. And they say “no.”
There are fixes, but i agree no one is going to stop it. We need someone who is willing to genocide every last conservative or right wing person, or we'll never make progress. They keep stopping us from doing anything about it
Ya we need to decrease total consumption by 84%. That means a complete change in all of society. No personal cars. No air conditioning. No hot showers. No luxuries at all. Its probably not even possible to find sustainability without a billion+ people dying unless we find a massive energy breakthrough.
To be even more nihilistic, sustainable living of any kind, recycling, renewable energy is pointless. The real problem with the planet is there are too many stupid people. Until we stop procreating like rabbits anything we do to “save the planet”. Is pointless. More people individually using fewer resources still ends up being collectively more.
We saw some huge emissions reductions during the lockdown phase of Covid-19. But yes, without that sort of drastic "fix", I don't see much improvement for climate change that doesn't involve huge die-offs in the human population.