YouTube’s climate deniers turn into climate doomers — A new report documents a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won’t work::A new report documents a shift away from climate denial and a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won’t work.
Here’s my thing: I absolutely believe that clean energy and radical climate policies would work. However I have basically 0 hope that enough countries will implement these things to evade climate catastrophe.
Countries already are. Slower than we’d like, but change is happening. Big changes start small, but gain momentum. Look at the rollout of renewables and EVs. If you’d described where we are now to past me only 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you.
We need to roll out good public transit and get more people off the roads in general, too.
EVs are a good step in energy independence, but they’re only mildly better ecologically than ICE vehicles (which should definitely be phased out). The whole ecological cost of maintaining road infrastructure is also not getting helped by heavier vehicles, so we need less of them on the road.
Agreed. I think better battery tech will allow for lighter EVs, but even so at the very least we need vehicle manufacturers to expand their EV range beyond massive SUVs and Sedans, to include more reasonably sized hatch backs etc.
You’re right; however. Public transport is shocking where I live, and is in dire need of improvement.
It’s gotta be a peer pressure thing, diplomatically, to work. The countries taking the biggest steps need to be loud about it so the ones dragging their feet (hi from the US) get their pride hurt if they don’t take action. The ozone hole fix worked that way too (though of course that didn’t have major political powers denying it was a problem).
I agree. Additionally, I don’t believe that, without controlled depopulation (restrictive birth control, not killing people), we can achieve climate stability and solve other issues like increasing pollution of the entire environment. I believe that the population should have stopped growing in the 90s (at about 4 billion), of course, this number is a hunch, not knowledge.
We have reached a point far beyond sustainability; we are on artificial life support. Without this support, even getting dressed would be a challenge, given the lack of a natural and clean source of textile materials. Nearly all clothes are made of plastic or contain some plastic additives. As we wash these clothes in our machines, we inadvertently consume plastic particles in our food and drink.
Speaking of machines, the devices produced today have an increasingly shorter lifespan. Simultaneously, the recycling of these devices is problematic, as our waste is often massively exported to third-world countries.
Another concern is the escalating scarcity of drinking water, among various other challenges. The list goes on and on. Anyone expecting the Earth to accommodate an unlimited number of people is plain insane or doesn’t understand the complexity of the issue.
We must act now on all the fields, even those unpopular ones (like population control).
Those who are against population control, please take a look at this initiative: https://populationmatters.org/ and its patrons (like Sir David Attenborough and Jane Goodall).
The amount of Doomers on Lemmy and Reddit is depressingly large as well. It’s du jour to act like any talk of climate positivity is naive, change is impossible and collapse is inevitable. Just look at the popularity of whole subs dedicated to Collapse and Doomer material. It’s exhausting trying to challenge the position of some of these users, yet we must try. Hope is an important part of tackling the climate challenges we’re facing, and the glamorisation of defeatism isn’t going to help foster that.
Mindless optimism isn’t the answer either. We need real change immediately, the window to slam on the brakes as a species is already behind us arguably. The only answer is to be both realistic AND ambitious.
No one said anything about mindless optimism. You are correct, change is needed and fast, but relentless pessimism achieves nothing except foster defeat. I’m advocating for a realistic approach to how we look at climate change mitigation. Part of being realistic is understanding that things may not be as hopeless as parts of the Internet would like you to believe.
I’m not saying we need to write everything off as hopeless, I’m saying we need to recognize that a lot of current efforts amount to greenwashing and ARE hopeless or even pointless (carbon credits for one are a good scam that comes to mind). The best work is being done by people chaining themselves to trees and sabotaging oil pipelines, not those writing policy with pockets full of cash… and this honestly comes off as apologetic for the latter and more than a little naive to me.
Thanks, Poindexter.
An argument I hadn’t seen until recently was “Man-made climate change is real, it’s an existential problem, and the only way to combat it is to burn as much fossil fuel as we can right now to boost the economy and increase our efforts to find a solution.”
Because scientific endeavors work in real life exactly like Sid Meier’s Civilization?
It’s not a shift away from corporate bullshit: the same people that were arguing that changing something is bad because the climate isn’t changing now are arguing that changing something is bad because it’s too late and let’s ride into the sunset giving trillions to oil companies.
To be fair, destroying the planet and foresaking future generations is easier than admitting you were wrong.
