We're getting cooked. I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills - AC's running non-stop. That's crazy, because I live in the area where you can't even walk to buy a piece of bread - we drive all the time. I fully expect for businesses very soon to operate at night. Costco, Walmart, groceries, even libraries will be working all night in places like Arizona, Texas and some parts of California.
Yes, let's look at "Asia" (as if that's some meaningful grouping in this context when the countries are so different culturally, geographically, and economically).
Since 2005, a huge amount of US manufacturing and resource processing (both large emitters) have been outsourced (largely to Asia, and more specifically China). Our economy doesn't function without these imported emissions, yet they don't count as "US emissions". Even excluding these emissions, the US makes up 4% of the world population and emits 13% of world emissions. Asia makes up 60% of the world's population and emits 52% (more than 3x less per-capita than the US). If you actually consider that the countries in Asia are vastly diverse, you'll find the large majority of these emissions are from China (from said manufacturing and resource processing), and India for example emits far less than its share of the population.
This also completely ignores that the effects of warming are from cumulative emissions (not just point-in-time emissions) because CO2 doesn't just disappear every year. As a share of historical emissions, Europe comes off far worse than Asia per capita, and the US even worse than Europe.
Even despite this, at least China (and the rest of Asia to a lesser extent) is investing in clean energy. China produces > 80% of the world's solar panels and > 70% of the world's lithium batteries. Meanwhile, in the US the administration is doubling down on subsidies for fossil fuels and issuing stop-work orders on renewable energy projects already under construction.
And because I know I have to give this disclaimer these days: I am no apologist for everything else wrong with China and their authoritarian government. But I can't bear this attitude of absolving ourselves of blame for climate change because some other continent has a bigger number than us.
American gas is not cheap. In absolute-numbers-sense, it's comparable to the current prices in Russia. And by all means and for all the different reasons, one would expect gasoline to be enormously expensive there right now. Far more expensive than in the States. It doesn't seem to be the case.
Yes it is. I don’t know why you picked Russia to compare to. Russia’s government heavily intervenes in markets to keep prices low, including subsidizing refineries and banning exports at times. The fact that our prices are as low as theirs means our gas is cheap.
I feel like you have not watched any videos of what's going on there right now. People lining up to buy any gas, and those lines are miles long, sometimes they have to wait for 8-10 hours. The crisis now causing shortages in neighboring countries - Central Asian republics and Mongolia. Average gas prices jumped considerably - 8-10x, and you'd think, well, how expensive the gas then? And it's about $4 per gallon. So, just like I said - the "cheap" American gas is comparable to the most expensive gas in modern history of Russia. Of course, there's purchasing power parity and other factors, that's why I said "in absolute-numbers-sense".
> and you'd think, well, how expensive the gas then? And it's about $4 per gallon. So, just like I said - the "cheap" American gas is comparable to the most expensive gas in modern history of Russia.
You have completely missed the point. The gas is cheap due to the government forcing it to be.
If the prices were set by the free market, it would not be $4 per gallon with shortages causing lines to stretch 10 hours long.
Russia also has 1/3 the median household income of the US. So in parity adjusted dollars they’re paying something closer to 3X as much as you for gas. Not the same amount.
Yes, that's why I mentioned all that - the parity and it not being the same amount. But I stand corrected - my initial claim of "US gas is not cheap" was incorrect. I just needed to look up "How US gas prices compare to the global average" and the answer is "significantly cheaper". I apologize for wasting your time. I got distracted by what's going on in Russia in the context of gasoline pricing.
Haha. I guess you imagined "Deep Dive Dubai" or something? My pool is basically an oversized bathtub. We would've called it exactly that if it was installed inside the house.
Have you never used a garden hose? Do you know that a regular, average hose left running overnight can waste like 5,000 gallons of water? My HOA enforces a rule - you must keep at least two trees per household. Trees need water. Not that much, of course, I shared the overnight hose number just for the sense of measure. Now you do the math - couple of trees, bathrooms, showering, drinking, cooking - that water usage adds up.
No, I meant exactly in the petrol sense. Darn americanims - you never know if gas is gasoline, or poison, anesthetic, or flatulence, or you're just being gaslighted.
Even if you’re driving a Prius and getting 50mpg, if you’re “driving all the time” you’re spending at least $100 a month in gas. There’s nowhere in the country where a water bill is $1000 a month unless you’re doing a lot of irrigation.
> I'm already paying 10-times more for water usage than I spend on gas, and 5-times more on electricity bills
Comparing ratios of bills is confusing. This statement would be unsurprising if you drove 10 miles per week in a Prius. It would be very confusing if you were filling up your tank every week and spending $1000/month on a water bill.
I can explain. I work from home - no commute. Yes, I don't have to drive as much as the average person has to in my area. This summer has been extremely hot, hotter than any previous - seems that's becoming a new normal. Past couple of weeks the heat remained in the 90s, even around midnight. Water district installed big banners with warnings "draught stages in effect", there's a penalty for irrigating at certain hours - it gets added to the bill. These banners getting erected for the past three years. Yes, water here is expensive.
Don’t you think this was important information to include in your post? Your whole point was built on spending more on water than gas, but then we had to read the comments to discover that you don’t commute and you have water-hungry situations like a pool and HOA mandated landscaping?
I'm not trying to deceive anyone - no matter how anyone could twist it, it is true - the heat is real, the water shortages are the new reality, and I am in fact spending more on water than gas. And it's not because I don't have to drive at all - I do, just not as much as the average person who needs to go to the office every single day. I still need to drive daily.
A few years ago (before wildfires forced us to move), we were in the East Bay of San Francisco. East Bay gets unusually hot - the mountain range prevents cool winds from the ocean passing over. Summer was extreme, the AC couldn't keep up, we had to hose the outer walls every evening, just to cool it a bit.
One day we woke up, had breakfast and the power line had failed. I quickly imagined what happens if it lasts more than a few hours, checked the heatmap, found an area that wasn't dark orange, and told everyone to pack - we're leaving. We headed towards Half Moon Bay. It's a little over an hour drive, but it took us another forty minutes to find a beach with a room for parking - entire coast was packed with the heat escapees like us. The beach was full of stinking kelp, there were tons of flies - they've tormented our stay, but we had little choice. We thought we were lucky to find a spot with not too many people, only to realize there was a carcass of a dead sea lion and it was dead-cat-stenchy. At least, being next to the ocean offered some relief from the heat. Later that afternoon, our neighbors called us to tell us that they were sitting in their minivan, at an empty parking lot. The power was still out, and to have a dignified dinner, they've grabbed some food and convened in the car, which had a working AC. But they didn't want it to look weird, so they drove away from their street, away from curious neighbors and friends.
Next summer wildfires came back. This time bigger than ever. Dealing with both smoke and COVID restrictions together felt like too much, and we decided to move. We headed East, our first stop was Barstow, CA - we decided to rest a night. It's pretty far from where the actual fires were raging, yet when we woke up, we were greeted with what looked like snow at first. It was ash. Our car was covered with it. We kept driving. The sky was black from the smoke. It only started clearing out when we crossed into New Mexico. We were all terrified to realize the scale of that disastrous event. Which has now become "a seasonal climate occurrence" - it's almost guaranteed that each year something will massively burn somewhere in the West Coast. And the fuck are we doing about that? Entertaining a clown with renaming a lake.
Maybe I am pessimistic but it seems no one cares about climate change these days. All of Los Angeles is sweltering now. Just pointing fingers and dropping individual names while the world continues to heat slowly. Any suggestions to get involved are welcome, I don’t want to be just a complainer.
Get politically involved, vote and and volunteer for local pro-climate candidates. Talk about and promote public transport, cycling, better zoning and infrastructure etc. People underestimate the power of local politics.
On a macro scale all you can really do is vote for national level candidates that care about these issues. Luckily it’s not hard to see which ones do and which ones don’t.
Individually you can't do anything. You can drive an EV, set your AC to 78, or whatever makes you feel good but only national governments can make the regulatory changes that will really have an impact.
I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy (and they have spent whole meetings on it). Our city of 80,000 people could disappear from the face of the planet and it would not make a bit of difference.
Working at the level of 80,000 people is a lot more effective than working at the level of an individual.
Working on your own carbon footprint is a $100M marketing trick played on you by oil companies like BP.
Leah Stokes' new book offers instead a "carbon wave" -- how to evaluate and maximize your impact at a local, state, national, and global level. Here's a LinkedIn post. She's got a new book coming out about this: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7496265286...
Yes you can but you'll have to vote against your immediate self interest and comfort. The sort of changes that will have an impact on the climate will mean giving up a lot of what makes modern life convenient and comfortable.
Thermodynamics; your convenience and comfort (CnC) are merely externalized on others not eliminated; someone else makes your stuff, deals with the environmental toll in the future.
Happy to sacrifice some of your CnC to ease obligations on those you give no assurances to.
Not that much of a difference for the average or lower classes of people that outnumber the rich by quite a lot. It would have a great and positive impact for them.
Changes can be phased in. For example that's why places phasing out ICE cars are generally doing it by phasing out new ICE sales over many years and letting any cars already on the road when new sales stop stay on the road, and are concurrently building public charging infrastructure.
Best the corresponding parties can do is banning plastic straws (no impact but feels great) and massive bureaucratic hurdles for air conditioning in private homes (because it's an "unnecessary luxury" and if your apartment is unbearably hot during a heat wave where the temperature doesn't drop below 25 even at night, you're just not correctly using shades and windows).
Not to mention there are plenty of environmental improvements that are vast and near-term quality of life improvements. The only penalty on many of these things is financial, but even that is only in the near-term, and in the medium to long term become financial wins.
Both parties in the United States are pretty much turning a blind eye to climate change. What we need to do is start boycotting parties, telling them we won’t vote for them unless they have really strong climate platforms. We need to make them want our vote.
This is some “both sides” absolute bullshit. The Biden administration passed the IRA, huge incentives for personal and commercial renewable energy production, EVs, all kinds of things.
Trump is paying people to burn more coal, blocking solar, canceling wind.
Could the dems have done more, sure. Are those programs perfect, absolutely not. But one party is moving in the right direction and the other is actively trying to accelerate climate change. Gtfo with that both sides crap.
> I even roll my eyes at my city council spending even one second on climate change policy
Every meeting minute spent on discussing climate change is another minute not spent on authorizing things like Flock or permitting data centers. That's nothing to roll your eyes about
You can do all of that, and then Elon Musk will use his hundreds of billions to install another pedofile in charge who won't give a shit about the environment.
He could use his assets/wealth to ensure everyone on earth has a functional, hygienic toilet. Would improve QOL for many who still live with open sewer systems.
Elon Musk was never trying to make the world a better place. He was always a businessman and he was using that to con the government into giving him money so he can make more money.
I think that, if people who believe in climate change want to be convincing, it would be more effective to avoid blaming specific instances of weather on climate change without strong justification. Especially when the weather isn’t even abnormal.
Los Angeles, especially inland and in the valley, is hot in the summer. It was hot in the summer 30 years ago and it’s still hot in the summer. It’s the typical hot season right now, and the valley appears to be only slightly above season average temperatures today, and coastal LA seeks be slightly cooler than average. Apparently it will be unseasonably cool in a couple days.
You’re correct that LA is usually hot (95F+) this time of year, but the humidity is what’s abnormal. The dew point in Disneyland was higher than in Disney World yesterday due to a tropical storm that dissipated west of the LA basin.
More tropical storms are approaching LA and that’s increasing humidity is why it’s sweltering.
A separate LA Times article explained that the humidity is due to lingering effects of a recent hurricane/tropical storm.
"Forecasters attributed the punishing humidity to the remnants of Tropical Storm Iselle moving over the state, as well as unusually warm ocean temperatures due to a combination of a months-long marine heat wave, a powerful El Niño and climate change.
"Dew points in the Los Angeles Basin have been “really high,” hovering around 70 degrees in many places, with a few coastal areas like Redondo Beach and Torrance reaching a dew point of 73 to 75 on Friday, said Ryan Kittell, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. The metric measures the moisture content in the air."
Exactly! What a strange about what’s going on in the LA basin right now is the extremely high humidity for this time of year. A 69° dewpoint is unheard of in this region. And this is what’s associated with the El Niño and associated with climate change.
I haven't paid much attention to la lately.is this true? San Diego is having an unusually hot and humid summer. Water temperatures are nearly tropical right now too
“Both-sides”ing this is ridiculous. Certain leftists might sometimes disproportionally blame corporations for the issue rhetorically but they aren’t broadly opposed to the kinds of taxes and regulations - on corporations or individuals - that would be needed to bring carbon emissions down.
If you insist on finding a way to criticize leftists on the climate file, a much better tack would be pointing out how some environmentalists have opposed nuclear power or densification.
For most individuals there is no lifestyle change they can make that will matter. Fixing it requires collective action.
The way individuals can meaningfully contribute is by supporting politicians that will make policies and rules and regulations the meaningfully encourage that collective action, and when they have a choice between more than one corporation for some product or service that are not too different as far as impact on the lifestyle goes choosing the one that is better from a climate change point of view.
The politicians and the corporations (encouraged by incentives and regulations by the politicians) can then bring about changes that will make it so the lifestyle changes for individuals that help with climate change also improve the individual's situations so people voluntarily make them in large numbers.
For example there are a lot of people in the US who would be better off if their next car was an EV except the public charging infrastructure isn't good enough for their needs. Build a lot more public chargers that support 800V cars and many of these people will pick an EV. This is something government can bring about.
For an average individual it is perfectly fine, to use a sports analogy, to play the game as it is now while supporting league wide changes to the rules to make it a better game in the future.
Sf Bay Area didn’t have a single day above 100 this year. Not counting Livermore etc. it’s the first time in a long time I can remember the entire summer being so nice and relatively cool.
They appear (I skimmed) to be investing in all any feasible ideas to capture CO2 from the air - this is a good thing.
The numbers are daunting and the returns are scant, but the effort is one that should be made.
The upside is I saw little sign of Gorgan LNG style Carbon Capture; where a massive source of CO2 greenwashes releasing 100 units of CO2 by stuffing 1 unit back in the hole it came from.
For every ton of CO2 pulled from the air is another ton that something else will emit. Once the emitting is lowered, pulling it out of the air might have a chance
That's more of the "Gorgan LNG style Carbon Capture" I noted above - that's "capture" in the sense of releasing massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere while extracting massive amounts of natural gas .. but "making up for it" by not letting quite all of it escape and pushing a bit back.
Dubious accounting trick at best .. not even working as it was sold on the box in practice.
Atmospheric CO2 already floating about appears to be what the air-mining crowd are targeting (albeit small scale so far).
Renewable energy is expanding faster than ever. And it's hard for people to look at that and think we're moving too slowly. But we still are. That's the basic cultural disconnect.
When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.
Nuclear has a lot of environmental impact too. You need to mine a lot of earth to get a little uranium, and a lot of that activity is very polluting and a lot of that activity is not climate neutral. Then you have the waste problem that's not figured out, proliferation etc.
We can't go cherrypicking environmental problems. That way we roll from one crisis into the next. There's so many issues we're causing, like entire ecosystems going extinct. Sooner or later that will lead to crises too. We have to stop externalising.
And yes the electorate wants to be safe and for good reason. Even Fukushima polluted a lot. It's not just about death tolls.
I think you missed the point of the nuclear tangent. The point was that people might be reluctant to build out energy storage capacity before demand appears because of what happened last time. The difference is that climate change is more predictable than the economy.
My best advice is not to approach people with numbers and figures and all the danger, start with saying you’re concerned about the future. It’s kind of an open ended conversation starter.
The big problem is this is all driven by consumption and it’s hard for people to cut back on consumption. I don’t know how to explain to people how a simple life is much easier than the complicated life of the rich and famous they see every day on the Internet.
I don’t think there is an answer for this, I think there’s way too much propaganda on the other side of the equation. My only hope from this El Niño is that it creates such damage and disaster that it starts waking people up. I think if it affects the ranchers and farmers that will be a big plus because they are usually on the side of not believing in climate change.
What I do right now is just keep talking to people and preparing, but I’m lucky since I live in a minivan full-time. I mean, I can drive anywhere. The weather suits me.
I'll go against the grain but our capitalist way of life is totally incompatible with solving climate change. Likewise one country can't solve this problem alone. You need the whole world on board. I truly think the only real solution is a one world government truly working toward for the betterment of the planet and it's occupants. We all know that ain't ever gonna happen though so we're hosed.
Hey I grew up super environmental and I have plenty of hippie cred, but this statement gave me shudders "the only real solution is a one world government". Yeesh, yeah a single government, surely nothing could go wrong.
The Savior fallacy. With power more concentrated, the ability to avoid being impacted for those in power rises and rises and rises. How are incentives then aligned? I'm sure that having 10 million governments would be much better than having one to solve the issue.
I've had this thought too. And when I think about it in the big picture way, I don't think it doesn't need to be all that hard to solve. It's not like we're talking about like, you know, some huge slice of GDP or something. Yes, the price of fossil fuels effectively doubles. But we can create lots of jobs to make solar and nuclear and all these other solutions in the meantime.
An economy that seizes climate solutions can zoom ahead in terms of innovation, manufacturing, and enforcement. The changing climate is one of the biggest economic opportunities we've ever seen in human history, but somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's not only the worst non-opportunity ever but somehow would break capitalism. The richest man on the planet makes electric cars.
Let me guess, you think it’s somehow impossible that people like Trump and Musk would end up running this One World Government like Trey have done in the US because…reasons.
Are they led by Trump and Musk though? You've misinterpreted the meaning of the question. I didn't ask what countries would accept being led by a national demagogue. Also, would other countries accept being led by the leader of the countries you listed?
> The global average sea-surface temperature hit a record 70 degrees on Aug. 22, according to Europe’s Earth observation agency Copernicus, which has been tracking the metric daily since 1979. The previous single-day record was measured in March 2024.
That's like saying coastal sea level rise is nothing to worry about in places like Florida because that whole area was at the bottom of an ocean 100 million years ago.
In any event, who cares what the climate was like before humans walked the planet? We do care about what it is like while we’re around because it puts significant constraints on our lives.
Yes, but it’s not uniform at all. The paper shows cooling in some parts of the north, and heating in the southern latitudes, along with significant variations by depth.
There’s a lot of nuance in this stuff - far more than global average surface temperature (which is primarily good for scary headlines) and “fish don’t have AC”.
That's not the issue, though I recognise the poster above was remarking about fish. High surface temps means more cyclones / typhoons / hurricanes, more coral bleaching, lower fish breeding and feeding because reefs die, impacts out food chains and destroys our homes.
Im Australian, so it also means droughts, water restrictions, and significant increases in bushfire number and severity after a few years of drought. Drought followed by cyclone, or bulk rain events causes catastrophic flooding. Its a shit show.
Sometimes I wonder if the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been growing more popular is a tactical tool used by individuals who don't actually believe in it but instead have accepted that they would rather be wealthy and destroy the planet and are pricing in the consequences of that decision.
There's also a prisoner's dilemma situation. Suppose you're some wealthy media magnate promoting culture war distractions from your portfolio of asset strippers and polluters, thinking of defecting to team decency.
That hypothetical you can look around at the rest of the global political class and see that the rest of the establishment will destroy the livability of the biosphere whether that hypothetical you starts putting all of your money into unions, green technology and BECCs or not and conclude that the only available choice is whether to be poor in a collapsing world or rich in a collapsing world.
Why would investing in green tech make you poor? That's what's wrong with that argument.
Moving away from fossil fuels is cheaper. Green energy is very cheap, it just misses a base load component right now. It's just that the people benefiting are different ones. And those people are going to lose sooner or later anyway, because in addition to climate change, fossil fuels are also finite.
The only reason trump is on the oil bandwagon is because many of his buddies are benefiting from it. And probably because he's still pissed at the Scotland windmill thing.
But doing the right thing doesn't have to make you poor. It will benefit everyone including the investors.
The optimal strategy for short term oligarchic revenue maximisation is a mixed strategy of mostly fossil fuels with some green tech.
The optimal strategy for long term biosphere habitability is a mixed strategy of mostly green tech with a tiny amount of fossil fuels exclusively for those metal smelting roles where arc furnaces and biofuels are unsuitable.
Investment portfolios dominated by technology that lifts everybody up are less profitable than greedy choices of risky investment, per some of the finer details of the mutual fund separation theorem.
"Hello, is this the Murdoch family office? I'd like to speak to your team's permanent director of assets strategy about how wonderful it would be for your income to drop by ten to fifteen percent."
You could do the same with the accounting team on retainer for the US Commerce Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Education Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Interior Secretary's family portfolio, or the head of NASA's family portfolio, or the Middle East Special Envoy's family portfolio, or the Administrator-in-Chief of the Small Business Administration's family portfolio.
These are all individuals with a net worth of over a billion dollars who each separately employ a full time accounting and financial team with its own IT and HR just to maximise family income. What's ten million a year in operating costs versus at least sextuple that in return?
Each oligarch of size is the figurehead of a corporation dedicated to number go up.
I’m sympathetic to the intent of your argument, but man, that’s a hallava gotcha there. Other than nuclear there isn’t a compelling story for a base load source of green energy. And all the new-gen nuclear tech is a long shot for safe, cost efficient, rapid scaling right now.
On the off chance they weren't a bot and were merely somebody sucked in to the culture war to the point of losing a lot of sanity, the answer is that the optimal amount of green tech for maximising oligarchic wealth extraction is somewhere both far above zero while also being at least one order of magnitude smaller than the necessary amount to mitigate emissions numbers.
And I think the artificially created right wing shift was to enable Israel to do a lot of killing without the rest world being united to tell them to stop with this.
I thought the narrative was that it was the blue cities that were the chaotic hellholes, specifically because of all the minorities that live there? Can you try to keep your stories straight?
Sorry, I have no idea what you are referencing or what person you are talking about. Please stay on topic. Did you respond to a different post by accident? What is your contribution?
Texas was bussing the Venezuelan migrants out of state to blue cities and pocketing a lot of the money that was to be used for integrating the migrants.
That's how places like Denver ended up with 40k Venezuelan migrants and little federal assistance for them.
And you know what we did? Tighten our belts a bit and help these people get integrated into our city rather than just pawning them off onto someone else.
Could we stop chopping down trees from primary forests in the Amazon to save the planet for us humans? Could we manage with a little less beef and soy?
Just 5 days ago the news was https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62m4gpnp78o. Different wording, few measurements later, this will run that way til December at the very least. We can shout another bird most days till there, or discuss the projections to the peak of the event (and how they usually correcting it upwards), that may give a better warning.
So, any legit climate scientists or oceanographers here? Or agronomists? How abnormal (and not just, the climate graphs for the last century say this is bad) is this on a longer timescale. Like, when was the water this warm last?
I feel this is going to be a "big one" this year? And probably the culmination of extreme heat, crop failures, and high diesel prices are going to trigger more conflict too? To be clear, I'm an optimist, I think things will be "good" in the long run, but I have a feeling the next 12-24 months are going to be a doozie with the 4 or 5 things converging...
Like, I don't want to have this crazy flamewar thing, but like, what do the numbers say, how fucked is this particular one?
I scuba dive in Monterey, CA every other weekend, and just came back from a liveaboard in Galapagos in May. The water is much warmer this year, and it is very noticeable because usually in Galapagos, divers are expected to wear 8mm wetsuit or dry suit to be comfortable in the water, but this year even a 5mm made me feel too warm. In Monterey, water temp used to be around 11-13°C but this year it’s easily above 16°C, divers also reported more sightings of spiny lobsters which were rare in Monterey because water was too cold for them.
I can’t overstate how it is. And you will need to be prepared. Be prepared for floods and just weird weather. While we humans are adaptable to these weather changes, plants and animals are not. This is going to affect feed crops for both humans and animals. So I would expect some inflation because of this.
I also want to state for those of you living in Southern California to be prepared for a possible earthquake. It’s a salton sea fills up with a lot of water quickly It could most likely trigger an earthquake.
But those are the impacts just in the United States. We might be looking at food price shocks in combination with the ongoing war in Iran.
By the way for those of you complaining about the heat in Los Angeles, it’s not really the heat. It’s the humidity. The LA basin has had record high dewpoint temperatures. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.
How do we fix this? The only thing I can think of is a spiritual awakening where owning and doing less is more attractive than flying around in jets and building AI data centers.
You can’t get a more direct example of failure of collective action.
I’m not sure the human species has the capacity to actually coordinate behavior at the scale needed, irrespective of any future warning etc…, to be able to combat this
We all reduced CFC use and stopped ozone depletion.
The problem with climate change is that there is a huge incentive to not fix it, and the culprit is not just rich oil corporations. Many countries subsist solely on oil profits and have no other natural resources to sustain themselves, i.e. Saudi Arabia. Those countries have influence over others like the US.
There are alternative options already available to replace fossil fuels for most things. In first-world countries, the only thing stopping a transition is the loss of corporate profits.
Stripe's climate researcher Zeke Hausfather is coming to AirMiners this Wednesday to share about El Niño climate science, the impacts, and then we're going to work on what we can do to avert the worst impacts of this storm.
The planet started out a ball of molten stardust, completely inhospitable to life as we know it. But then there was not only life, but life detached from the ground too. Then K-T event wiped out almost all of it. But the planet kept going! It can be argued it got better and more diverse.
Are people in trouble? Perhaps. If we stop technological achievement in the name of a few degrees centigrade, then definitely.
With the depletion of the coal and oil deposits the industrial revolution relied on the first time around, it is now locked in that this century is human civilization's only shot at reaching some kind of abstract technology escape velocity.
Crash now and there will never be a second chance, just iron age stuff in a harsher environment for however many tens of millennia it takes to have some random pandemic that wipes the descendants out occur.
I think the idea is that, the current trajectory of technology is just making problems worse. More and more powerful, capable of pulling us further and further from a healthy equilibrium as we see with global warming etc.
Theoretically, if we can crack fusion or some other source of abundant, cheap energy, we could build many of the bandaid solutions proposed today that are not feasible due to energy constraints, while transitioning society to a more sustainable path. Tilt the curve as it were.
Our psyches unfortunately aren't built for the globalized world we live in, and unless we figure out some sort of collective awakening to transcend our egos... Our best hope is likely solutions that allow the march of progress, while slowing, stopping, and eventually undoing a bunch of damage humans have done to the biosphere over our history. Definitely a moon shot, but hopefully we can figure something out.
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