On Friday, the globe hit 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees) above pre-industrial levels for the first time in recorded history
The dismaying reality is that it is driven by the wealthy. I got rid of my car, I shop local, and everything in the home is low emissions. No reduction in my personal life can ever offset the way they live.
The truth of the matter is that it’s impossible to stop climate change in the short and mid term without degrowth in energy consumption. World leaders gathered and celebrated when they agreed to trade responsibilities for CO2 emissions, when a market-oriented world economy was always going to provoke this result unless there were explicit limits to the production of contaminant energy sources.
Driven by the wealthy and enabled by the stupid.
If this topic ceased to be a partisan issue, we might actually see real change and limits enforced.
A world where pollution producers would need to price cleanup and management into their production (which would in turn incentivize cleaner alternatives).
Where corporations might be held liable for damages from their climate or eco negligence.
But as long as this remains an issue that the masses are going to be divided over, the world is going to burn as stupid people insist 3rd degree burns on asphalt is just part of the circle of life.
But I drive my car less, that should do it! /s
This is the reason we’re should focus out efforts to make a ruckus and force decision makers to enforce carbon neutrality BY NEXT YEAR instead of by next century. Of course that won’t happen but that would be the reasonable way.
A general strike? Say the word
God, I wish.
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I mean people set fires and bombs in pursuit of the right to vote and we could argue that climate change is far more existential.
Don’t kill the wealthy. Redistribute their wealth and make them part of the working class.
It’s a fate worse than death in their eyes.
The Reign of Terror was a bad thing, actually.
You overestimate the usefulness of political violence in domestic matters
Unfortunately, they’d probably call in the military in the case of a general strike. At least try to assassinate the leadership.
Guillotines might result in less and more well directed bloodshed. Though, I don’t disagree entirely. That kind of violence, any kind of mass violence, ends up at least somewhat with spillover and misdirection.Hard to say.
We are all tired and angry, and it would seem violence could provide an amount of catharsis and finality. Yet I think the situation is too dynamic to be sure of a positive outcome. Peaceful but firm methods should be tried first, at least.
Will just result in new draconian laws being drafted and enacted. Watch how fast people lose the right to peaceful assembly if it actually affected the ruling class.
I think some rights you either have, fight for, or you just default to being a slave
Fuck humans, let em all die, the rest of the species on earth will be thrilled.
Don’t blame the symptom for the disease.
Capitalism didn’t just pop up out of a vacuum to fuck humanity over, we invented it and have continuously supported it to do so.
Yes, we did invent it. However, that was done by a small group of people that have been in power for generations, and kept it difficult to change to a better system.
What I’m trying to say is that I think most people probably don’t find it very fair that someone like Bezos can just be so ridiculously rich.
Maybe we can change this.
You really think that’s going to happen? Lmao. Yeah sure, and next we’ll have world peace and end poverty.
Greedy, easily corruptable and prone to violent authoritarianism- describes like 85% of our species now and throughout recorded history.
Stop nice-washing humanity and wake the fuck up. You’re not going to end capitalism, too many people benefit from it to let you.
If we just give up, then there is a 0% chance. If we try, then the chance of succession isn’t zero. We have to try to be optimistic. Yes, the world is fucked, but hey, giving up is just accepting that and allowing it.
Maybe when I see the magical communist revolution where humanity doesn’t destroy itself I’ll be a believer, but until then, I think humanity as a whole is a destructive force for bad.
I don’t really think communism in the extreme version is currently a solution, but there is a simpler solution for now for the ultra-rich if you tax them for a large amount of money proportional to the income let’s say 100% after 10 million per year you quickly fix (I guess bandaid-patch) a big problem with capitalism.
We lost the class war, the climate is fucked.
Most species on earth will be dead in any situation that wipes out humanity.
Hopefully another super predator doesn’t evolve and create its own extinction event 😵
The first super predator to wipe out life on earth also did it through climate change, which I find kind of poetic.
Don’t worry it will happen. It won’t be long
It’s not driven by the wealthy, because there are far fewer wealthy people than everyone else.
Individual shopping habits are a band-aid until we can fully replace how some of those habits work.
Carbon taxes would be infinitely preferable to voluntary changes, but we can’t pass carbon taxes because people will go absolutely insane if asked to pay the true cost of their goods.
The richest 1% produces more emissions than the poorest 66%
Worldwide, yes. That generally includes your average Americans, who are in the richest 1% globally.
The largest climate contributors are the billions of “average” people worldwide though, and it isn’t close.
The average american is a millionair?
1.1% of the world’s adult population are millionaires. This adds up to about 56 million people. Collectively, this group has about $191.6 trillion and controls about 46% of the world’s wealth.
1.1% of the world’s adult population are millionaires. This adds up to about 56 million people
I had a decimal point wrong on the Top 10% which does indeed make me look silly.
Regardless, this holds true:
The largest climate contributors are the billions of “average” people worldwide though, and it isn’t close.
The idea that owning stock makes you a polluter is beyond stupid, and that entire article you’re initially referencing is dumb as fuck.
People are arguing with you because they don’t want to take responsibility for themselves or pay the true cost of their consumption. As long as they see someone worse, they don’t have to do anything. The top 1% make 16% of the emissions, sure. But the top 10% are responsible for 52%. That’s 34% belonging to the 1.1-10% . Much of that is due to transportation (in dumb Suv and trucks), inefficient home heating, aviation, and dirty power generation.
We simply don’t solve this problem by focusing on the top1% alone . Which, like you said, is why carbon taxes should be effective. Especially how Canada did it, with the tax being redistributed to the bottom 90% or so. Unfortunately, bringing in an effective system of carbon taxation just gets you voted out for a science denier.
I swear, if I was the fossil fuel industry this exact kind of class anxiety is what I would exploit to stop progress. Get people paying attention to Taylor Swifts jet so they’ll refuse the systematic changes needed avoid this actual crisis.
I mean, over the years I’ve heavily reduced my meat intake, am super conscientious about transportation (haven’t flown in a decade, keep my revs low when I drive, and try to get all my errands done in efficient ways as to minimize gas usage), turn off lights, ration my hot water usage, don’t eat out at wasteful restaurants, buy “ugly” produce from the grocery store, promote renewable energy solutions whenever possible, compost, recycle, and create extremely little garbage. Yet, at my work, several of our AC generators that we use to power the facility use more oil in one day than my car does in its entire lifetime. Several handfuls of billionaires and their families emit the same amount of carbon as the poorest 66% of humanity. Seems to me, if we want to solve climate change, we have to get rid of the biggest polluters first, then transition to clean energy.
And the biggest polluters are corporations/industry, and the rich.
no one wanted to be held accountable for the triage so we let everyone bleed out, safe in the knowledge there was nothing we could have done.
Wealthy nations are making progress, but too little and they’re starting from a bad place.
Poor nations are busily repeating the industrialization process that made the wealthy nations wealthy. Anyone want to tell them they don’t have the right to do so?
I wonder if the window of opportunity on geoengineering is also closing. Because this emissions reduction thing isn’t going anywhere.
“But there are risks with geoengineering! We don’t know what might happen!” So: let’s get testing and find out, the way we do with everything else. Doing nothing on this spells certain doom. I’ll take an unknown quantity over certain doom.
I wonder if I’ll be alive for the moment everyone goes from “This is bullshit and I’m going to ignore it” to “Oh no who could have seen this coming?”
Some people will never admit anything is happening. They’ll just blame everything on something else.
We are already seeing the effects of climate change. If they were going to admit it, they would have done so already.
There are constant cycles of ‘fuck around’ and ‘find out’ that are naturally occurring, pay too close attention and you’ll see more than you want to. Like 5g conspiracies were always fucking dumb, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t hear almost nothing serious about them after someone decided to try and bomb a city block over it.
We’re gonna go from ignoring it to seeding the atmosphere
This will disproportionately effect the poor and developing countries, so the thinking of elites and super rich is that there’s still plenty of time to rectify the situation.
Rectify it? No, they know they’ll be gone before their life is disrupted so much that money can’t fix it.
That time is now before they get worse killler robots than they do.
The fact is that this was a conscious choice, even recently. The switch to natural gas that everyone is touting is one that is designed to cause higher short-term emissions.
Methane is really bad over a 20-year time frame and only really lets natural gas equal coal over a 100-year period (assuming typical fugitive emissions rates). The transition from coal to natural gas is accelerating the rate at which we boil ourselves alive.
Methane is burned at the point of use and produces carbon dioxide. Ideally there is no methane released in to the environment.
Methane leaks
Something like 3-10% of all methane production leaks. Methane is about 80x worse than CO2 over a 20-year period.
Oh it does for sure. At least in Canada there are government regulations requiring inspections by 3rd parties to check for leaks with some sort of thermal camera. I’m not familiar with the technology to check for leaks but I’ve had to fix the leaks before and it’s taken seriously and well documented.
Eh, humanity had a good run I guess
didn’t we pass the point of no return like 10 years ago
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You mean pledging to eventually tackle the problem 20-30 years down the road and doing nothing about it in the meantime hasn’t solved the problem?! I’m shocked! 🤯
Every time I hear “carbon neutral by 2050” I’m always thinking yeah like it’ll fucking matter at that point, Honda (or whomever).
I’ve been day saying this for the past two years now, humanity is fucked, and soon.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a direct result from the energy we took from burning fossil fuels. To get all that CO2 out were going to have to wait Millenia for earth to do it (that is, if it still can) or spend that same amount of energy to get the CO2 out.
To put that into something understandable: we’re going to have to spend ALL the energy we produced over the last two centuries on too of the energy we need for ourselves to be able to get CO2 back to preindustrial levels. Basically, for the next two to four centuries were going to have to spend at least 50% of our world energy budget to scrubbing CO2 and NONE of that energy is allowed to generate CO2. Actually, NOTHING from humanity can generate CO2 to reach that. If we continue spewing CO2 then you can double that number.
To put that into perspective, adding all required work and infrastructure, energy -all energy- will become 3-4 times as expensive for the next few centuries
People will not understand the issue and will not want to pay more, rich people will not want to foot the bill even though they could, so we won’t do anything and things will get worse and worse until we all die.
One possible alternative might be spraying sulphuric acid into the atmosphere, that might buy us a few valuable years while we fix shit but what will happen is that we’ll just spray the crap out of it and call that a solution while we continue to spray CO2 into the atmosphere like there literally is no tomorrow for humanity
We’re fucked
Always the possibility we eat the rich but I’m not hopeful
🎵*it’sthe end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine!*🎵
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And my cousins are having kids. 🤦
It’s not consumer cars that’s raising the temperature, though. They want to electrify cars for control. The elites are going to use this carbon credit crap to make people submit to their will. More rules for thee but not for me.
The primary sources of greenhouse gas emissions by economic sector in the United States are:
Transportation (28% of 2021 greenhouse gas emissions) – The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation primarily come from burning fossil fuel for our cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes.
And
The largest sources of transportation greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 were light-duty trucks, which include sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans (37%); medium- and heavy-duty trucks (23%); passenger cars (21%); commercial aircraft (7%); other aircraft (2%); pipelines (4%); ships and boats (3%); and rail (2%). In terms of the overall trend, from 1990 to 2021, total transportation emissions have increased due, in large part, to increased demand for travel. The number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by light-duty motor vehicles (passenger cars and light-duty trucks) increased by 45% from 1990 to 2021, as a result of a confluence of factors including population growth, economic growth, urban sprawl, and periods of low fuel prices. Between 1990 and 2004, average fuel economy among new vehicles sold annually declined, as sales of light-duty trucks increased.
In the US, cars and the car-centric sprawl it encourages is absolutely the largest single contributor to carbon emissions.
There’s a reason that the per capita emissions of the Netherlands are literally half of what they are in the states. It’s the cars.
You sound pretty crazy there
There is no more or less control between gas or electric cars
Nuttier than a squirrel turd man.
Lmao
