nah it's natural

A lot of ordinary people, both young and old, bought, and are still buying into the lies of corporate America because our media is controlled by corporations.

Denial, indeed!

I keep hearing this argument and its such a cop out. People are intelligent enough to understand they can make a difference by dropping their financial contribution to the key players in climate change.

they just don't want to because they're selfish

Aaaaaaaaah i hate that this is what we say to that argument!! Why does it end there? Like "its the megacorporations." Oh ok then nobody is to blame.

No. Actually The megacorporations are to blame. Attack. The megacorps are run by people (so far) but if you kill one lackey, the corp replaces them (without mourning I might add), so how can anyone attack the corp and not the people? The law? No it stops there?

Huh, so these mega evil entities are destroying the planet? Huh. Well doesn't look like anything to me? Yet they can lobby and decide laws? Is that how good we are at fighting then?

They are pure demonic world eaters and have lobbyed to become legal persons. To be the only entities without soul that can be considered a legal person in our legal system. If that system is broken to that degree.. well, if they are persons, then they can bleed. And die. I am not this weak at fighting for my planet

Also a degree of survivorship bias.

Fossil fuel lobbyists coordinated with lawmakers behind the scenes and across state lines to push and shape laws that are escalating a crackdown on peaceful protests against oil and gas expansion, a new Guardian investigation reveals.

The folks that are "doing something" end up assaulted by police, arrested, jailed, and periodically maimed or killed while engaged in active resistance. These incidents of industry-coordinated state oppression go under-reported or propagandized into "eco-terrorism" in such a way that any kind of opposition to the industry is painted as extremist and counter-productive.

When your only legal options are "try to recycle harder and maybe buy more Greenwashed merch" and "Go full denialist, embrace fossil fuel propaganda, and roll some coal on a Prius", the outside observer is going to assume nothing is being done. Instead, real material efforts are simply being thwarted.

You're committing a worse sin. You're fighting the culture war for the powers that be.

Well pick up your gun and go do something I guess

It has the handy acronym of ARGH.

Okay, that is hilarious.

I'm just going to call it "the climate shitshow" at this point, with how cooked we seem to be.

Love it.

Yes there are some upsides

I would say 10 of relative comfort, another 5-10 of increasing disasters (political, social, environmental, etc.) that tear apart civilization, and a final 5-10 of complete collapse where only small isolated communities still exist, and every day is a real struggle for survival against exceptionally hostile conditions.

Honestly, most scientific projections of resource exhaustion and environmental degradation point to 2050 as the point beyond which “civilization” really ceases to exist.

And honestly, I would be shocked if humanity still existed as any kind of a high-tech going concern much past that.

Depends a lot on where you are from. Not everyone has the means to uproot and move to a walkable city or a city with public transport.

Our governments have fundamentally failed us

...and in the past we were fighting and losing to similar billionaire corporatist figures.

well, those who are born in 2010 can't vote, and those born in 1997 can vote. Some of them are too young to vote and some are not. So they're entering voting age.

Well the last couple of years still can't vote, so I imagine that's what they meant

Perhaps "just entering" was an overstatement.

Wikipedia has the Gen-Z range from 1997-2012, so they're 13-28. This year, about 68% are eligible to vote; something over 50% were eligible to vote in the last presidential election, and one statistic I saw claimed they made up only about 8% of the total vote. They are, however, the biggest generation in history, ever. Given that the birth rates in the US stopped climbing and started falling in 2007, it's conceivable that they may be the biggest generation ever, forever.

In any case, statistically, young people vote at far lower rates than older; 18-29 (GenZ, at the moment) vote around 50%. At around 30 it's 60%, and by 65 it's over 70%.

So, given that some 65% of Gen Z are eligible to vote, and statistically about half of them will at this age bracket, that's only about 35% of Gen Z voting. That number will grow over three next decade and become the dominant number, but right now it's fairly small... hence "just entering voting age."

You're right, my wording wasn't accurate; the meaning was.

Ancillarily, births in the US peaked at 4.3M births in 2007 and have been declining since; they haven't hit 4M again since, and are down to 3.6M in 2025, below 1994 (3.9M) levels.

I agree! I don't think we can vote out way out, not in one fell swoop.

We need to vote locally, and support voting reform efforts. If we can normalize IRV at the local level, so that people lose their fear of the unknown, we have a chance to get it into congressional elections, and that's where real change will happen. Eventually, ideally, we get rid of the electoral college and use IRV in presidential elections, and then we might see a surprise third party win. We can do most of this without constitutional changes.

But, can we survive as a country long enough to get there? It's a long road, and I don't know.

My numbers were mixed in the previous post; I was mixing total global and total annual use. I'm sorry about that; the numbers looked off but I didn't catch the time scale difference.

AI companies are projected to use 1kTWh in 2025. Transportation is projected to use 1.2TWh, industry, 1.1TWh. Bitcoin, everyone's favorite whipping-boy, is estimated to use only 173TWh globally, a mere 17% of AI. Residential is only 800TWh, 4.5x Bitcoin, but 80% of AI. Commercial is less, at 600TWh.

These all come from different sources: homeinst.org and Deloitte are the main ones, but the Bitcoin stat comes from Cambridge and the EIA (eia.gov), and the AI industry number comes from an MIT and backed by a different Deloitte report.

The industrial sector is the largest energy user, but AI is a close third just below transportation.

I was surprised that cryptocurrency energy use was so relatively small, given the hysteria. Bitcoin alone is 173TWh, far smaller than all of the sectors, and a fraction of AI; but even adding all of the other cryptocurrencies, the estimated consumption rises only to 215TWh. That pushes it past the smallest user, the agriculture sector sitting at 200TWh, but still well below everything else.

AI is the third largest energy consumer, annually, globally.

Transportation is moving in the right direction atm, even if it is slow. AI is going the wrong direction.

I think they're intent wasn't to take away from any other issues we have but to say that we have another burgeoning issue which if it continued to grow at scale could be as damaging as our other major contributors.

Now we have the the education and first-hand experience to understand the impact and scope of the issue and despite this have still showed no reluctance.

How much faith do you have that dems under Gore would have fought the republicans and their own donors when they were complacent letting the republicans steal the election?

For my part, I live in a rural area and raise my own chickens for meat and eggs. I buy fresh meat and veggies from local farmers. My whole household works from home which helps reduce my car footprint but I still drive a gas vehicle once or twice a week because we don’t have mass transit and biking is unsafe due to lack of infrastructure and big US trucks. There are a good 4 months a year that I don’t use AC or heat in my house and just open the windows. I don’t leave things on when I’m not using them. For work I use a raspberry pi and/or a tablet instead of a monster gaming pc.

I’m not going to feel guilty for my lifestyle, I do a lot more to reduce my impact than the average person.

Ideally we would all live in tiny, energy efficient capsules and work within a mile of our residence while consuming responsibly farmed foods. That way the entire population can suffer in order to offset the pollution caused by unregulated industry.

Yeah, my daily driver for work is a raspberry pi. I still use active cooling though.

Reactors would be helpful in this situation honestly. They only emit steam

You're selling AI short. It also guzzles water at a rate that could make a golf course blush.

Water holds 8 times the gasous CO2 as the atmosphere it is exposed to at a given pressure(altitude). The algae, being carbon-based, pulls the carbon from the water to grow, and releases the oxygen as a biproduct. The algae biomass can then be condensed and stored, or used as a raw agriculture material. Water, sunlight, and a small amount of fertilizer all fed by an air pump.

https://youtube.com/@narcimalgae

And yet, I still recycle because what the hell else can I do? Just give up and send to landfill? Or hope in the dark that it's going to recycling.

We already reuse and reduce, I have some clothing from over 20 years ago.

Yeah. It just feel really pissy, that we're guilted into not taking the car to work. While coal plants are just spewing out all day.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do what we can. That's what the individual can do. I'm just really pissed on all the shit talk from politicians.

There's 256 coal power plants in Europe. Until politicians have made sure they've all closed down, THEN they can start talking about raising tax on fuel for ordinary people, on an environmental basis.

Until such time. They have not done enough themselves. It feels like I'm scooping out water from a boat, and instead of fixing the leak, I'm told I'm not scooping out enough water.

Correct! Insects have spiracles that basically passively exchange air. Max size is basically determined by this.

IIRC, some caterpillars only stop growing and pupate when they run out of a growth hormone.

I always wondered what would happen if you grew them in a high oxygen tank and supplemented their diet with the hormone.

Maybe get a Mothman that way.

Yes, AI is sucking up all the immediate term cheap fossil-fuel energy while it can. But it needs more, so it’s driving carbon-free investment.

Nah, this is the same nonsense lie cryptobros tried to peddle. Any energy used by AI is energy which could have been used for something more worthwhile, carbon-free or not. And most of it is far from carbon-free.

AI demand is driving huge investment in production of carbon-free energy at scale

I feel like AI companies are creating a large demand for energy no matter where it comes from, and feel like having some minor investments in potential carbon free energy is mainly a marketing ploy or something to point at if they ever get sued.

Immediate term with Small Modular fission Reactors (SMRs)

Tbh, the big problem with nuclear in america is that we don't really have the federal power needed to actually coordinate and mandate the needed infrastructure for it. The US is so obsessed with state rights that we're susceptible to nimby attacks and disputes at the local and State level governments.

To actually cut through the red tape, we'd have to empower federal agencies for a good reason for once, and I'm not very optimistic about our current political climate.

and immediate term, multiple commercial fusion energy plants are being built.

Yeah..... I think it would be more accurate to say that fusion experimental sites are being built. Most nuclear engineers I've heard talk about fusion are still skeptical about fusion being viable in the next 20 years.