‘Change course now’: humanity has missed 1.5C climate target, says UN head
‘Change course now’: humanity has missed 1.5C climate target, says UN head
www.theguardian.com
‘Change course now’: humanity has missed 1.5C climate target, says UN head
Comments
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Wouldn't it be nice if we weren't ruled by psychopathic idiots, and this might have actually made a difference?
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Best hope rn is the solar panels from China that every country from African to Pakistan are able to install and use less fuel
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No, our best hope is that our best scientists learn magic and then rapidly enable wide scale adoption of fusion reactors that are efficient enough to generate free energy that we can use for a bunch of, yet to be invented, sci-fi technologies that deal with the huge pile of shitty challenges that are amassing at our doorstep.
The odds of short to mid term survival of civilization is statistically insignificant.
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I still contemplate if we had gore instead of bush. Its just insane how different the world could be.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if we weren’t ruled by psychopathic idiots
HumanHistory_IRL
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It could only effectively work with a world government.
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Sure blame politicians for the fact that people are going into deeper and deeper debt to buy bigger and bigger trucks.
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If the politicians would have refused bribes,
the standards wouldn't have come into fruition that allowed the auto industry to decouple vehicle size and weight from energy efficiency;
the trams systems wouldn't have been bought up, shut down, and rails ripped from the ground to make room for more lanes;
the energy sector wouldn't have septupled down on an invisible gas that's 20x worse than burning coal;
the healthcare companies would be run by medical experts finding the best treatment instead of by money men denying care by default;
the technology we developed wouldn't be tracking every time we blink to create advertising opportunities;
the houses we build wouldn't sit vacant waiting for a tenant to pay half their income for the privilege of having no equity...
Greed is the problem.
It's understandable within capitalism why corporations would push boundaries to make money, but our politicians are supposed to be the force of opposition. Instead they look the other way while pocketing another cheque or airline ticket or deed to a brownstone.
I'm as pro active transportation as anyone I have ever met, but it's delusional to blame people for buying a large, expensive vehicle when the manufacturers keep discontinuing small, cheap cars because the return on investment isn't as high. The politicians could require them to make two compact cars for every pickup or SUV, but they don't because they're greedy just like the corporations.
There are no checks and balances anymore, and the politicians are to blame. Some blame in certain places should also land on the electorate, to be sure. But with every city, neighbourhood, and street gerrymandered to look like a hand drawn map by Michael J. Fox, it's mostly the politicians on the hook for all this.
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World is too busy deciding whether to kill minorities or tax the rich an extra few percent to make any progress on this.
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We desperately need a socialist revolution.
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No we don't.
What we really need is people to stop fantasizing about spherical revolutions in frictionless societies and do the boring, unfun, hard things that actually make a difference.
It requires people not doing nothing until magically the perfect thing comes along and realizing they'll have to wade through and actively support shit, until they've successfully reformed or composted said shit into something that is finally able to grow the first leafs of anything resembling a society they want.
I'm just so tired of people rejecting the facts of the political systems they live under in order to pretend to chase some other system they won't see within their life time.
We have to pick the least bad option and then try to make them better because that's just the way shit works. Acknowledging that doesn't mean you are complicit or any other such nonsense in the same way acknowledging climate change doesn't mean you don't want a climate that isn't rapidly deteriorating.
"But if x, y, and z people just..." yeah well they won't, and we know they won't, so we have the constraints we have.
Not super directed at you, I've just been seeing entirely too many naive, in my opinion, fake socialists that seem to only value socialism as far as they can use it as a weapon to brandish against liberals and other socialists who simply see reality and acknowledge that doing anything requires getting your hands dirty.
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Our kids will be really ashamed of us.
Short term profits are way more important than the future of our kids I guess.
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America voted for a child rapist, no one postering actually cares about kids
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I'm already ashamed of us. I have a hard time walking the fine line between preparing my children for a difficult future and raising kids who know happiness.
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I just chose to never have kids because there was never any possibility that humanity would overcome our narcissistic greed prior to ecological collapse.
That was 20 years ago. The last decade has only solidified the certainty of collapse in my mind.
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As a parent: happiness is about expectations. The exhuberance of youth can carry them as long as we aren't preparing them for the halcyon, easy days of the 1990s. Life will be hard, it always has been, but there can still be fun and rewarding experiences. They need to know resilience, independence, and be quick on their feet both mentally and physically.
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it seemed like my kids probably wouldn't have a good future, so i didn't have any
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Based
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I've really been feeling vindicated for my choice not to have children lately
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Yep, same. I love my non-existent children too much to bring them into a world which I only really see getting worse in their hypothetical lifetime. Also helps me have a bit more resources to support the little ones of friends and family to hopefully help their lives suck less despite what they were born into.
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More food and resources for the conservatives to multiply. Great choice in resigning the once great humanity to corrupt sociopaths 🙄
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You're right. I will have kids so that children of conservatives don't just get to run around the wasteland unchallenged but have to fight my kids for food and water. This will make me feel so much better.
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Such a silly argument. Contributing genetics isn't the only way to influence future generations. I may not be a parent, but I (and many more people) educate others' children every day.
Just because someone doesn't bring a kid into the world doesn't mean they're giving up on the future. Individualist cultures may have people thinking that nuclear families are the end-all, be-all of child-rearing, but it still "takes a village."
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Let them raise their children in the hellscape they created. Let them explain to their children why things are so awful. I won't be around nor will my children have to suffer for the choices all those conservatives demanded.
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Removed by Moderator — Modlog
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It just seems crazy. Normal, sane, hardworking people of the world are begging for governments and corporations to stop killing us through pollution, but the rich don't give a fuck. There won't be consequences for them. There won't be a reckoning. It just feels like they'll stubbornly punish all of us for not being born wealthy like they were.
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This is where I envy religious people: I would love to believe that proper justice will be served eventually. But I can't, I have to watch the injustices and cannot do anything about it.
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And the corpos and govs cry incessantly about not being given new victims to exploit and discard. The entitlement is disgusting.
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“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”
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Even if it wasn't already too late, the oligarchs profiting from the demise of the planet are in full control of information sources and politicians worldwide. The only way the planet survives is if humanity is wiped out through a global incurable plague at this point.
We have nobody but ourselves to blame for the reckoning that is coming after decades of voting against our own interests and choosing convenience of fossil fuels over the environment.
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It's no use going for collective blame and doomerism.
"We have nobody but ourselves to blame..." yeah, except that guy over there burning coal and guzzling fuel like there's no tomorrow. "The only way is to wipe humanity" ...or do something about it for once.
As long as we're here, no matter how bad it is, we have to step against it in the ways we can. It's not us who makes it so. We don't want that. And it's essential to make it a very clear and loud statement one can not turn away from.
Look up your local climate activist groups. See what can be done. Participate in protests. Do it.
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It’s no use going for collective blame and doomerism
Honestly, I think we could have done with a lot more doomerism. thisisfine.jpg-ism is the biggest reason why a political solution is impossible.
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yeah, except that guy over there burning coal and guzzling fuel like there’s no tomorrow
You mean the thing that allowed us to reach 8 billion and growing? There's no way you're getting from the 19th century to today without fossil fuels. You are here because of them. It's got nothing to do with "that guy" over there.
Unless you are in a log cabin you hewed yourself by hand, raise chickens with no feedstock that came from fossil-fuel powered agriculture, wear nothing but natural fibers and leather you tanned yourself with oak tannins, etc
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The planet will survive just fine, it has been through worse cataclysmic events, but humans may not be able to keep up with climate change and disappear along with other contemporary species.
The problem is that humanity can be wiped by the actions of a handful of individuals with the connivance of a majority. What you are proposing makes no sense at all.
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but humans may not be able to keep up with climate change and disappear along with other contemporary species.
Finally something cheerful.
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Gail Berman is to blame. She cancelled Firefly and doomed humanity in the process.
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Guys. Chill. The world will be fine. The planet will go on.
Humanity, on the other hand, is fucked.
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That depends on how you define world. I would include all life on the planet to be part of the world. We are actively killing biodiversity, wiping species from the earth, all from our direct negative contributions to the world.
So yea, the planet and life overall will find a way, but not all life that happened to live in the same era (and after) as humans
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Obviously.
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Humanity, on the other hand, is fucked.
We deserve it
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The problem is capitalism
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The old Soviet Union's environmental record wasn't great. And environmentalism was very low on the Dengist priority list.
Capitalism incentivizes industrial growth. But it was the "free" real estate of the colonial era and the massive surpluses of the industrial era that incentivized capitalism and created the illusion of unlimited economic expansion.
The problem is one of economic planning. Can we, as an intelligent advanced civilization, collectively manage the scarce resources of our planet? Or will a handful of individuals continue to divide and conquer the proletariat mass? Simply going socialist isn't enough. Bookchin will tell you that. Hell, Kropotkin will tell you that.
It isn't enough to merely establish a central and democratically managed local economy. We need a world wide organization capable of balancing the current demands against future resource constraints on the scale of centuries. And we need it to be equitably operated by a planetary consortium of committed socialist ideologues, not a handful of post-war juntas that run one another into the ground in another Cold War.
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Consumer-capitalism. Neither is great, but their combination is truly horrifying.
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-Sent from my iPhone
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there are people who literally believe in magic and avoid guilt in all capacities in favor for an afterlife free of repercussions
stop the proliferation of ideologies that support fairytale images of uniqueness and pursuit of boundless wealth, they lead to the most ugly behavior towards all other animals including other humans
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We all know we are fucked. I am living in the moment till it all ends and never having children. Humanity will destroy this planet long before it changes course.
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Covid convinced me we're done.
We couldn't even get people to wear a fucking mask to protect themselves from a disease they saw killing their neighbors. Shit - we can't get them to allow other people to wear a mask.
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The part that absolutely kills me about this is that there were anti-maskers during the 1918 "spanish flu" pandemic. This suggest that with two valid examples that this is a bad idea, people still chose to not do it. It also suggests that we're still the same society that we were 100 years ago.
https://www.history.com/articles/1918-spanish-flu-mask-wearing-resistance
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COVID (or more specifically, the response to it) was the turning point for me as well. The realization that we would not work together to manage a crisis.
If people won't do the easy shit, they sure as hell won't do the more difficult things that are needed to address climate collapse.
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Planet will be fine. Humanity and many other lifeforms? Not so much.
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Mass extinction event is all ready happening so yeah
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Only when we can step away from capitalism can we change course. Until then, the system locks everyone in and we're just tinkering with detail. And that step will be a rough one, but it is necessary.
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Yeah they're changing course... To go upwards even faster. 🤦♂️
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The next topic under this Post is that Texas sues Tylenol because of autism claims.
We're fucking doomed. Thats what I personally think and I really Wish and Hope that I'm wrong.
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Fuck it, start geoengineering. Snowpiercer actually looked kind of fun.
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Time to perfect the cockroach blend recipe
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Please no
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We already have one country fucking society, the climate, the economy, etc thanks to no regulations. We definitely should also let them obscure the fucking sun
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Country? Are you some sort of socialist? Keep the government out of it. We should pay Elon Musk and Bezos to do it.
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Tell that to Captain America.
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Haven't we missed it like 10 years ago?
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The target of staying under 1,5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average temperature within the century was set less than 10 years ago. It was considered ambitious but possible back then, and so many world leaders and governments agreeing to it in the Paris climate accord of 2015, was considered a major political achievement.
However, there have been uncountable political setbacks since. Aside from Donald Trump's two election wins and subsequent horror shows, we've gone through a pandemic that brought insane financial, monetary politics and crushing inflation, the Ukraine war and the advent of power hungry AI (that totally will be good for something and ain't no god dammed bubble, seriously stop calling it a bubble, bro, it's the future). All of which has reduced climate change to a niche topic that don't hold any sway over political elections in the rich countries responsible for the brunt of greenhouse gas emissions (directly or indirectly).
Less than 10 years ago we thought it would be possible to stay below that target over the coming 85 years. Less than 10 years later that target is declared dead by the secretary general of the UN.. Was it realistic then? Well, a lot of planning and climate policy has involved exceeding 1,5 degrees and then using massive deployments of imaginary future technologies to bring the climate back. Not exactly prudent reasoning.
Some countries are still sticking to their plans, kinda. Norway are making headways installing carbon capture technology on their off-shore oil rigs (!!!) so that they can keep drilling for fossil fuels with a smaller impact on their own reported national emissions.
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Not taking away from your larger point but mostly not inflation but profit taking. Early in COVID corporations holding functional monopolies learned demand was inelastic and commenced to price gouge.
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Yes, but we're still missing now too.
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Ah, good point. Let's see if we unmiss it in 2035.
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At this point it's a matter of how bad.
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Yes, but let's not forget that 1,5 degrees C was considered really bad to begin with.
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no, rhetoric only meant to motivate by fear turnt around into demotivation: helplessness.
look up Climate Clock to see the exact year.
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Lol yeah change course now because all the other warnings worked
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We are fucked.
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Thats been humanities lower back tattoo for a while now.
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Have more kids! Have pets! Don't worry, we'll just all move to Mars!
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It's over. Even if every single person and corporation did an about-face on this right now, inertia alone would carry us into the consequences this was intended to avoid. Enjoy it while it lasts.
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If everyone got together and came to the decision to fix the planet, it would probably still be possible, even though it'll likely get to a point where going outside is a complication. Generations, to be sure.
Though of course, we're never all going to agree on how to go about it, so you might be right.
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Uh huh, that was by design
Those Paris climate accords were literally useless, as it was nothing more but a kind suggestion.
Even when we would have made hard contracts we know that half the countries out there would have failed for a variety of reasons (most of them being a variety of "ah but I want to be re-elected and if I try to save the world, things will be slightly harder for my base, so I sign for yes, and then do no")
This was just a "well let's give it a try" and the US immediately borked out with Trump because now it's cool to have mentally deficient adults controlling countries.
Nobody with a brain ever believed that we'd his that 1.5 degree limit. Ik actually fairly confident that we'll get a two degree limit, which we'll crash right through, then we'll start producing CO2 harder and faster than ever before just to be sure we can take straight through the 3 and 4 degree limits that we'll set because politicians don't give a fuck about any of this, they only care about their reelection and the populace of countries that matter either can't do anything about it (hello China, how is Winnie today?) or just too fucking dumb to even understand the issue (hello USA, how is the Cheeto today?)
I honestly believe that we're in humanities end-times. Not the biblical ones, those were fairytales, but the real one that humanity made for itself. There is no one to blame but us. I think GenX will live to see how humanity dies out, because nobody will fix this obvious problem with obvious solutions, everyone who matters can only think about themselves so enjoy the days that we have left, all.
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Money buys power and influence and politicians react more to that than their own constituents. When money can bend reality and get people to vote against their own interests just to keep the status quo, there'll be no change.
I mean, for all the things we do right we get stuff like the Bezos wedding where everyone arrives via private jet or COP25 where everyone also arrives by private jet to discuss the climate.
We have Greta Thunberg who addressed the world leaders and voiced our discontent at their lack of action. Her views are not unique and are a reflection of many but yet, despite laying the truth bare and shaming leaders for their inaction, power and influence labels her as whatever they want to discredit her words and influence.
So, if we want to reverse things and change, we need to target the rich and tax them, shame them, eat them... Whatever it takes and only then will we be able to do something net positive. Doing 'our part' is not enough when the top 1% literally offsets all of our efforts everyday.
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There are many Great Filters, but this one is mine (ours).
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Whatever tiny hope of correcting this died when Trump was re-elected. It's been game over for a while now. That's not to say we shouldn't try to make a difference where we can, but it's too late for Earth.
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Whatever tiny hope of correcting this died when Trump was re-elected.
The bulk of greenhouse gas emissions are occurring outside the US. Americans have a far higher per-capita output but a relatively small gross population. Even then, the median American's emissions pale beside that of their billionaire neighbors.
If global change comes, it is going to have to come through the BRIICS, where the bulk of new industrial activity is taking place and the vast majority of emissions already occurs. Trump decoupling the US economy from the rest of the world and his inadvertent quest to tank the fuck out of the US consumer economy is (quixotically) working in favor of these ends.
It’s been game over for a while now.
The game isn't over, its simply changing. Areas of the world that were habitable will no longer be habitable. Mass migration began in earnest 20 years ago, at the outset of the Iraq War and near-total destabilization of the Middle East. Population growth globally has staled out due to exploding cost of living and economically engineered social isolation of the working class. Foodstuffs that we once considered staples - beef and almonds and oranges - are increasingly categorized as luxury goods.
But we've been in the Holocene Extinction Era for over 200 years. This is the sixth great extinction event in planetary history. And through it all, humans flourished. Hell, the advent of modern nitrogen fertilizers have made plant life flourish. The Earth isn't going anywhere. Humans aren't going anywhere (certainly not Mars, given how much more inhospitable it is than even the most nightmarish climate change scenarios). Life as we know it and human engineering as we've managed it are both far more stubborn and persistent than you're giving it credit for. We can endure at a much more efficient level of biome utility than we currently employ. We can persist at a scale of hundreds of millions rather than tens of billions.
But we're going to see sweeping changes. Really ugly ones. What we're seeing in Gaza today is the roadmap for the future of the Global South, unless they can organize and resist a modern western eugenics regime. There is going to be more war and more bombing and more industrial annihilation and more sophisticated efforts by one group of humans to massacre others.
That's probably good for the climate, long term. Not good for us or our kids or our grandkids, though.
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The world is being run by conservatives and fascists.
The world will not change course, humanity is borked.
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The good news is that it is still something we can deal with. I mean, to just give up is to let the current "owners of the world win" ( billionaires and gang).
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And how do we stop those billionaires?
The way that I see it, they won't stop by themselves. We either get politicians to finally stop them (highly doubtful) or the world citizens stop them by force.
What other solution is there?
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I mean honestly a fundamental restructuring of democracy in the US. We need a 3rd party in the US that can hijack the Democratic party apparatus without falling victim to its trappings in order to crack the first-past-the-post system; without that, capital has the oppressive power of the top 5 most funded militaries in human history. The US squats on any country that even thinks of not playing nicely with capital, and without that there can be no resistance to climate change.
Beyond that, you really just need to prepare. Blah blah, mutual aid, community defense, etc. I'm not gonna bore you with what you know, just reiterate that it WILL help when shit hits the fan. I guarantee you when your kids are getting conscripted into the water wars, you're gonna want to have enough community presence to push back.
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Billionaires should be afraid. They shouldn't be treated like humans. Don't serve them at restaurants. Give them a disgusting look every time you see one. Throwing shit at yachts should be a national past time. But what do people do? They treat them like gods and kiss their asses, because you never know, maybe they drop some crumbs for the peasants.
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bye bye world
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Time to come up with a new target we can miss.
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Over the course of the history of the planet, there have been several extinction events, and then over time, new life evolves from what remains creating new biodiversity. The only difference is that the mass extinction is being caused by an apex predator, (humans,) instead of a meteor, or volcano. The earth will incorporate plastic into the new ecology. It's already happening. We will go extinct by making the planet incompatible with human life; other life will exist and thrive.
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Your apathy and mental phlegm makes me furious. We don't "go extinct", billions and billions of sentient beings will suffer greatly for centuries to come because of it. More so with every bit of warming we are adding or preventing. It's far from over, this is barely beginning. So stop this doomer bullshit and take responsibility for your life and your actions.
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as you point out, it's human made and thus fails your comparison. it could have been avoided.
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Despite being human beings, we are still living organisms that evolved. Our species evolved intelligence which led to agriculture, industry, the industrial revolution, and our current ecological shitshow. In theory, we possess the intelligence to change course and attempt to fix things, but our collective greed and hubris will ensure that the capitalists end up ruling over a pile of smoldering ash from their bunkers. I'm not trying to downplay how badly we as a species have fucked up or how much damage we have done, just that evolution will continue despite us, even though we are the ones that pushed things in a certain direction.
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6th extinction...
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Dumb ways to die, so many dumb ways to die.
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I've always liked Antonio Gutteres. While a politician, he has been the most honest of them when it comes to climate change.
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eh, covering up Covid for China for a solid 6 months wasn't great.
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Gonna need to get those Coke-drinking polar bears a fridge...
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Yeah sure, tell that to the billionaires that are actively ruining the planet.
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Hot climate take: Having children is the most selfish thing possible.
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People told me that i'm not changing anything by not having kids and not eating meat and recycling or... Pretty much everything i do seem to annoy people. Oh yes, riding a bike, that riles some people up.
What do i care? I'm 40 with no kids, the world can turn into cinder for all i care. I'm not saving anyones environment, i do what feels right.
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weve known this for awhile and we know 2 is already unavoidable. We are going backwards when we have to be taking the most extreme actions we can to just slow it down.
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Oh, the UN. The international united-circus organization that no country gives a fuck about its laws or abide its rullings because the US government, represented by its pyscopathic oligarchs and paid politicians, can
veetoshit on anything they want as long as more data centers, more fossil-fuelled wars, larger militry budget, ... make them a little richer.-
The UN is a circus organization with no power by design. Because it's primary purpose is a keeping every country at the table no matter what for diplomacy, to reduce the odds of another world war
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Always makes me laugh reading stuff like the comment you replied to. The UN isn't a stick to beat countries with, it's primarily a round table to get otherwise-adversaries to talk.
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Of course we did bro, AI (or at least, the current use of the term) is here and no multinational conglomerate gives a fuck about the environment any more
It's not even about AI. It's just the next growth bubble to milk, there will be the next after.
It never stops.
Oh how I wish it really was.