People should respond as if it is fixable, even if it is not. Any mitigation or reduction is positive. If you’re gonna go out, go out swinging. Reject the status quo. Expect more from yourself and others.
And also go Vegan 🤗
The problem is fixable, but my biggest worry right now is that rich nations will do enough to save rich nations. They’ll get most of their power from non-carbon based sources, pollute significantly less from industrial processes, protect their agricultural output, and switch 90% of cars on the road to BEVs. Then they just deal with the problems of increased flooding, wildfires, etc.
Meanwhile, the Middle East turns into a power vacuum because nobody wants their major export anymore. Africa starves to a level not seen in decades, or maybe ever.
Doom stops when people have hope. Teaching people how to climb to a solar punk future is the solution.
We need solar punk political candidates.
How you run varies a lot by country.
In the US, you start by filing papers to do it. Typically a combination of a fee and collecting signatures. Municipal government tends to have a lot of power over things like what commute mode is favored and local building codes, so I recommend it for first-time candidates. You’ll need to raise enough money to help get the word out, spend a lot of time visiting community groups and talking with people, and ideally recruit a few volunteers to help you win a primary.
You’d be surprised how easy it is. Many political parties will allow anyone to run for a seat if no one else is already doing it. A lot of the smaller parties will even actively seek out good candidates.
There’s vetting of course, but so long as you’re not a terrible person and haven’t said anything publicly that’s opposed to the party’s platform, it’s really not too hard.
The hard part is when it comes to the larger parties that have established (often terrible) candidates. The party knows them, so you have to put in the time to get known as well and then run against the sitting candidate when the time comes.
It does happen though. AOC in the US is a great example. She unseated a democrat that the party actually liked, and she did it with an army of new members she got signed up.
Not only representative politics. We need to focus on grassroots initiatives as well.
Both is good
Being a doomer doesn’t help
Dismissing problems using cheap labels like that helps even less. Actually causes harm.
Pretending we are all doomed just leads to inaction. Why bother, if we all die anyway.
Pretending all will be great just leads to inaction. Why do something yourself, when it is basicly solved already.
What works is to understand that there is a problem, but we have the solutions. That is actually the case right now. We have a massive problem with climate crisis, but we also have the tools to bring our emissions to basicly zero, if we choose to do it. Some countries are already taking actions on this.
@MrMakabar @XTL The main problem is that we need to end Capitalism, and we need to end it NOW, globally, because every possible solution only works if the economy can stagnate or even shrink without causing economic disasters.
@MrMakabar @XTL we have the tools, but governments wedded to profit and growth won’t use them, and certainly won’t use them quickly enough.
We’ll need a wave of revolutions to improve our democracies; shortening terms, dispersing power to communities and as much as possible moving from electing representatives who can be easily captured and subverted to truly democratic decisions which are harder to manipulate.
@MrMakabar @XTL Why bother? to make the doomedness less shit. Do the things that move the needle from certain death to near-certain death. By teeth and fingernails, hold on until the last.
@MrMakabar @XTL You put something in the words I always struggled to do. Thank you!
The section on how much solar can power homes is off. The deployed capacity is measured by the output of the panels in direct sunlight on a cloudless day. Obviously, that doesn’t happen all the time, or even most of the time. Exact measurement depends on local conditions, but if you take the figure and reduce it by 80%, you’ll have a rough idea of how much is actually going on the grid over time.
So when he’s citing how many homes can be serviced by 1GW of solar, multiply that figure by 0.2 and you’ll get something closer to the real one.
Solar and wind deployments, combined with some kind of energy storage, are important, but we shouldn’t drop wildly misleading figures. If the numbers in the video were right, then we’d have solved the problem of carbon-based electricity generation already.
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
