Every time I see these I see these climate change related issues (which is now multiple times a day), I get the same sinking feeling in my stomach like I’m behind on work and don’t have enough time to do it and I’ll soon be in trouble for letting things get too far behind. That feeling keeps me up, causes me stress, and is generally not a comfortable way to live. This just fucking sucks.
I hate to say it, but I keep avoiding articles about climate change for this reason. I can’t do it every time, obviously, but it just gives me such stress. We’re all so powerless while corporations destroy our planet.
Have you tried separating your recycling out? It’ll help offset the cruise ships that each put out around 250,000 cars worth of straight up pollution a year, without factoring in other impacts.
And thats just the cruise ships imagine how much cargo ships output, admitedly cargo ships actually serve a purpose. Cruise ships are idols to our decadence and hubris.
I dream of bloody knives and car bombs.
The solution to that, the systemic impersonal solution, is going to be ending the production of single use plastics. While there’s little you can do about recycling, you can imagine if you’ll be complaining about that.
Don’t be too harsh on yourself, big corporations are the main cause of climate change. Unless we all collectively decide to give these companies a wake up call, I’m afraid there’s very little you can do alone
Is there anything reasonable that we (those who have interest in living “like before” and won’t die of age within 30 years) can achieve? I feel like many things are very out of reach, and the population is just too heterogeneous to agree on something. Older folks where I live just do not give a fuck, and elected someone whose major interest is in removing rights from people they actively hate. At least one big city where I live has been without water nor electricity for several hours (days?) because the heat has messed out the infrastructure, and I feel like even in my country barely anybody is talking about it… It’s just very discouraging, I want to shift my perspective, but it’s not easy.
Yes, there are things you can and should be doing.
People blaming ‘corporations’ while not doing anything themselves are a huge part of the problem. Out of the 100 largest corporations contributing the most CO2, almost all of them are fuel and energy based.
So, number one - drives less, or don’t drive at all. This might change where or how you live.
Number 2, buy 100% green power or install your own PV.
These 2 things alone can be contributing up to 50% of your own greenhouse emissions. This isn’t ‘corporations’, it’s us buying power and driving around.
After that everyday consumption is huge. So don’t buy shit to just throw it away. Only buy what’s necessary. Spend more on fewer things, and things that will last.
And finally, do these things because you care. If enough people make some changes. It starts to seem normal. Then others do it too. And vote.
The number of smart, tech savvy people here who think some boats and random companies are the source of impending catastrophe are sadly mistaken. The actual information on what’s causing and contributing is well researched and easy to find. You’ll be able to find an online calculator for your country which will give an averaged breakdown of your own emissions. You can use that to keep drilling into what actions will have the biggest impacts.
Everyone needs to make changes to the way we live. Some need to go first for others to follow.
Big companies only do what they do when they are paid to do it by consumers.
“Big companies only do what they do when the governments that they paid with bribes or “lobby” money look the other way while they fuck the planet up left and right like it’s a race to the end”
Fixed it for you. Stop excusing the rich, and trying to place the blame on the consumers, friend. It’s disgusting.
You’re being downvoted, but why? Human greed also extends to consumers. We don’t have to buy a thing because it was paraded around in front of us. I hate the “consumers have no agency, they have to buy stuff!” mentality. It’s morally bankrupt and just results in more finger pointing and zero action. Stop buying crap.
And the worst part is, average citizens like yourself aren’t a massive burden on the environment. It’s people like Elon Musk flying personal jets across the world for dinner, who are actively contributing to the death of the planet.
The jets are bad but what is worse are the handle full of billionaires and csuite execs who have the money and power to decide company policies and bribe politicians and governments: lobbying, independent expenditures, gala dinners, super pacs, incentives, revolving doors, private fundraising, paid speeches; to look the other way so they can pollute however much they want.
Nothing is Ethical under Capitalism.
Social Democracy is better but still exports the suffering to the global south.
Workers of the world must unite to over come the absolute insanity of the capital class.
Unfortunately, everyone participates and it adds up. If you want to compare such personal consumption like jets, then the rich account for about 15% of the global emissions.
Here’s a chart:
from this report: https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/carbon-inequality-in-2030-per-capita-consumption-emissions-and-the-15c-goal-621305/
The share of total global emissions associated with the consumption of the richest 1% is set to continue to grow, from 13% in 1990, to 15% in 2015 and 16% in 2030.
If you want to include the rich’s capital, which you should, because that has to change:
the bottom 50% of the world population emitted 12% of global emissions in 2019, whereas the top 10% emitted 48% of the total. Since 1990, the bottom 50% of the world population has been responsible for only 16% of all emissions growth, whereas the top 1% has been responsible for 23% of the total. While per-capita emissions of the global top 1% increased since 1990, emissions from low- and middle-income groups within rich countries declined. Contrary to the situation in 1990, 63% of the global inequality in individual emissions is now due to a gap between low and high emitters within countries rather than between countries. Finally, the bulk of total emissions from the global top 1% of the world population comes from their investments rather than from their consumption. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00955-z
But if you imagine that the petite bourgeois lifestyle of McMansion in suburbia, cars and driving around everywhere, eating boatloads of primary calories, and the rest of the consumption isn’t contributing, you should read more. Here’s a start: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3691-the-imperial-mode-of-living
Sorry but this is not true at all. Your regular average citizen demands products whose production, transportation, and disposal is responsible for massive amounts of emissions.
If you buy cheap Chinese shit off Amazon, or Big Macs, a new phone every year, you’re part of the problem.
- Be big business
- Spend decades chasing profits using any means necessary.
- Make so much money that the average person can barely get by.
- Sell them the cheapest shit possible that they have no choice but to buy cause they’re poor as fuck.
- Have morons on the internet blame the average person instead of greedy corporations/billionaires/government.
- ???
- Profit!
Really? The feeling I get when I read articles like this is a resigned feeling of “No shit, we’ve only been hearing warnings of this for the past 30 years. People are fucking stupid”
There used to be plausible deniability. “Maybe it won’t really be that bad, even though we should be acting in case it is.”
Now it’s more of a “I wonder where the various lines are and how many we’ve already crossed, which one will be next, and how soon we’ll notice it.”
Have you noticed the number of insects is way down this year? Maybe I’m wrong. They do still gather in the lights (which might be another part of the fucking problem…) but there just doesn’t seem to be as many as there used to be this year.
The irony is that if we did act as if it would be that bad, it wouldn’t be that bad because we would have mitigated the worst of it, and it’d become a laughing-stock for non-critical thinkers.
See also: Y2K…or more recently, comparing COVID death rates for vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations.
You can only do so much. Life was set up this way for us by countless generations before us. You can reduce your energy requirements, reduce/reuse/recycle, but it will only help so much at the individual level. Never stop trying. Never stop trying to convince your friends and family to reduce their footprint. I bug my SO every time they put something recyclable in the trash or they buy something we don’t need.
But the world is burning because of greed and we can’t individually put an end to that. Live your life, do what you can, share love. It’s the best we can do right now.
I like to look on the bright side, in that climate change will either wipe humans off the map or send us back to the Stone Age so we no longer have any real impact.
Both scenarios will heal the planet, animals will re-populate, and homeostasis will again be restored. Checks and balances. We’ll just be another animal that that got out of control, which nature corrected, like it’s done thousands of times over with every animal that’s ever been out of control.
A healthy world. I like that outcome, with or without us.
I don’t think you realize how much even stone age humans fucked up the planet. Half of Australia’s forests were burned down and most of America’s megafauna was hunted to extinction and the people who did it had little more than stone tools.
Yeah, I read Sapiens too.
Still, I suspect it’ll shift the balance of power away from us for long enough to allow nature to take back some control. As a species we’ve lost our way and we won’t stop until the planet is dead or it wipes us out. That’s the bottom line.
This could be the only planet within a million light years with complex, conscious life and we’re systematically destroying it for conveniences like single serve ketchup.
This is the reason I finally pulled the plug on Reddit. Too much r/climate and others like that in my feed.
Now let’s see how long will Lemmy last. Ultimately I’ll just let myself die while playing Baldurs Gate 3 during a random heatwave in bliss ignorance of what’s going on in the ocean or Florida or Italy or wherever.
38,4°C for non americans.
Oil and gas companies are awesome at branding. We need to be better. We should name the heatwaves after oil companies.
We should also name the hurricane season. So the Exxon Mobile Heatwave, and the British Petroleum Hurricane Season. The Suncor Forest Fires.
etc.
Maybe they are referring to this… https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/meteorologist-heatwaves-oil-gas-companies-b2378915.html
That just sounds like free advertising. No one would actually connect the Sunoco name to a forest fire…but Sunoco would get their company name repeated millions of times per day on web and TV network traffic free of charge. No thanks.
Trust me, calling a Hurricane season the BP Hurricane Season is not free advertising. A bunch of red hat-wearing cultists will love it, but the vast majority of the planet will understand the premise. And it will tick away at their dominance.
Or we can just carry on and let them open up public lands to drill baby drill whilst we watch average global temps rise.
Are we all gonna die soon? Serious question
We? No. We’ll just be uncomfortable. Our kids? They’re going to slowly cook to death as they’re running out of food/water/oxygen. Or, y’know, get blown up in one of the wars fighting over scraps of food/water/oxygen.
But look on the bright side: we’re on track to beat last fiscal year’s profit margin! If we do that, we’ll get a free company branded pencil and one ticket to use some leave-without-pay at you manager’s discretion – and the regional manager gets another vacation home!!
Mass famines and heat that kills without AC coming summer of 2024 or 2025. Won’t kill the global north too much yet, but it will be one of the biggest deadly events in history for the rest of the world.
Military journalist Gwyn Dyer reported on this almost 2 decades ago.
The global militaries have been planning for this for years. You see those ships with refugees from northern Africa? That volume is going to ramp up plus Mediterranean countries are going to exodus north to the Nordic states and immigration is going to lock the fuck down. People are going to die by the millions. Maybe not in 2 years but this is our future.
On the plus side, and I am fucking saying this sarcastically, at least it’s the “right people” dying which is to say those not white and those not rich.
People are already dying to the effects. We know climate change can cause more and higher intensity hurricanes, more droughts, fires, famines, wilder weather swings, floods, and wars and refugee crises, etc. We know these things are increasing and we know people are already dying to them now.
So while you can’t pin any individual disaster to climate change, we already know it’s causing deaths.
As for if we’re all going to die? Probably not all of us, so if you’re lucky and don’t mind you or your kids living in a Mad Max world, you can relax a little.
No. We have a long ways away before the human population will be wiped out due to climate change. Most likely around 100 or so years. The issue is what happens before then. Increasing temperatures will mean less water for crops creating food crisis. It will mean rising water level which means people living in low coastal cities will have to move. There is going to be mass migration which people do not like (Conservative fearmongering and look at how the homeless are treated). The food shortages and migration will cause unprecedented poverty. Poverty is correlated to crime so there is going to be an uptick of it. If we don’t cut our carbon emission by 2030, we are going to see water wars and food wars by 2050.
What do these food and water wars mean? It can mean a lot. The rich will most likely be fine and continue with their yachts and private jets which are the biggest contributors carbon emissions. There will be more and more wars breaking out and even 1st world countries will be affected. This can lead to use of nuclear weapons which will continue to cut the human population and make things less inhabitable. Over time the human population will be cut and climate change acceleration will most likely slow down but not fully stop. There’s also a feedback loop to the planet heating up. As polar ice caps melt and the planet heats up, it may naturally continue on its own until it equalizes. It can go up to like 10 degrees which, well, I hope i am not on the planet at that time.
Not everything is hopeless. We have a lot of bright scientists and we are in an era of unprecedented wealth. I do believe when it comes down to it, the world will unite and we will be able to mitigate enough of it and create solutions. Mass solar panels is a good one. Building nuclear reactors for the future use is another. Some solutions have been suggested like turning the sky white and other stuff. Public transit is another thing picking up and will greatly reduce carbon emissions. Just remember, a majority of the pollution comes from the use of private jets, yachts, and cruise ships. People will get hungry. There is one group of people who are at fault and I think the French found the solution to it.
No. We have a long ways away before the human population will be wiped out due to climate change…Not everything is hopeless. We have a lot of bright scientists…
I said something similar in a thread yesterday and got savagely shat on by everyone. The thread was about people literally not having children because they’re worried about climate change. I said have kids if you want, don’t if you don’t, but it’s insane to make such a major life decision based on some nebulous calamity that may or may not happen in your lifetime, or at all. I’m extremely concerned about climate change but goddamn some people are nuts.
Spoilers: Third world war will start at October, to go through clueless and senseless deaths all around the world, for uhhhhhh…6 years’ish.
Then (not really sure beyond that tbh) we will have a worldwide apparition of Our Lady… something something “folks will die of shame by witnessing their sins being committed”, etcetc. The antichrist will come, christians will be hunted like animals.
Demons will manifestate, wander around. Everyone will accept em as saviors, praise em, etc. Lucifer will claim victory, etc.
Then, 2nd cometh of Christ, etc, judge everyone, etc. Hell will close, etcetc. New Jerusalem, etc.
So um… yeah. 10 years at best, 20 years at worst.
Beware of the upcoming hurricane season.
