It's worse than that. There is very determined political will, across much of the globe, to stoke global heating further for short-term benefit.
In my country (Australia) we had a federal election last year. The climate issues were very clearly laid out, and most citizens here accept the science, and have some understanding of the severity of the issue. Yet they voted very decisively against any further action to reduce emissions.
Most of the electorate here simply will not countenance changes from business as usual. Of the world's more significant population centres, Europe is the most realistically ambitious but is too fractious & bureaucratic to rapidly make the necessary big decisions, the US is weighed down with a sclerotic political system and a huge proportion of the population with dogmatically anti-scientific attitudes, China is backpedalling due to economic worries, and India has enough troubles of its own.
We're toast - this must be clear to everyone at this stage.
That's not to say they couldn't have done more, but it's kinda sad that everyone else is drawing a flat line or going up. EU alone is not going to save the planet, even if they somehow stopped emissions altogether.
Agree the EU is in better shape than much of the world. There's a lot of technical arguments about how well it's doing in practise. But even the fact that it's at issue shows that at least it has some chance of meeting its 40%-cut-by-2030 Paris target. And it has a fairly solid consensus about the dimensions of the problem, lacking the fake polarisation corruptly injected by the fossil fuel industry into the US and Australia's political systems.
> We're toast - this must be clear to everyone at this stage.
Yeah, unfortunately you are more right than you know. Like, right all the way to the bottom of the human soul. Climate change is both too fast and too slow for us to deal with effectively. In the past, humankind was never united in a global economy powered by fossil fuels and fed by financial markets driven by AI. It could never grow at a very large exponent. Now, fueled by massive population growth and even more massive economic growth, we've entered into a very steep exponent indeed. Running on theories generated by thousands of economic PhDs and underwritten by national monetary policies, the machine is finally eating the world. Literally. Capital is flowing everywhere for economic development, from vast palm oil plantations across southeast Asia, to Lithium mines in South America, to cattle farms in Brazil, to vacation homes in every picturesque spot on the planet, we're chopping it all down. And that's just the sheer physical digestion of nature. We're pumping out our waste products at record rates, and thirsty for more, we equate energy consumption with quality of life.
And worst of all, we will not stop nor even let our foot off the gas. We're locked in the patterns of international struggle for dominance even as we are locked in interpersonal struggles for sexual competition. He who makes the most money, touts the biggest consumer markets, the greatest exports or GDP or most powerful weapons...that person is crowned king of a smouldering planet.
We cannot right this ship. We are just apes, ffs. We can't evolve past our basal instincts and our antibiotics and satellites are no witness to the betterment of the human soul. We reached the apex of better angels of our nature and greed and corruption and the brutal mathematics of a game theoretic dilemma where every last human stands more to gain from defecting than cooperating.
We're gonna smash this motherfucker against the wall as hard as she will go. And the greatest irony of it all is there written in the bibles that evangelicals clutch to their chests as they gnash their teeth for more prosperity as god promised. And that was the simple wise truth, that cuts to the core of all that is today's sin: the love of money is the root of all evil.
You sound angry. I'd suggest defanging that by considering eventual collapse as always having been our civilisation's trajectory.
Any creature that manages to escape, for a period, limits on its reproduction is going to overrun its environment. That's just elementary ecology. It should only be surprising to the religiously-minded who never truly believed humans to be part of the physical world. This includes many atheists raised on a superstitious belief in inevitable 'progress'.
If you think about it, the notion that the assemblage of cognitive, conative and affective faculties that evolution installed on a primate for the purposes of hunting and small group coordination were somehow magically going to be up to the job of managing a whole planet was always pretty fanciful.
I am. I've been around and around this thing for decades, a misanthrope since my teenage years. A lot of us who delved deep into tech and scifi absorbed myths about the future of humans as a space-faring, enlightened and truly advanced race. After the internet and the great advancements in computing, it seemed maybe we were reaching into truths of the universe and would join God in his great datacenter in the sky, cranking pure mathematical harmony and joy in our ever-expanding understanding of scientific knowledge. But we weren't climbing into heaven, or building a space elevator up there. We weren't even making ivory towers or steel skyscrapers. It's still been our base primate instincts at work. Greed. All of that striving after science and mathematics and technology has never been any different than digging up the hills for gold or slashing down the forests to plant our wheat. We're dwarves; we're diggers, miners, destroyers, conquerors, killers, pyschopaths. And that guilt triggers in me because I see the delicate things, the beautiful things, that we have destroyed to get here. And the future just looks like one big highway littered with McDonald's with powerlines strewn across, dusty and dilapidated. We fucked Earth. You bet I am angry.
Then (forgive me if I'm mistaken here) it seems like you are probably clinging to the Enlightenment myths of human supremacy and inevitable 'progress'. To be angry that humans aren't transcending physical and ecological reality implies that you think it was possible to have done so. A bit like a lapsed Catholic still feeling guilty in the face of accusations from a God that they claim to no longer believe in.
Haha, there is some truth to what you say. I was indeed raised Catholic, but I'm an atheist now. No, I think that there is a case to be made that wanton destruction is morally bad and I think my values stem from that. We wouldn't be in such a bad pickle if our population wasn't nearing 8 billion. How much of that is really necessary to support one of the giant spires of our technological thrust? A million? A hundred million? I don't think even a billion humans would be necessary for all of the tech behind the computer industry.
I hear you. Coming from one of the rogue nationx when it comes to climate change, I have my moments too.
Still, on reflection, I'm pretty sure our current trajectory was inevitable the moment humans developed agriculture. We're the wildly pullulating caterpillar devouring our tree, and always were going to be just what we are. Just another species. Just another dead end in evolution's exploration of ecological state space.
Maybe Americans could start changing their way of life rather than waiting for « political will » or a never coming technological revolution. UE has started reducing CO2 emissions will keeping a very reasonable and increasing level of life.
Current emissions have the US at 2x India and current emissions are obviously irrelevant since it’s total cumulative emissions that matter, where the US runs away with it.
I assume you mean EU. However, while EU countries have made a lot of promises and plans, they're not actually keeping them either and people are complaining about impact on their daily lives. At least the US is transparent in not wanting to change (their President is).
It's easy to blame politics, but voters really do have an effect on this and there's hardly any will there either. The fastest growing party in the Netherlands is huge on climate denial and stopping or rolling back anything done against climate change. Their voters are adamant that there's no real issue with climate change, that everything is exaggerated and that it's all a left-wing conspiracy.
Most people want to remain at the same level of comfort and luxury, and that's not possible if we want to effectively combat climate change. We'd need to fly less, drive less and consume less and that's the opposite of what's happening in the world.
Quite. It's really very boring to hear people endlessly whinging about politicians, then refusing to vote for those offering anything different from BAU. There are no perfect democracies, but citizens surely must accept some responsibility for their voting decisions.
