Climate Change
GenderNihilismGirdle
Member Posts: 1,353
in Off-Topic
Since it came up in another thread, I thought I'd post something that puts the whole thing into pretty stark perspective (but with funny jokes!) and I'll pop a video commentary at the top of it by a climate scientist in case people are interested in someone in the field droning on for a few minutes over a funny comic highlighting what they like about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKAT8-qjQHw
Without further ado, the comic itself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKAT8-qjQHwWithout further ado, the comic itself:
17
Comments
The biggest thing anyone can do to regress global warming is to go vegan.
Besides, the world is boring, for the most part. We need some really dramatic event to happen to shake us out of our half-asleep doldrum. Supervolcano. Small meteor strike. Extraterrestrials. Something...anything.
Nah, no-one would be that stupid...
Seriously, though, we need to colonize the Solar System. Jerry Pournelle laid out a reasonable plan in his book A Step Farther Out. I like how he explains the costs of the various steps: "We could build an O'Neil colony at L5 for the cost of a medium sized war."
We live in a time (and have since the late 70s, we're just much better situated to do it now than we were then) where we could go post-scarcity very easily, but every sector of capitalist industry around the globe artificially enforces scarcity to ensure they can keep charging for what we actually have in such abundance that the idea of charging for it is basically patently monstrous and inhuman if you consider basic human needs being met as more important than the accumulation of capital (which, in order to stay competitive in a top-down, anti-democratic, authoritarian economic system like capitalism, you basically have to prioritize over human lives, which puts us in many of our current pickles).
Warehouses full of food go to rot because agribusiness wants to price fix and avoid flooding the market with goods they want to be able to charge more for than they could if the market was filled with what is actually being produced, and people starve as a result of these capital over human lives choices made on the daily. The companies that don't make these choices don't make the big profits and lose market share to the ones who do.
We're not over population capacity on Earth, and wouldn't be if Earth's population doubled. The problems are problems of logistics and distribution (and capital accumulation over humans lives), not population issues.
The same can be said of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions contributing to our inevitable (at this stage, barring Deus Ex Scientia at the last minute with a miracle cure we haven't invented yet) ecological devastation(s) that are bearing down on our children (or in my case, nephews/nieces) and their children. The energy industry is loathe to switch to eternally, infinitely renewable resources while they've got things they can charge for due to their non-renewable character, the consequences of continuing to use them be damned if you can justify making more money that way.
I don't think we necessarily have to stay at exactly the same temperature forever, but a good rule of thumb for maintaining a healthy environment is that climate change should be gradual. Aside from storms, changing temperatures also mean extinctions (not every organism on the planet is as flexible as we are), and extinctions tend to have effects wider than individual species.
We can tolerate a certain amount of environmental chaos. We can also tolerate a certain amount of economic and technological change. I'd prefer the latter; humans have proven very good at handling it. strawmen.
I'd go with nuclear energy and a shift in agricultural practices away from livestock. There are more ways to mitigate climate change (the nice thing about our situation is that the alternatives have already been invented), but I think those would be the most practical.
What about you guys?
I say this as a vegan: please stop saying that the ecological devastation of entire sectors of industry full of organizations who each outpollute entire continents on their own can be beaten by individual agency of people and households.
The individual agency that would actually matter is people stopping sectors of industry, democratically, from doing things they do without any kind of democratic oversight. Which is pretty damn near impossible without literally forcing the people in charge of those companies, especially the industry leaders of each sector of industry globally, to step down and be replaced with elected representatives whose job it is to do our will, rather than their own will and that of investors/shareholders concerned with profits and maintaining competitiveness in the market vs other companies.
This is especially true when it comes to the big industry leaders (in any industry, not just energy and agribusiness), where these tend to be the biggest investor priorities (profitability, competitiveness, position within the industry at large, etc are sometimes just consolidated under things like "profitability" but some companies do more comprehensive investor surveys), even if the environment or "the consumer" rank at all, they consistently rank under concerns about outcompeting other companies and making more money for them as investors/shareholders, even if they are also investors or shareholders in similar companies (which makes sense if you think of them wanting to be investors in all the industry leaders and profit from whoever is on top no matter who it happens to be...people's lives and the environment just don't factor into those kinds of formulas without hobbling the company's effectiveness at staying at the head of the pack, which in turn means companies whose investors gain a conscience quickly find their stock index giving them frowny faces that once again begin to trump human lives or ecological considerations).
Eugenics and genocide have actually been practiced within the past century, although not necessarily for "population control" reasons (well, eugenics was explicitly about controlling certain populations - disabled people and people of color primarily). They're the easy answers to the question the other poster raised.
The problem isn't "too many people" at any rate, as @GenderNihilismGirdle pointed out.
But not because we're "overpopulated" lmao
I said, if a person wants to make a difference in global warming, it isn't to buy a hybrid car and only do your laundry after midnight and taking 2 minutes less in the shower or take public transit.
It isn't ranting about corporations or governments adopting toothless laws. It isn't about signing petitions or going to rallies to scream and make a scene for tv cameras.
It isnt making silly cartoons that help illustrate the problem to the masses.
It is to stop eating meat. Not only is ot healthier for a person, but it is healthier for the environment. It is a statement in itself, a boycott so you will, to the the world's leading polluters. The main reason why the Amazon is still being clear cut today is for livestock and the food to feed them.
So whenever the topic of global warming comes up, I challenge people who are for reducing emissions to stop eating meat. If you cant do that, do not expect corporations to give up something they need for survival.
You have to address these issues at a systemic level, individual and household consumer choices barely register. I'm not saying "don't do it", I'm a vegan after all. I'm just saying it won't be enough, and "making a statement" in that lifestyle-driven way doesn't actually make the statement that will change the way the industry does things.
I'm vegan, but I don't pretend it makes any difference in the global scheme of things, because it doesn't. It wouldn't even if I grew my own food and only ate that, but a vanishingly small percentage of vegans can or will do that. It's not like the supermarket I buy my groceries from goes "oh no!! don't use the money THAT customer gave us to restock the dairy cases or the deli!! they're a VEGAN!!" like my money that I use to eat still goes to animal products whether I want it to or not (again unless I grew and ate in a self-sufficient way entirely of my own crops, which I don't and no vegan I know does).
Just complain?
Hope for a natural disaster?
Have heated discussions on random message boards?
Nothing?
You brought up two positions that (1) no one is making, and then (2) criticized them rather than a real claim. This isn't a gray area; this is just what you said. It fits both requirements for being a straw man.
A curious thing is that some people actually have said the problem is "too many people." But even their solution isn't eugenics or genocide--it's expanding access to birth control!
There are folks who would support genocide and/or eugenics, but like you said, it's not to solve climate change.
Well, okay.
There was ONE guy who advocated genocide to stop climate change.
Samuel L. Jackson.
In the movie Kingsman.
He was a great villain.
We can be activists pushing for what we can do. It's not that we're totally helpless, but putting that much weight on individual people's shoulders doesn't really work.
Things *not* to do:
get hysterical on a message board
support people who think that climate change deniers should be met with civil and/or criminal penalties--just because someone disagrees with you doesn't make their position "wrong" (in 99.9% of all cases)
try to implement a one-size-fits-all solution onto every country--the situation in Albania is going to be different than the situation in Zambia
project only negative consequences from any change in global climate. Why are these changes only ever presented as negatives? Isn't anyone trying to find any positive outcomes from it?
Anyway...there aren't too many humans so population isn't a factor. What *is* a factor is our propensity to cram too many of us into too small an area and think that this could somehow be a good thing. Our major cities are, truthfully, unsustainable as they currently exist. We should spread out more, give each other a little more breathing room, and space to exist.
As I mentioned in my earlier post with regard to artificial scarcity if you read that, companies love to have something be scarce enough (whether that's true or not) for them to ratchet up the price whenever they want to make more money (which goes to those at the very top of the energy industry rather than the people actually working to extract and process it), and in this case it's a golden goose: oil actually IS scarce, they don't have to employ artifice to get us to pay more for it (but they do anyway)!
I mean really, why should we have to pay for sunlight? For wind? The heat that has always been (and will be until the Sun goes red dwarf) locked inside the Earth's core? Pay for construction and maintenance to the stuff that captures it and turns it into energy, sure, but it's not the same as oil and gas where that's factored into the base price but the actual resource itself needs to be extracted and then additional processing from the crude form to become useful makes up most of how you get price-gouged at the pump, and neither sun nor wind now geothermal will ever actually run out.
Energy companies maintain themselves primarily as oil companies despite sitting on patents for blueprints for all kinds of renewable energy technology, as we know from disgruntled ex-researchers who worked on those projects to prove their viability with nice fat corporate paycheques and corporate funding only to be dumped unceremoniously as soon as the company secured the patent and filed it away for the post-oil era (which won't arrive before massive ecological devastation kicks off anyway, more than likely). Lots of people go into renewable energy field work as scientists and engineers with nary a worry about how capitalism functions in their head, and quickly realize that their dreams of solving energy crises around the globe are being actively stopped by profit motives from the very energy corporations who offer the best funding for that kind of research.
We'll all be worrying about the ways in which capitalism has functioned, is functioning and will continue to function as an economic system soon enough, even those of us who could care less until it directly impacts us, although some of the older members of these boards might be dead before it gets Hollywood apocalypse movie levels of bad or worse.
How would we get them to stop short of a revolution to abolish the current way of doings things, economically? Reformists have tried to reform capitalism for centuries now, and so far the only times we've managed to get it to work have been when masses of people in the streets have been willing to get into fistfights with cops. People's willingness to do more than just "scream for the cameras" was what won us those victories. I agree that merely screaming at a protest does nothing, violence is the answer, as it always has been in fights against an unjust state or corporations. Those days are long behind us, especially now that cops are as militarized as they are compared to the 19th and early 20th centuries when you might actually survive an encounter like that (which is also when a lot of those reforms were won). But a lot of those reforms are clawed back all the time these days, in part because of a protest movement that's been defanged and far too peaceful for decades and decades now (and lately, in large part because they wouldn't fear violent protests and revolts even if they happened since the police have become more militarized).
I fully expect to have to live through billions, including children and infants, dying from ecological shifts that make human habitability untenable across much of the globe with a swiftness that people can't escape in time to save themselves, even if we manage to somehow avoid cascading ecosystem collapse (and I doubt we will, which would then mean life in general would be untenable across ALL of the globe, not just human habitation across most of it).
As a side note, I hold no illusions about democratic forms of economics actually under the control of people who do the work replacing authoritarian forms of economics. I mean, just look at the authoritarian socialist mode of production that replaced the burgeoning economic democracy of the soviets that emerged in 1917-18 in the U.S.S.R. (Lenin squashed those as soon as he could after getting to Russia after the Revolution was finished, so I hold a special loathing in my heart for Leninists who say Stalin messed up the Russian Rev...like, Stalin got his template from Lenin and just slammed his foot on the pedal of that monstrosity, chewing through working class people left right and center, which is hardly communist or socialist).
People who want power over the economic and political spheres will always find a way to negate democratic control, whether by assuming a bureaucracy as default like capitalism or installing one to "oversee" people who ousted those above them as in the case of Lenin's grip tightening on the free federation of soviets he wanted under central power. I mean, we're all familiar with authoritarian power in economics always having more influence over political democracy than the people who do the voting (which means as a political form it shouldn't be called a democracy, since demos and kratos are people and power, maybe capitalocracy is more accurate for what we've got since the kratos of the demos isn't nearly as influential in capitalist "democracies" as the kratos of capital).
As long as we don't dump bosses off our backs and keep them off, establishing democratic forms of economic organization to replace the authority of unelected board rooms, CEOs and so on, this problem keeps cropping up. The French Revolutionaries cut the head off of political authority and tried to replace it with political democracy, but stopped short of continuing with the bankers, the oil barons, the steel magnates, and the other members of the nascent capitalist class who then subsequently exerted undue influence over those sparks of democracy and shaped the flame to their liking, a tradition authoritarians in the economy continue to this day. That one big mistake, and the subsequent failures of all revolutionary anti-authoritarian political forces who couldn't manage to overturn authoritarianism in the economy, has cost all of us living today literally everything.
But I don't really think a Revolution tomorrow that spanned the entire globe, in economic and political spheres alike, could solve the problem. We'd just be living in a cancerous utopia, destined to wipe us out but without the boot on our necks telling us to pay to eat when we have abundance...until we no longer had the abundance we could have been enjoying these past several decades because of crop conditions worsening to the extent we can't grow anything.
Again, unless there's a Deus Ex Scientia as I said in a comment above. And under capitalism, I wouldn't be surprised if we died ironically, with patents for all kinds of fully funded, researched and proven solutions languishing on shelves due to lack of profitable opportunities for deployment, and still languishing there after every ape has long gone extinct, homo sapiens included. That's maybe where a global attempt to get economic democracy going might actually be useful: the instantaneous spreading of Miracle Cures that might otherwise stay hidden from view with an authoritarian global economy motivated more by profit than the survival of our species. I'm not holding my breath for miracles though, scientific or otherwise.
Economic democracy is the answer, not arguing on message boards or complaining or becoming vegan or nothing at all. But on my end of things I'm mostly just waiting until either a) I die or b) for enough people to wake up to the horrors of authoritarianism not just politically, as in fascism, but also economically, as in capitalism. Which is a kind of nothing at all, given that I'm mostly just waiting to die since I don't hold out a utopian hope of people actually getting their collective $#!^ together.
Once (or if, as it's a pretty big if) we all get fed up enough with authoritarianism to actually make sure political and economic democracy are hand-in-hand everywhere, I'll be right there ready to implement it in my neighbourhood, my workplace and my community generally, and just as ready to fight tooth and nail to supplant unelected hierarchies like board rooms and CEOs with a democratic implementation of the economy that spreads the decision-making among everyone (if possible) or at least electing people rather than letting unelected Directors and Chairmen of Boards, or unelected CEOS, COOs, CFOs, etc, or unelected Presidents and VPs of Sales and Marketing and HR and whatever else maintain themselves and leech off the profits and surplus value generated by the people doing the actual work...if all those positions were abolished and their decision-making powers devolved to the people who actually do the work that their decisions affect, I think that'd be ideal. Horizontal, leaderless democracy is much better than delegating a hierarchy IMHO. But I'm perfectly content to elect those positions democratically as a replacement for the current system where there's little to no transparency and zero democracy, even if it's not what I'd prefer. Anything's better than what we've got. Top-down, authoritarian ways of running things are b.s. politically and b.s. economically, and the way that b.s. trickles down tends to coat us all in that smelly stuff while they wipe their behinds clean with currency. That is true of political authoritarianism and most people accept that, but for some reason the suggestion that you might want to spend most of your waking hours in a given week in a democratic workplace that you co-own and co-manage rather than an authoritarian one is scandalous in a "democracy". It's hard to say you live in a democracy when you spend most of any day asleep and at work, given that the waking piece of that isn't lived or experienced in a democratic work environment for the vast majority of people around the world.
If we actually controlled economic organizations like companies from the bottom-up, we wouldn't be seeing the kinds of abuses that happen regularly. Even things unrelated (or more tangentially related anyway) to the environment, like jobs going overseas to places that pay their workers an inhumanly low wage (the incentive of which is, you guessed it, capital accumulation for the company at the expense of the workers! gee isn't capitalism a gas?) wouldn't happen if those workers were the ones in control of their company's business decisions. They wouldn't vote to end all their jobs and so there wouldn't be an economic incentive for other countries to treat their populace like garbage to entice foreign investment. A democratic economy would be a more human economy, and would encourage and incentivize more human choices than one centered around capital accumulation. Which is exactly why capitalism gets more and more inhuman as time goes on, and learns to use PR to put up a nice mask. Oh, that company that polluted the Gulf has a rainbow icon during Pride month! What a progressive monster, I guess we can't hate it now!
And again, I think a swarm of forms of economic democracy are bound to flourish once/if we topple capitalism. I don't think it'll be One World Under Glorious Soviet Authoritarian Communist Iron Fist, because democratic solutions naturally embrace and utilize diversity in ways authoritarian forms can't (and this was true of the U.S.S.R. as well, immediately after the Rev the soviets were democratic workplaces, and Lenin's lackeys became oversight to that system and it became state capitalism, something Lenin himself admitted, so really the problem with the U.S.S.R. was that it was too capitalist not that it was too communist, but unless you actually read stuff on this subject, which most right-wing "anti-communists" don't, you never learn this stuff).
Capitalism can't accept formulas that are more democratic without relegating them to trinkets or showpieces to show off that they can endure small businesses that are run by the people who work there...as a system it's just not ever going to let those kinds of companies get to the top, since they aren't willing to do whatever it takes to accumulate the capital to prove themselves the top in that industry. Humans are infinitely creative, and I know we'd find all kinds of solutions to these problems if we could ditch authoritarian economics, so I highly doubt it'd be a one-size-fits-all solution. But for now, capitalism is the one size that pretends it fits all, even when we can see plainly the apocalyptic effects on the horizon it is even now whipping up for us.
But it's very probably too late for all that stuff under the cut anyway, we needed to get that going decades ago for it to have meant anything.
The fact that we're all doomed isn't all that hard to see, it's just that the irrational among us cling to irrational ideas about how it could change the same way people with stage 4 cancer in their marrow and lymph nodes might irrationally hope beyond hope that they become the first person to survive that diagnosis in human history. The solutions I ranted about in the spoiler'd section would have worked in the 90s or earlier. We're pretty well screwed now unless the Magic Wand of Science gets waved in a way we don't yet know how to wave it, and I'm not holding my breath for that.
That's not me saying that's the solution, that's just me saying it's too late for viable solutions. Climate scientists largely switched their stance from "this is what needs to be done to prevent ecological devastation" to "this is what needs to be done to mitigate the effects of ecological devastation" during the last decade, and that is going to get more and more depressing as time goes on. They say dentists have one of the highest suicide rates of any group of degree-holding professionals, I wouldn't be surprised if climate scientists overcome them by a lot in the next 30 years.
I just posted the infographic because it seems we have a few people on here who think climate denialism has any grounding in the data or the science used to interpret that data, not because I was trying to rally people to action. There's no action we can do that will stop the disasters at this point, just actions that might hold them off for a tiny bit longer and might make them slightly less bad as they roll in, which might buy us the time we need to get an economic democracy rolling so we can more effectively spread solutions that haven't been developed yet when they might come at some point in the future.
But I don't recommend any of those as solutions to climate change wiping lots of us out as it worsens. I just like 'em is all!
Possible solution?
There's also the hypothesis that global warming is resulting due to the lack of pirates. But I'm sure everyone already knows this.
Syria is a good example. The drought made many farmers move into cities to try to get money to provide for their families. The cities got crowded, food ran out, the dictator panicked and tried to get control. The masses rose up, civil war broke out. At least this is considered true by many, but of course (as always) debated by others so I won't even link to articles supporting my belief since it's so easy finding others refuting them.
Anyways, the point is, why bother saving people of we are wasting our planet while doing it? We have six billion humans but only one planet. If I had to make a choice whom to protect, I would choose the planet without a second of doubt.
Your point about climate change not being only negative is naive. Climate change will of course affect people differently depending on where we live, so the countries first affected by it will be countries that struggle already today. For people in places like N.america and W.Europe the effects will come long after other areas has been affected. The waves of migration we've seen in Europe has been argued by some to be only the beginning and that we might start to see a relocation of people on a massive scale soon.
Damn, I had more to write but my manager had the indecency to come into my office and interrupt me with work-related questions! Haha.. so I forgot what more I had intended to write
The first about means and results. Mahatma Gandhi told something like "if you grow an apple tree you can not expect to gather pears", means and results are deeply related. I completely agree. French revolution did lead to terror age and then to Napoleon's imperialism and wars, Russian revolution did lead to oppressive dictatorship, riots and revolutions are not the way, even if they try to correct wrong things. A true and lasting change can only happen if people, enough people, expand his consciousness, only then, like a chain reaction, a real change can happen, once a certain critical mass is reached.
That is why I think that riding a bike instead of driving a car, or being vegan instead of eating meat, can be really useful. If enough time is left to us to operate such change before everything collapses, and probably is not so.
The second is that the corporations, or better worded who has really the control over mass media, have at disposal very good crowd control spells to avoid this, and that they are using them, to keep us in an ignorant and unaware state, it is a relevant part of their business model.
The third is that some things are way more important than what they appear to be to most of the people. I make an example: bees. They are not only useful to us because they give us (or we take from them) honey. They are the most important specie in the planet, related to environmental issues. They are providing pollination, their extinction or a relevant reduction of their number would have a tremendous effect on the environment, causing the extinction or relevant reduction of 1/2 of the plant species.
And bees are actually at a real risk of extinction, not for climate changes, but for other men induced factors. Here in Europe the Varroa mite and fowl pest, not originally present, are decimating them. And the chemicals used in modern agriculture are doing the rest.
We humanity are like wizard's apprentice Mickey Mouse, with an immense power to operate changes and very few knowledge of the consequences.
EDIT:
One more: hypnotized as we are we lack to see very obvious things. I remember when I was in primary school, half a century ago, only very few people was suffering from some form of allergy or food intolerance. Maybe one person on average in a schoolroom, nowadays a relevant part of the people that I know has such problems.
But we don't care, we consider it normal, if we even notice it.
If we were more aware, less hypnotized, we would ask ourselves why, and who owns the patents of so many new chemical molecules, that drive crazy our immune system, molecules that we breath, ingest and touch continuously, don't want us to be aware of that, to keep us hypnotized is part of their business model.
Doom-and-gloom apocalypse scenarios because of climate problems are boogeymen designed to scare schoolchildren. The rest of us have to deal with *real* problems like militarization of the police--did you know that school districts have received 5.56mm and 7.62mm semi-automatic rifles as hand-me-downs from the Dept. of Homeland Security? Why would school districts need such things? Why would local police departments in small cities need armored vehicles designed to withstand IEDs?--or continued economic disparity--the people in charge of micromanaging the economy game the system to their own benefit or the benefit of their corporate sponsors--or for-profit prisons--to maximize profits the corporations must have a steady influx of "criminals" to fill beds, thus benefiting from other people's misery via incarceration--or ethnic cleansings in Africa, where you risk being killed just because you were born to the "wrong" tribe, or human trafficking. None of these problems are because the climate isn't what it was 500 years ago.
If I sometimes come across as condescending or as if I trivialize climate change...well, that is because I truthfully think it *is* a trivial problem that isn't worth serious consideration. So what if the sea levels rise or green belts change location? Human beings will have the same fundamental choice we have always had--adapt or die. The only chance we have for long-term survival as a species is to get off-planet as quickly as possible. One sufficiently-sized meteor and there won't be a planet left.
I know many people who are concerned about the issue, though, would like for everyone to stop using oil-based products (on a side note, we need to quit calling it "fossil fuel" because most crude oil is created geologically, not as a result of decaying organic matter buried deep in the ground but that is a topic for another thread). I will have to find the link to this source (it exists on another forum where I am the mod) but covering less than 1% of the surface area of the planet with solar panels completely fulfills the energy requirements currently used by the worldwide electric grid. Certainly using 1% of the surface area is a reasonable solution, yes? No more burning coal, no more need for biomass, and no more nuclear plants (ironically, their safety record is better than that of coal plants).