It is too late. We are going to die!
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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My headcanon past 2050 is basically nuclear wasteland. I try and stay optimistic in the moment, but the old faith in humanity gas-tank is running a little empty these days.
I feel you. There is this little bit oft hope, that all my effort actually achieves something. But its like hoping for thr existance of god it feels like
self defense
well yeah, you can't just try, you need to actually do it.
Stupid title, grammatically at least.
You hear that? It's too late now! Welp ggs guys
This is a by-product of modern society (maybe late stage capitalism). We need to be sold a "solution" to a problem. Reducing consumption is not something that can easily be sold hence these carbon capture, recycling plastic "solutions".
Unless someone can make money off of it, reducing emissions is going to be difficult.
It's simple, you have a shared resource running out, nobody wants to grab less of it.
Grab less of it yourself - the others will compensate for you. Produce some of that resource - the others will just profit from it for longer.
The biggest emitters are too strong to be climate-crusaded, the smaller ones do successful bribing and greenwashing, but I think there will eventually be climate crusades - against those poor bastards who formally fail to do something right, but don't really contribute meaningfully to emissions.
Other than finding some wonderful (like in Total Recall) process to turn fossil fuels into matter practically not separable and not usable as fuel, I don't know what one can do.
Profitable personal mobile nuclear batteries are still not reality.
Some new magical principle of producing energy, sufficiently decentralized (here go big NPPs). There's none, so prepare for dark future.
As far as energy production goes, we already have the technology: solar, wind, nuclear. We also already have the technology for cars and personAl transportation. Above all we have transit. If we can get our shit together with things we already know, we’d be in better shape. If we would have done it as little as ten years ago, we could have stayed within the Montreal targets for global warming.
Now it’s no longer enough. We need to fix harder areas as well: aviation, shipping, grid storage, steel and cement, etc, and we need it asap … how is there still not any urgency?
You need technology cheaper than fossil fuels. Some of fossil fuels' downsides are upsides for some people (political control), which necessitates the difference in cost by a big enough margin to counter those invisible benefits. A revolution.
There's no urgency, I think, because Earth's population is going to start shrinking. The emissions are going to slow down for that reason.
Countries that won't have some quality, not quantity, approaches to their economies by then are going to fall hard.
I guess that's how EU is going to make the world owned by Europeans again.
Things that reduce consumption are frequently successful in capitalism. Generally, using less, costs less. There are always those selling a thing who are trying to increase the consumption of that thing, but often at expensive of those selling a competing thing. One successful way of doing that is to be cheaper to buy or run or both, by doing more with less.
However, sometimes we want something to be made with more a bit more to last longer and be repairable.
Raw capitalist won't do all this on its own. The invisible hand isn't very good at planning long term. Governments need to structure markets for outcomes they want, and keep measuring and correcting.
Carbon capture does not make money, wtf?
Carbon capture doesn't make money. Selling the service of carbon capture does.
How?
tldr; Greenwashing/marketing mostly.
Sounds tenuous. Gimme the full version.
Instead of UBI, we should give every citizen carbon credits that they can then either use themselves for cars over certain (adjusting) emission limits or more likely sell to companies. Every company has to pay for their CO2 (and downline for imports)
The interesting thing would be people not necessarily spending their carbon credits like they do money. As there is no real incentive to sell to one company or another, other then tiny rate differences.
Also... always peg the price to what it costs to clean the carbon out. That creates a greater incentive to not skirt, as it might get cheaper over time.
So, because I can afford an EV , to electrify, to add solar, I also get a carbon bonus to sell or bury.
While normally I like where you’re going, we’re already past the point of early adopters deciding to do the right thing in lot of ways and need to scale up for affordability.
Or if your goal is to influence more personal decisions, like how much meat you eat and what temperature you set your thermostat, I’m not sure it’s enough
Imagine if you could get FREE MONEY by not using all your energy coinz!
The only examples this article gives of irreversible damage:
-
homes destroyed by hurricanes: clearly and obviously reversible. Build new houses. Fin.
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rising sea levels: reversible. Cool the climate, get more glaciers, lower sea levels. Obviously it's more of a "100 years from now" solution, but it's definitely a solution.
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lives lost: yeah, that's a fair point.
And also irreversible is The decline of biodiversity. Once a species is extinct it won't come back.
Guess we'll have to Jurassic park this shit but with Pandas
Yeah, I've always wanted us to have a genetic Doomsday Vault, with the sequenced genome of every species. We can clone them from that.
We are wildly far away from having the technology to do that. A single genome wouldn't provide the genetic diversity for a sustainable population. We would need hundreds or thousands of genomes for each species to ensure that non-related individuals could mate.
We absolutely have the technology, we just don't have the money to gather the data. Or we haven't chosen to allocate it.
And to those who say "well, the Earth will bounce back": we're much closer to the end of Earth's ability to support life than to the beginning. Earth doesn't have endless time to evolve new kinds of creatures. We could be doing damage from which Earth's biodiversity never recovers.
That's not a good argument... this is such a small blip, the earth has been much hotter and colder then now and will stabilize again before it's eventually destroyed.
To me, the better argument is simply: Wouldn't you like there to be humans or soem sentient beings that remembered you in the future? Maybe not you specifically, but the culture and art that you contributed to?
Right, Earth will be here, life will find a way ….. but cockroaches and jellyfish can’t read
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