“as a species, we are behaving like a pod of dolphins beaching themselves because some kind of brain parasite disrupted their echolocation. Our ability to share knowledge and understand the situation we’re in has become utterly compromised, and deadly.”
Oof. Of all the consequences of the US electing Trump twice, this is the one with the most blood on our hands. Morally abject.
I quite agree we are already seeing the effects of climate change. And we will have to change a lot of things because of it in our lives.
If civilisation will fall because of it, I have my doubts, but we are clearly entering a period of political instability in the Western world. And we are voting for the wrong people, because a lot of us are not ready to hear the difficult truths.
Civilization is civilization until people have missed three meals.
Considering that everything is happening faster than expected, civilization is definitely at risk. We haven’t even slowed down the pace we’re adding CO2 at, 11 years after the Paris Agreement.
We’re on track for breaching 2.0 the first time in 2035-2040 (which is when IPCC will finally agree that we surpassed 1.5C warming, because they count the average over a decade)
Then you have MI5/MI6 did an analysis of the greatest threats to the UK in the coming decades. Food security was one major one, and they feared that a polycrisis could hit as soon as 2030-2035, creating scarcity of (some) food.
A dictatorship is not the end of civilization. Is "just" the end of political freedom. Look at China, civilization is not in danger there, quite the opposite. For me, China in terms of knowledge growth is now the leading country in the world.
I am 100000% done with conversations about climate change that lay the blame on ‘we’.
We’re not a pod of dolphins. We’re 8 billion people living in a world organised into strict hierarchies. It wasn’t lies that got us here. Every decent public opinion poll taken in the last 25 years show the majority of people want action taken on climate change and that WE are willing to make sacrifices to achieve that.
If it was up to ‘we’, climate change would be well under control and oil & gas would be fading memories.
But it’s not up to ‘we’. And the Infantile, weak minded, learned helplessness of accepting the inhuman abuse heaped on us from the world’s biggest assholes because ‘this is just what people are like’ has got to fucking stop.
The vast amounts of wealth and power that have been mobilised in our lifetimes to FORCE us into dependence on carbon based energy represent the single biggest campaign ever undertaken in support of a product. By an order of magnitude.
Multiple wars, billions spent on campaign financing, coups undertaken, advertising, media consolidation, lobbying, lawfare and black ops - all in service to Oil & Gas- is what got us here. Undertaken by less than a thousand powerful men (or almost all men) to feed their lust for more and more and more power and wealth.
And one of their most important campaigns is selling you the idea that their narcissism and stupidity is your fault. Because otherwise you might just decide to turn on them.
I've noticed the blame game is a way to avoid systemic change. If "we" are the problem, then we just need to do better. Shorter showers. Throw away our trash, etc. It doesn't matter the issue. Traffic sucks? That idiot doesn't know how to drive! It's definitely not our car-centric urban planning and lack of public transit.
Everything is the result of just some stupid and/or incompetent individuals not doing their part! Then we don't even realize the problem is the inherent outcome of the systems we've designed.
We didn’t design the global economic and political systems that protect and advance the interests of oil and gas no matter how unpopular, irrational or deadly. Nobody voted for that, nobody was consulted except a few very powerful people.
I’m also 100000% done with Americans. 90% of the citizens of this planet have no say in the matter - many of us under the threat of economic sanction, annexation, or war.
Nobody in my country is empowered to stop the Oil & Gas industry. We could participate in it marginally less, but if you think we can shut off the oil taps to America without consequence, you’re not living in the real world.
This is a most excellent article. I say that for people who hesitate to read such things, but the article lays out the measurable reality that the main stream press is in thrall to Big Oil, and thereby is forced to downplay the existence of this climate emergency. As the last line of the article implies, "there are a million things to do."
I had an argument in a local Facebook group about this. We're a oil and gas economy here, so they were fear mongering about Democrats destroying the industry. At one point they were complaining about "liberals" caving to climate change. I forgot how local people think of the political spectrum, so I commented something like "No liberal would ever do what's necessary to honestly address climate change." And they were like, "nu uh!" because I guess they've heard a Democrat say "climate change" before.
But it's so weird being afraid that Democrats/liberals are going to destroy the economy to fix climate change when I'm over here wishing they were brave enough to destroy the economy to fix climate change.
That’s what I don’t understand. People (and investors and corporate executives) acting like we have a choice between protecting the economy OR preventing climate change. When will the masses wake up. There is no economy, markets will be doomed, if our food supplies are burning and millions of climate refugees are escaping areas that are no longer inhabitable (the Sahel, Ganges Delta, the Philippines, etc). Western Europe was crying over a couple million Syrian and afghan refugees. Imagine hundreds of millions…
Getting off oil and switching all steel to electric by 2050 is childishly unrealistic for industrial civilization to achieve. Vaclav Smil wrote a book about this. A carbon neutral cement alternative maybe.
There is a workable strategy with a 66% chance of success. It consists, in a condensed description here, of using natural processes to sequester carbon while simultaneously moving to a cessation of CO2 emissions.
A slightly longer description is this: replant and nurture six ecosystems, three marine and three terrestrial. These are kelp beds, mangrove estuaries and sea grasses; and boreal forests with their fungal understories, tropical rain forests, and prairie grasses with their bovine inhabitants. Simultaneously we must reduce to zero the carbon emissions from fossil fuels for transport, energy, and heating, powering industrial manufacturing, deforestation, and making materials like cement. These two things--carbon sequestration and elimination of CO2 emissions must both happen at once all over the planet or we are screwn. However, if we do them, there's a 66% chance of success.
diethyl2o | 10 hours ago
“as a species, we are behaving like a pod of dolphins beaching themselves because some kind of brain parasite disrupted their echolocation. Our ability to share knowledge and understand the situation we’re in has become utterly compromised, and deadly.”
Oof. Of all the consequences of the US electing Trump twice, this is the one with the most blood on our hands. Morally abject.
Upbeat_Parking_7794 | 11 hours ago
I quite agree we are already seeing the effects of climate change. And we will have to change a lot of things because of it in our lives.
If civilisation will fall because of it, I have my doubts, but we are clearly entering a period of political instability in the Western world. And we are voting for the wrong people, because a lot of us are not ready to hear the difficult truths.
ssjjss | 7 hours ago
Crop failures will change things very fast
aeon314159 | 7 hours ago
In human history, what predicts the fall of civilisation more than any other? Famine.
SquirrellyBusiness | 24 minutes ago
Loss of trees is another.
conception | 3 hours ago
And no more fish.
kazarnowicz | 6 hours ago
Civilization is civilization until people have missed three meals.
Considering that everything is happening faster than expected, civilization is definitely at risk. We haven’t even slowed down the pace we’re adding CO2 at, 11 years after the Paris Agreement.
We’re on track for breaching 2.0 the first time in 2035-2040 (which is when IPCC will finally agree that we surpassed 1.5C warming, because they count the average over a decade)
Then you have MI5/MI6 did an analysis of the greatest threats to the UK in the coming decades. Food security was one major one, and they feared that a polycrisis could hit as soon as 2030-2035, creating scarcity of (some) food.
Upbeat_Parking_7794 | 5 hours ago
A dictatorship is not the end of civilization. Is "just" the end of political freedom. Look at China, civilization is not in danger there, quite the opposite. For me, China in terms of knowledge growth is now the leading country in the world.
kazarnowicz | 5 hours ago
Even dictatorships will have issues feeding their people in the late 30s in a worst case scenario.
It’s hard to keep power when people have nothing to lose, since they’re starving to death.
biskino | 4 hours ago
I am 100000% done with conversations about climate change that lay the blame on ‘we’.
We’re not a pod of dolphins. We’re 8 billion people living in a world organised into strict hierarchies. It wasn’t lies that got us here. Every decent public opinion poll taken in the last 25 years show the majority of people want action taken on climate change and that WE are willing to make sacrifices to achieve that.
If it was up to ‘we’, climate change would be well under control and oil & gas would be fading memories.
But it’s not up to ‘we’. And the Infantile, weak minded, learned helplessness of accepting the inhuman abuse heaped on us from the world’s biggest assholes because ‘this is just what people are like’ has got to fucking stop.
The vast amounts of wealth and power that have been mobilised in our lifetimes to FORCE us into dependence on carbon based energy represent the single biggest campaign ever undertaken in support of a product. By an order of magnitude.
Multiple wars, billions spent on campaign financing, coups undertaken, advertising, media consolidation, lobbying, lawfare and black ops - all in service to Oil & Gas- is what got us here. Undertaken by less than a thousand powerful men (or almost all men) to feed their lust for more and more and more power and wealth.
And one of their most important campaigns is selling you the idea that their narcissism and stupidity is your fault. Because otherwise you might just decide to turn on them.
No more.
My-own-plot-twist | 4 hours ago
Yes!
-Clayburn | 2 hours ago
I've noticed the blame game is a way to avoid systemic change. If "we" are the problem, then we just need to do better. Shorter showers. Throw away our trash, etc. It doesn't matter the issue. Traffic sucks? That idiot doesn't know how to drive! It's definitely not our car-centric urban planning and lack of public transit.
Everything is the result of just some stupid and/or incompetent individuals not doing their part! Then we don't even realize the problem is the inherent outcome of the systems we've designed.
biskino | 2 hours ago
We didn’t design the global economic and political systems that protect and advance the interests of oil and gas no matter how unpopular, irrational or deadly. Nobody voted for that, nobody was consulted except a few very powerful people.
-Clayburn | 2 hours ago
We continually vote to support it.
biskino | 27 minutes ago
I’m also 100000% done with Americans. 90% of the citizens of this planet have no say in the matter - many of us under the threat of economic sanction, annexation, or war.
Nobody in my country is empowered to stop the Oil & Gas industry. We could participate in it marginally less, but if you think we can shut off the oil taps to America without consequence, you’re not living in the real world.
We didn’t choose this.
Easy_Interest_6832 | 4 hours ago
This is a most excellent article. I say that for people who hesitate to read such things, but the article lays out the measurable reality that the main stream press is in thrall to Big Oil, and thereby is forced to downplay the existence of this climate emergency. As the last line of the article implies, "there are a million things to do."
-Clayburn | 2 hours ago
I had an argument in a local Facebook group about this. We're a oil and gas economy here, so they were fear mongering about Democrats destroying the industry. At one point they were complaining about "liberals" caving to climate change. I forgot how local people think of the political spectrum, so I commented something like "No liberal would ever do what's necessary to honestly address climate change." And they were like, "nu uh!" because I guess they've heard a Democrat say "climate change" before.
But it's so weird being afraid that Democrats/liberals are going to destroy the economy to fix climate change when I'm over here wishing they were brave enough to destroy the economy to fix climate change.
diethyl2o | an hour ago
That’s what I don’t understand. People (and investors and corporate executives) acting like we have a choice between protecting the economy OR preventing climate change. When will the masses wake up. There is no economy, markets will be doomed, if our food supplies are burning and millions of climate refugees are escaping areas that are no longer inhabitable (the Sahel, Ganges Delta, the Philippines, etc). Western Europe was crying over a couple million Syrian and afghan refugees. Imagine hundreds of millions…
ZappaZoo | 37 minutes ago
The heat and pollution from one data center can effectively counter the good intentions of many thousands of ecology minded people.
Plenty_Fondant_951 | 5 hours ago
Getting off oil and switching all steel to electric by 2050 is childishly unrealistic for industrial civilization to achieve. Vaclav Smil wrote a book about this. A carbon neutral cement alternative maybe.
Easy_Interest_6832 | 4 hours ago
There is a workable strategy with a 66% chance of success. It consists, in a condensed description here, of using natural processes to sequester carbon while simultaneously moving to a cessation of CO2 emissions.
A slightly longer description is this: replant and nurture six ecosystems, three marine and three terrestrial. These are kelp beds, mangrove estuaries and sea grasses; and boreal forests with their fungal understories, tropical rain forests, and prairie grasses with their bovine inhabitants. Simultaneously we must reduce to zero the carbon emissions from fossil fuels for transport, energy, and heating, powering industrial manufacturing, deforestation, and making materials like cement. These two things--carbon sequestration and elimination of CO2 emissions must both happen at once all over the planet or we are screwn. However, if we do them, there's a 66% chance of success.