In short, we aren’t on track to an apocalyptic extinction, and the new head is concerned that rhetoric that we are is making people apathetic and paralyzes them from making beneficial actions.
He makes it clear too that this doesn’t mean things are perfectly fine. The world is becoming and will be more dangerous with respect to climate. We’re going to still have serious problems to deal with. The problems just aren’t insurmountable and extinction level.
Honestly I think we should stop trying to stop climate change and start adapting to it.
Because at individual scale all actions to limit climate change are almost meaningless, whatever we do we will not see the consequences of it. On the other hand we can adapt to climate change at individual and community level.
Start planting trees in our community, build a way of life that does not require fossil fuel since we are running out of them, installing solar panels and improving home insulation to help during externe weather events, buy less products and focus on repairing them instead …
All of that can directly improve our life, present and future, without relying on everyone doing their share
AND, as a side effect, all the action we do to prepare yourself to live in a post growth world are also great to reduce our CO2 emissions.
That’s a good and healthy way to approach this. Nicely put.
Bettering the world’s situation is a legislative/political issue. Bettering you and your immediate community is something you can help with, even if it’s only at the margins.
The problem with all this, however, is that there are a lot of the things that you can do to help your personal situation that are definitely not helping the overall situation. For example installing air conditioning, watering your lawn, etc. They might make things more comfortable for you, but they’re by no means better for the world. We still need to incentivize the right things through the right tax breaks and financial/industry incentives, which lead us back to politics being the actual thing that we need to make meaningful personal and global change possible.
I don’t know lemmy’s demographics, but I imagine it skews overwhelmingly north American, white, and with a reasonable and stable income. I.e., The people who are most capable to “adapt”
We must also focus on unreserved communities, those without the means to make life comfortable, or to repair their homes or to move to avoid sea level rise or hurricanes or other damaging impacts of climate change.
Excuse my trickling down, but I’ll respond the same way as with EVs. The best way to make it affordable is to put more of it in the hands of people who can afford it now. As manufacturing scales Up, it gets less expensive. As more is bought new, more is available for the used market.
This does work with manufactured goods where scale matters and there is both a market for new sales and pre-owned sales
I’d love to install solar panels, I have a flat rubber roof with no tree coverage that’s perfect for it. A $35,000 upfront cost is an absolute nonstarter for me. I have it, but that’s basically my entire emergency fund. If someone would pay me to have them installed, hell yeah, let’s do it.
Because adapting is the same situation. Yes, you can make changes personally, but there are overwhelming societal issues that you can’t begin to touch, that require huge investments, but is from politicians and corporations. Most importantly, adapting is more expensive than prevention
