It’s important to remember we are doing it for glorious purpose:
From what the capitalists and their non-wealthy sycophants tell me, this is the only way, and we should stop complaining as they end the world to see who can get th highest ego score.
But you don’t understand, doing literally the bare minimum would mean 150 people only have 50,000,000x the average persons net worth instead of 100,000,000x!
And
I’ll never be allowed to be in their club since they all work to make sure poors stay poorssomeday I might be one of them, so clearly I must defend this to the death of me and all my family and their children.Climate Safe Pensions - Stand.earth
Climate Safe Pensions
With more than $46 Trillion in assets worldwide, pension funds are one of the largest institutional investors in fossil fuels.
Given the growing financial risk facing fossil fuel companies, it is no longer a responsible investment to put our hard earned pension dollars into an industry that is wreaking havoc on our planet and frontline communities. Nearly 30% of fossil fuel industry shares are held by pension funds – with as much financial power as pension funds hold, they could be a force to reckon with in the battle to address the climate crisis.
This isn’t even a recent comic, it is old. We know about this for so long already, it is depressing.
We’ve been knowingly on the path to self-destruction for half a century.
It’s just become increasingly difficult to engage in self-delusion about it as the consequences become apparent.
This is why I’m past hope.
Most economist agree with externalities and wealth distribution. But people don’t like externalities and wealth distribution has nothing to do with capitalism and is to fo with politics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_propaganda
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
https://truthout.org/articles/pedagogy-for-profit-education-under-capitalism/
The capitalists own major media, the capitalists influence curriculum, as they’ve captured the state governments that set them, from K-Colleges of Economics to say “free market” capitalism is the only way kiddies. It indoctrinates millions of non-wealthy Americans to advocate against their own interests. Hi.
They use their power over government not only to deregulate their own industries for profit, but to defund social supports and then use their media to shriek “see how government doesn’t work?! Privatize everything!”
You can sing the praises of capitalism if you want, but capitalism not straight jacketed/draconianly regulated is a social blight that removes all humanity from society. A society shouldn’t be in service to an economy, an economy should be a lowly tool to distribute goods and services for the benefit of society.
Actually it was my economics classes in university that highlighted how bad things are and how corporations need to be highly regulated. Even the professor who attempted to show us we couldn’t regulate corporations and thus shouldn’t try used a simulation that made it apparent corporations would strip the land and ocean of everything if they could.
It definitely depends on the university you go to, there’s ideological differences in economic schools of thought. But the observed science is very simple and repeatedly proves demand driven programs at the bottom of an economy are far more powerful than supply driven programs at the top.
I will sing the praises of capitalism because I understand it in a way most people on this site do not. It has done more to improve the standard of living and bring people out of poverty than anything.
Yes there are poltical issues in our society, especially America which isn’t the world and isn’t the only capitalist country. But that is a political issue.
People just need to think more about politics and understand how the economy works more. That’s where the issues lie.
That’s fine. Our trajectory is pretty well set anyway. We’ll keep insisting more growth/metastasis is the solution for the consequences of reckless growth/metastasis.
Have fun blaming everything except the root cause on the way down.
If someone comes up with a better alternative I’ve love to hear it.
So far no one has.
Technology and science is pushing humanity forward.
And despite capitalists claims, it’s the government supplying both, not the corporations.
Take billions in public funding, sell the result for profit, claim no one else could do that and no alternative exists.
Tale as old as time.
You need to look up the amount of funding corporations do verses government.
Also government spending in a capitalistic society is a good thing. It’s like education. Governments put money into education and get “nothing” back for it. It just wastes money. But Governments do not work like businesses. Governments work through taxes so anything that can increase the amount of taxes they make is a good thing.
So something like education or funding is a cost that is recuperated in taxes.
Getting business to do things is just more efficient then doing it state controlled. That’s why America did so well from the war and Germany had issues.
The understanding of economics and capitalism is very low on this website.
https://wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/centerpiece/fall2018/transcript_jodidi11-5-2018
It’s worth the read. I promise.
I read it. I’m really not sure what I’m meant to be talking from it. I think a lot of Marxists don’t understand what capitalism is.
“Its very structure, therefore, deprives us of the ability to decide collectively exactly what and how much we want to produce, on what energic basis and through what kinds of social relations. It deprives us, too, of the capacity to determine how we want to use the social surplus we collectively produce; how we want to relate to nature and to future generations; how we want to organize the work of social reproduction and its relation to that of production. Capitalism, in sum, is fundamentally anti-democratic. Even in the best-case scenario, democracy in a capitalist society must perforce be limited and weak.”
Capitalism is entirely based on the the free hand of the market not on votes. People effectively vote with money. If people want more pears instead of apples, then more pears are planted than apples. The free hand of the market works without votes and infact is a lot lot more efficient than voting on everything or on trying to control these choices from a central government. Its fundamentally why (among other reasons) capitalism is so much more efficient than anything else.
Something that seems horribly missed by certain people that don’t understand capitalism is externalities. Most economists want these corrections made to prices. They want ways to fix the tragedy of the commons, they don’t want factories everywhere polluting they want the best use of capital, land and labour.
People get to vote on the limit of business. They can choose to have green spaces around cities and there is absoultely nothing a business can do about it. All the wealth made from capitalism that wouldn’t exist without it is taxed by the government and the government can use that money to better effect. Lots of countries and cities have green spaces and high environmental protection. Capitalist want the government to pay for education and the government wants to pay for education because it gets more money back from taxes.
If I have missed something please let me know. But I’m getting tired of people on this site no understanding basic economics so I’m not sure how long this conversation will continue.
There are so many engrained assumptions here that would take a long time to undo, a lot of reading, and they take a long time to digest. I went through the journey, and thought like this once, until I realised there was a lot more to this than this narrative that is classically taught. I’m sorry. We should leave it here, maybe you’ll find it eventually. I appreciate your consideration of the text. It’s a good starting place. Ps, I was not the one who down voted.
Communism has been tried and failed exceptionally.
Hopefully something else comes along but I think it will just be a form of capitalism with higher taxes and UBI.
I wouldn’t call what has been tried communism as it was never a dictatorship of the proletariat, but I’m not convinced by orthodox communism either. That is also missing a whole lot of geopolitical nuance to what actually happened. Either way, what we have isn’t working and it’s time to find something new. Lemmy isn’t a good place for theory anyway, not that any other social media is much better.
I’m waiting for the day someone suggests I viable alternative to what we have now
I know this isn’t politics or nation state news, but it is deeply troubling for all of us who live on planet Earth. Six standard deviations is mind boggling.
Mods, please remove this if you feel it isn’t news worthy. I know it breaks rule 1, but wanted to share.
I’d say this is valid world news. And it’s scary as hell. :(
I don’t have a car and I’m separating my trash but it doesn’t seem to do anything
There is other more insidious trash that needs separating
I bet we could compost that.
We need something new
It’s my fault, I forgot to turn off the tap while brushing my teeth yesterday.
Sorry everyone.
I’m sorry I forget the source, but I once read something from a scientist that in your entire life, if you reuse/recycle/protect the environment,etc for your own single entire life, you will have starved off climate change for 1 whole second. Mind boggling to know your entire existence comes down to that litter of a difference. The point of what I remember reading was not that individuals are the problem, but that corporations and big industries were the worst offenders doing little to help change.
I mean if every single person on earth did this, it would equate to about 253 years. (8 billion seconds is about 253.68 years) combine that with other efforts could really make a difference. Granted this is a hypothetical number and there are far more factors at play, it’s obviously not as simple as each person doing this = 1 second saved, but just throwing out there that there are a lot of people on earth…
It is still worth it to recycle, reduce, don’t be wasteful, eat less meat, all those things.
The idea that doing little things yourself adds up to much bigger and more cumulative impacts is lost on most people. Instead they tend to fixate on the idea that if no one else is (visibly-to-them) making sacrifices, and my own personal effort is so small, why should I bother?
Why account is marked as bot?
Should be fixed now, not sure why it was set to that.
Now not bot
The trash bit is better solved by not buying stuff in the first place (reduce).
Personal emissions exist, but are small. They add up when multiplied by millions or billions.
You’ve taken some right steps, but there’s still s long way to go. Various industries, companies and individuals do what makes economic sense to them. Governments decide what makes sense and what doesn’t, but you can influence that by voting.
For example, many industries have used coal and gas, because it made economic sense at the time. Now that emissions trading is in place, using polluting energy sources is less and less appealing. The same sort of shift should take place in other areas as well, and politics is the way to get there. Climate change isn’t a technological problem as much as it’s a political one.
The company I work for uses gigantic barrels of oil to lubricate our AC motors. We’re one company in North America out of thousands. There isn’t anything you can do.
Lubricating oil isn’t quite so bad (extracting and refining is bad, but so too for a lot of minerals).
Breaking up the hydrocarbons leaking CO2 is a big problem, as is leaking methane.
These are rookie numbers, now make it to 10 sigmas. But seriously, the biggest problem is that global warming is happening very slowly (in human years) and we are kind of normalising it and concentrating on more pressing topics.
I guess our kids or grand kids will read in their history books about our ignorance and scratch their heads wondering how stupid we might have been to allow all this to happen. And they will be absolutely right of course.
We are more concerned about our well being and our consumerism while wanting bigger cars, bigger toys, share prices etc. instead of trying to lead a sustainable life.
We’re fifty years into this. You might be new. Nothing changes except the right-wing’s hypocrisy and idiocy. Nothing. Changes.
Indeed. It’s depressing growing up, and the only thing that changes is the severity of the prognosis. We still travel around the world because we’re bored. Hours long roundtrip flights are sold at 20-30 USD, probably because of tourism subsidies. Not to mention the many business trips just to “meet in person”.
We have all this technology to work from home, to reduce our footprint. But, we don’t give a fuck. And this is just travel. Capitalism needs to be curtailed to factor in the long term destruction of the planet, or we’ll head there as fast as profit margins allows.
A world that lets this happen is a world that won’t have history books in the future, or accurate ones at least
I often wonder where we’ll be in 2000 years.
Will our descendants look open our great works like how we’ve looked at Roman works, in awe of what we achieved with “primitive” tools. Or will they look at it in awe due to not having any understanding of how such a thing was done at all.
Will we have colonized the solar system and left earth to stabilize itself, or will we be back to city states, warring over scraps of land and access to water that is slightly less polluted. Or will it be both? The rich with their space empires and the poor left to fend for themselves amongst the corruption.
Will there be any of us left at all? We could wipe out all human life right now with a bio weapon or nuclear war. We’re like children playing with their Father’s gun, maybe nothing bad happens and we put it back where we found it, or maybe it’s going to be a tragedy. We’ve only had these tools for barely a century, who knows what we’ll do in 20 of those.
Will we have colonized the solar system and left earth to stabilize itself
Definitely not that. Any technology that would allow us to colonize other planets would be much easier to use on Earth no matter how bad it gets.
It can also be argued that the continued trend of having an increasing human population is only going to keep accelerating the decline of earth’s biosphere.
We’re already seeing an apocalypse in the insects, and that’s going to lead to a decline in plant life.
Our carbon emissions are rapidly increasing ocean acidity and temperature, which will kill off huge swaths of the planktons that produce much of the oxygen we breathe. Biodiversity is approaching mass extinction level lows, and we’re barely figuring out how to slow it down.
I’m sure life on earth will survive it, it survived the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and that was an incredibly rapid change. But human civilization as we know it may not be able to adapt quickly enough to the damage we’ve done.
Humanity may end up as mole people living in carefully life support controlled bunkers if we continue. If earth is nearly as inhospitable to large terrestrial life as mars, what’s the benefit to one over the other? Might as well just leave the earth to the million year process of fixing itself and expand outwards if we can.
Earth still has plenty of benefits:
- Things will grow outdoors, even if they’re not the things we want growing.
- We already know where major deposits of natural resources are.
- There’s an ionosphere, meaning the surface isn’t bathed in deadly radiation.
- Parts of it, such as the poles, will likely remain habitable.
The big issue, though, is that transporting any substantial number people to Mars would require many trillions of dollars of investments in space transportation. It’s just not feasible to ship a large number of people to another planet. Even if we could start a colony on Mars, most of humanity will still be stuck on Earth and they won’t have much interest in supporting a colony on another planet if they’re being left to die.
The thing is that even with catastrophic global warming, earth would still be tons more habitable than Mars. Any structure that could allow survival on Mars would also allow survival on this hypothetical future earth.
We either fix it or we are screwed. So we are probably screwed. Anyone seeking to build a Mars colony as an “escape” would probably fare better building similar stuff in earth deserts, or something somewhat different underwater. Still not the most sane places to go for, but more sane than Mars if the goal is “most survivability”.
I read/watch high fantasy about thousands, maybe tens of thousands, year old dynasties, let alone civilizations, and it just doesn’t even make sense to me. We can barely keep a world system in place for a few decades.
Have you watched The 100?
Are today’s history books accurate? History has been used for ages to fuel the country’s propaganda and are rarely if ever critical to some shameful moments of one’s history.
There are some exceptions but they are rather rare I would say.
History has always been written by the victors. Next time there might not be anyone alive to write it tho.
Global sea temperature affects things like hurricane strength. Buckle up.
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Hey, you know that tipping point that everyone was talking about? Yea I think we’ve passed that
There was a hank green video about this a year back. Video link here, the tldr was that container ships used to use a type of fuel that was both bad for the environment but also really good at cloud seeding. More clouds shielded the oceans surface from the sun, artificially reducing its temperature. But in 2020 regulations made container ships move to a fuel that didnt seed clouds as much, so fewer clouds, higher temperature.
So i guess one potential take away from that, if its right, is that the temperatures are not “suddenly” getting worse, but rather have been artificially depressed and we are only now going to what it should be.
Actually it’s currently being looked at. The basic idea is to add sulfur to kerosine for airplanes to spray that into our atmosphere.
Bad side is it will cause acid rain, but the good side is that it will buy us a few decades that totally won’t be abused to speed even more CO2 in the air
And the millions of people who’ll die from the air pollution are, of course, of no consequence.
This has real ‘Operation Dark Storm’ vibes.
He he, I’m in danger.
Cool cool cool cool cool
Actually: warm warm warm warm warm
I kinda feel like we hit the point where its either our global production infrastructure or our species seeing this graph.
If we keep going, we won’t have to choose! We get to have neither! Hooray!
If we keep going? Brother, the flag-wavers are waving their jesus-hands in the air as we speak to keep it going. Right-wing ‘conservative’ victories guarantee planetary destruction, and we’re all watching it happen.
Load up on guns, bring your friends!
This graph says we probably crossed that line a couple decades ago and we chose production.
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I haven’t heard of any ultra-rich person who wants to reduce the population. A population decline will lead to stock price declines as the majority of the population ages (automated 401k investments buy and thus increase stock prices, withdrawals from 401k sell and thus decrease stock prices; an older population means less investment and greater withdrawal). Do you have a source for your decrease surplus population claim?
STOP DOOMER POSTING I know climate change is a frustrating problem to solve (to say the least) but holy shit this doomer posting makes it so hard to keep up the momentum necessary to solve it
It is NOT already too late
The way the climate change works, it won’t be too late until we’re all dead
Stop Doomer Posting
Oh ok, so you acknowledge that humanity’s footprint needs to be systematically drastically reduced for the next several generations until we reach a number this planet can sustainably support, and we need to push to end the capitalist global economy that requires infinite growth/metastasis on a finite world with finite resources immediately, in favor of an economic model that revolves around homeostasis/equilibrium, which will require necessary draconian lifestyle changes on all of our parts, right?
For the record, I’m more than willing to. I’m hilariously outnumbered though.
Now go ahead and talk about “baby steps” in the face of accelerating temperature increases. Baby steps are steps that could have made an impact that reverberated into today’s consequences half a century ago when we knew about climate change but largely pretended we didn’t.
You call it doomerism, but I just don’t believe in self-deception to feel better.
We have entered into the flickering phase of many earth systems. Being a realist isn’t doomerism.
So if like 95% dies and all the production, transportation, unnecesary consumption etc, it will normalize and we get a do over?
humanity might, yeah. while they would be starting from a less advanced position they would have access to the knowledge we earn over centuries so it wouldn’t take as long to get back to where we are now, with the benefit of hindsight this time
This is not a news article, it’s a picture of a graph.
In the interest of discussion here, I’ll leave it up this time.
Please report this to us earlier, or, if you think our rule about articles only is unfair, I would like to hear your thoughts on if this should be allowed in the future.
Id like to see documemtation for graphs that are quantifying something or apealing to emotion deeper than a meme.
Fucking January 6th!
It’s going to get fucking Venusian around here at this rate
HELP US
A lot of us want to make change but a lot of people are trying to stop it…
God, Gods, someone!
^help…
Hurricane season is going to be a fucking rollercoaster.
Some of You Guys are Alright, Don’t go to Florida next Autumn.
Are you doing anything in particular to try to stop it?
Writing to politicians that cover my area. Actively recycling and reusing things. Trying to control my personal footprint. Pushing for and using electric when possible or simply avoiding gas use.
I’m not sure what else I can do to make a more significant impact. I have thought about it for a while and I always come to the same conclusion that mega corporations and the like, should have accountability for what they create, rather than push it to the consumers who purchase.
Sun chips used to use biodegradable bags but stopped due to complaints of noise? I never experienced it so I’m not sure. But seems dumb.
As with any heavy lifting, a team makes the workload easier. Unsure how to press everyone to come together as we did with the ozone layer.
To be fair the chip bags were really loud…
I never got to experience them. Minor inconvenience for a better environment.
Well, I bet they didn’t lobby for fossil fuels at COP28.
Thank you kind internet person
I use Nitter Redirect (Firefox addon), but I do appreciate seeing a nitter link in the wild, thanks!
