“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”
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.
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.
And the corpos and govs cry incessantly about not being given new victims to exploit and discard. The entitlement is disgusting.
The problem is capitalism
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.
Consumer-capitalism. Neither is great, but their combination is truly horrifying.
-Sent from my iPhone
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.
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.
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
We’re still the same society we were 500 years ago, just with technology.
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.
Planet will be fine. Humanity and many other lifeforms? Not so much.
Mass extinction event is all ready happening so yeah
The world is being run by conservatives and fascists.
The world will not change course, humanity is borked.
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.
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.
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.
Lol yeah change course now because all the other warnings worked
We are fucked.
Thats been humanities lower back tattoo for a while now.
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.
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.
Everyone who was alive during the pandemic should know that the whole “if we all get together to do …” Is the biggest pipedream in the history of pipedreams.
Fortunately, I wasn’t.
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.
Yeah sure, tell that to the billionaires that are actively ruining the planet.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
A third party?
How about thirty parties?
Hahahahahahahaha
Riot. Bloodshed.
Dumb ways to die, so many dumb ways to die.
